Tank Talk is WoW Insider's 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 Allison Robert (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.
Since Tank Talk began, we've gotten a few questions from people about raid fights that require tanks to use resist gear. With all of Burning Crusade's raid attunements now removed, and with lots of guilds testing the waters in Tier 5 and Tier 6 before Wrath hits, I figure now's as good a time as any to discuss what resist sets you're going to want if your guild is intent on progression. The resist gear issue is nowhere near as dire as it was in vanilla WoW (Molten Core, anyone?) and in general the raid as a whole rarely needs to worry.
Tanks are special. But you knew that already, didn't you?
This guide covers all of the existing 10-man and 25-man content in the game outside of Sunwell Plateau:
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 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:
With M'uru now apparently substantially nerfed, and several guilds having been past him for a few weeks anyway, the top guilds are now biding their time until they can face off against Kil'jaeden himself. Before they can do that, one last Sunwell Plateau gate needs to be opened; my guess on when that will happen is May 27, two weeks from yesterday, but no-one knows for sure.
So I thought I'd jump the gun a little and give you all a preview of the loot we should be able to expect from what will almost certainly be the final raid boss of TheBurning Crusade, thanks to MMO-Champion. None of this is confirmed, of course, because nobody has actually fought him yet, but given the item levels, and the fact that we haven't seen them anywhere else yet, we can be pretty sure these are KJ drops. And an odd number of them are helms.
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.
The small handful of guilds worldwide that have killed M'uru thus far are going to have an achievement therein that nobody else can touch. As of yesterday's patch 2.4.2 (today on the European realms), Blizzard has made the following change to the encounter:
We've changed the Negative Energy spells cast by M'uru and Entropius to no longer cause spell interruption on the target. This should ease the frustration of the encounter for those casting classes who can not obtain 100% resistance to spell interruption through talents and effects such as Concentration Aura.
Having not done the fight myself, I can't really comment on how big of a nerf this is, but it's something, anyway. (Background: M'uru is the next-to-last boss of Sunwell Plateau, followed only by Kil'Jaeden, and Entropius is another aspect of M'uru that appears during the fight.) Guilds who have been wiping on M'uru, or who intend to try him in the future, do you welcome this change?
When the North American realms came back online after maintenance today, the second Sunwell Plateau gate was open. This means that all you high-end raiding guilds now have a chance to tackle M'uru, SWP boss number five, while I cry softly to myself and work on melting Malchezaar's face off. The first SWP gate was opened after patch 2.4 had been live for two weeks, and the second, today, was three weeks after that. This makes the likelihood seem pretty decent that the fourth third gate, allowing access to Kil'jaeden himself, will open four weeks from today, but we'll have to wait and see.
Nobody killed M'uru when 2.4 was on the PTR, so we don't really know what he might drop, although four trinkets named "...Naaru Sliver" seem fairly likely, as they are SWP drops and M'uru is a Naaru. See World of Raids for stats on the trinkets and some information on the M'uru fight. The European realms will presumably get the second gate open tomorrow, after their maintenance.
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.
You may remember the raiding guild Risen, from the Alleria server, for their work in Naxxaramas back before The Burning Crusade, being among the first to grab Atiesh and the Corrupted Ashbringer. They're back at the forefront of WoW news again, but this time for a different reason. They've decided to tap out of raiding until WoTLK, and they aren't being very shy about telling us why, with a post on their website under the oh-so-witty title "World of Casualcraft."
A few days ago, Eliah mentioned a tragic thing in his list of Undocumented Changes in a recent PTR push: The Stamina disappeared from the new Tier 6 pieces!
There was a pretty big outcry about this, and understandably so. The Burning Crusade has made Stamina a very important stat in all areas of gameplay from PvE to PvP. You need to be able to take blows in the arenas, and almost every raid encounter has multiple sources of random damage to the raid. Stamina is a big deal, which brings us to the good news.
The Stamina has returned to the T6! Not in the amounts it had previously(unfortunately) but still a decent amount. While not ideal, it has enough Stamina that classes can actually wear these set pieces now. Previously, with no Stamina on this armor, most classes were completely unable to wear them in a raid. I know that I, personally, already have to wear PvP gear for a number of encounters because my raiding gear simply doesn't have enough Stamina on it for Black Temple and Mount Hyjal. New tier pieces with no Stamina at all would be something I could not even consider using, no matter how good the rest of the stats may be. Being one-shotted by environmental damage makes that awesome damage and mana regen a little useless.
Today a big new build went up on the patch 2.4 PTR, and every change that was in the patch notes was detailed here. However, inevitably, there were some changes that didn't make it to the patch notes, and for that we have the intrepid researchers at MMO-Champion and World of Raids. Here's what they've managed to tease out of the realms:
Most of the Tier 6 belts, boots, and bracers found in the Sunwell raid have had their Stamina removed, and other stats increased to compensate. The exception is the Warrior tanking set, Onslaught Armor. Edit: And the Paladin tanking set, Lightbringer Armor.
The five epic BoP jewelcrafted trinkets we learned about previously have had patterns added; they're available at the Revered level from the Shattered Sun Offensive quartermaster.
In what must be a bug of some sort, rank 1 of the Warlock talent Emberstorm now increases the casting speed of Incinerate by 2%, as well as its previous effect of boosting all fire damage by 2%. Other ranks of the talent are unchanged.
That's everything discovered so far. Seen anything else that wasn't mentioned in the new patch notes?
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?
The 2.1 patch this week introduced enough new quest lines, top-end raid content, flying mounts, and L70 solo & small group content to qualify as its own game. With a three day weekend looming I didn't even know where to begin. So I scoured the web and found the where to go and what to do to get me started.
THE BLACK TEMPLE: Already planning to strut around Shattrath in your T6 Raid gear? Don't bank that T5 set too quick. The Black Temple attunement quest is ... epic. And it hasn't even been fully discovered so far. What is known is that you will have to slog through a great deal of the Burning Crusade raid content that comes before it: Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Serpentshire Cavern, The Eye and The Battle of Mount Hyjal. And many of those raids require extensive attunement quests of their own. If you are still itching to begin, you can dig in with the Tablets of Baa'ri chain out of Shadowmoon Valley to start grinding that Ashtongue Deathsworn rep. NETHERDRAKE EPIC FLYING MOUNT: First, don't confuse this with the Swift Nether Drake top Arena teams are awarded with at the end of every season. That one has a speed increase of 310% and has an armored appearance. This is the normal epic nether drake with a speed increase on par with other epic flying mounts: 280%. What's special about this epic flying mount is that it can be obtained through solo and small group quests. No raid required. What is required is a great deal of dedication.
The first steps on your journey is to dig yourself out of Hated reputation with the Netherwing clan and get all the way to Exalted. This is accomplished through solo, 5 man and 3 man daily quests. Head to the south east corner of Shadowmoon Valley and speak to Mordenai in the Netherwing Fields. A complete write up can be found here.
Wow, those PTR folks sure have been busy. Now we have the full stats for every single class's Tier 6 set(s), which drop in the Black Temple. This came to us almost simultaneously via MMO-Champion and World of Raids, though I have to say World of Raids's versions are a little less irritatingly watermarked. Looks like the names and set bonuses that came out a little while ago were correct, as far as I can tell.
Ever one to have fun with math, I decided to add up the total stats on all the T6 gear, so you could compare them with other sets more easily. Here are the results (socket bonuses included):
I heard these were out a few days ago, but the link I got was to the official forums, and the thread had been deleted by the time I got there. Well, MMO-Champion has them now. Delete that, Blizz! Now keep in mind, as MMO-Champion warns us, these aren't "official" bonuses, but were rather extracted from the currently game files somehow, and will most likely change when 2.1.0 goes live (which according to Tseric will be "soon"). Still, this should be something to get your mind going.
The bonuses mostly follow the same pattern: 2-piece bonuses makes a skill cheaper (or sometimes return more mana), and 4-piece bonuses makes a skill stronger. Since the 4-piece bonuses mostly affect our "bread and butter" skills (e.g. Greater Heal for healing priests, Fireball, Frostbolt, and Arcane Missiles for mages) and mostly by about 5%, they seem pretty cool. The 2-pieces vary in how much they impress me. Tier 6, if I'm not very much mistaken, drops in Mount Hyjal the Black Temple [thanks, klink-o], which is certainly out of the reach of most guilds, but I'm sure some of us will see it eventually. Without further ado, all the Tier 6 names and (provisional) bonuses are after the cut.
With M'uru now apparently 
A few days ago, Eliah mentioned a tragic thing in his 
The 
I heard these were out a few days ago, but the link I got was to the official forums, and the thread had been deleted by the time I got there. Well, MMO-Champion 
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