Dear reanimated angst-puppy hero corpses,

Love what you've done with the smell, really. The little air freshener attached to the runeblade is a nice touch. Now that I'm in the beta, I've had the opportunity group with -- conservatively -- billions of you. I've healed a lot of Death Knight tanks, and tanked for a lot of Death Knight DPS. Most of you seem like cool people, so I say this with sincere love in my little Druid heart and a touch of worry over what will happen in November:

Most of you are awful.

I don't wish to be needlessly cruel here, mind you, or to overlook that the class is still new. Blizzard endlessly tinkers with you, so it's not like your rotations haven't changed, or your talents and skills are stable. And I know you're not coming to Northrend with a bank full of awesome gear from Burning Crusade. This isn't about your wearing greens or using the wrong attack or tanking rotation; I'm not even going to bother with the theorycraft surrounding the ideal DPS rotation until Wrath actually ships. But I'm seeing an awful lot of you running around playing as if...almost as if...you haven't played a tank or a melee class before. It's uncanny. But when I switched from playing a balance to a feral druid more than a year ago and knew nothing about playing a melee DPS/tank, I made all the mistakes you're making right now. Help me help you!

Welcome back to Ask a Beta Tester! We'll jump right into things today with a question from Snuffles...

In regards to flight, what areas are restricted (besides Dalaran) and how to they prevent us from flying over the ocean? Is it a wall, or a new fatigue system?

Beyond places that are indoors and you can't mount period, Dalaran and Wintergrasp are the two no-flight zones I've seen. You can't fly in Dalaran so it's more city-like, and Lake Wintergrasp so you actually have to take part in the combat and plan your travel routes, not simply fly from point A to point B without a care in the world. Flying too far out to sea gives you a fatigue bar

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 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. Today, dear readers, we might make ourselves hated by the entire population of undisputed, royal-bloodlined, main tanks, but that's OK. We are used to staying at the top of someone's hate list.

One of the accepted facts of raiding life used to be that the main tank was the guild's gearing priority. As Adam Holisky's observed, "Everything that happens in the raid eventually makes it back to the tank." Healers undergeared? You're screwed. DPS incompetent or just badly grouped? Buh-bye. Random number generator wreaking all manner of havoc on healer crits and boss parries? Thar be the graveyard. A truly cynical mind would opine that the tank should be as well-geared as possible if only because it makes it easier for the raid to forget that person existed as anything other than a rapidly-advancing line on the Omen screen that: a). always stayed above their own, and b). never died. There are enough random variables while the raid's learning a new boss that the tank needs to be eliminated as one, and in vanilla WoW that was certainly the goal. Raid and offtank damage on most encounters hadn't scaled to the point where you could make a compelling argument in favor of gear equilibrium across your tanking roster. What was the point of something like that when 95% of the damage in a fight was going to be absorbed by a single person?

That changed.

Tier gear is a concept that has been with WoW since the beginning. In Molten Core, the very first WoW raid, each class had a set of gear that looked good together, could only be equipped by that class and that was, supposedly, specially tuned to that class's stat requirements. Priests had Prophecy, Warriors had Might, and so forth. This was called tier 1.

Classic WoW had three official raid tiers: tier 1 came from Molten Core, tier 2 from (mostly) Blackwing Lair, and tier 3 from Naxxramas. T3 is notable for a few reasons:

• It was obtained via multi-class tokens. The bosses would drop, say, the belt token for Priest, Mage, and Warlock. You'd then have to take the token, some mats dropped by Naxx trash, and some crafting mats to an NPC to get the gear. This was useful because the boss drops became more flexible: if your priests all had their belt already, you could give the token to a mage or a warlock; if it had just been a straight drop of the priest T3 belt, you'd have to disenchant it.
• T1 and T2 filled eight slots, while T3 filled nine, adding a ring. However, the highest bonus was for eight pieces, so you could choose which piece you wanted to leave out and still get the set bonus. This is continued in BC with five-piece sets, but only two- and four-piece bonuses.
• When Wrath of the Lich King goes live (or possibly when patch 3.0.2 does) you will no longer be able to acquire T3. Naxxramas is being moved from its current location up to Northrend, where it will become the entry-level raid for level 80. Those who already have T3 will get to keep it.

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:

There's a new game in town, and Artirius of the Aerie Peak server has noticed it, and admittedly, so have I. With attunements gone, it is now possible for any level 70 to go in and see tier 5 and 6 content whenever they want. Of course, they don't generally have a prayer of actually downing bosses unless they have 20-24 well geared people to help them out.

That's where gold comes in. With a few thousand gold, you can buy your way into a tier 6 group that doesn't need the tier 6 armor and go along for the ride. A few hours later, you come out on the other end with Illidan dead and a few shiny new drops, even if you've never set foot in Karazhan.

It's not just people trying to buy these slots in the trade channel either. As Artirius observes, many raid groups are actively soliciting for buyers for their raid slots. On my own server, one Horde group is trading tier 6 runs for large quantities of certain herbs, promising that all but a few select drops will go to the people who buy their slots with stacks of Netherbloom and Ghost Mushrooms.

So what's causing this?

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:

A while back fellow WoW Insider blogger Adam posted his thoughts on PvP, calling PvE the only real game. He makes excellent, valid points as to why he believes this is so, such as the fact that it is quite impossible to level from 1 to 70 through PvP alone. The game was designed around a PvE-centric environment, and the relatively late additions of the Battlegrounds and Honor system are a testament to that. In those respects, Adam is completely correct.

Of course, many of you took issue with his statements, even prompting him to publish his personal counterpoint on the matter. As an avid PvP player, I found some of what Adam said to be less than savory myself. It has to be noted that Adam has extensive PvE endgame experience, and his opinions come from a raider's perspective. I will concede his first two points -- you cannot progress in World of Warcraft through PvP alone and that PvP was a mere afterthought. On the other hand, Adam's other points don't quite hold as much water.

Yes, that pic above is the priest's robe, direct from Arena season 4 (you can click on it to see a bigger version), and here is the priest's helm from season 4. As the story goes over at World of Raids, a player on EU Arathor accidentally deleted some season 1 items, and a GM then accidentally gave him season 4 items in replacement instead. The items were taken right back (duh), but their IDs were activated on that realm, so anyone with a little item ID knowledge could pull up the stats.

For comparison, these have boosts almost all around from the season 3 items, which is pretty much to be expected. And while the Stamina is clearly much higher than anything we've seen at the higher levels, the actual damage doesn't compare much to even the Tier 6 stuff. PvP gear in season 4 is all about staying alive -- we've seen a few other items leak out already, and it's the same deal on those.

Which is probably as it should be. We should note, also, that this stuff may not actually be done -- although the fact that it's spawnable on the live realms might mean that Blizzard is ready for season 4. I still don't think we'll see it until after the arena tourney, but who knows?

The dust has settled on most of the servers, and the Fury of the Sunwell has been a success across the board. One of the lingering issues however is attunement. It has been noted before that Onyxia is now the hardest attunement in the game. This has occurred with the removal of the Karazhan, Black Temple, and Mount Hyjal attunements. However this creates a false impression that these instances are no longer worthy of attunements, and thus these quests are no longer worthy of the care and time that's necessary to push forward into them.

You want to get your Vashj and Kael vials, you want to complete your Mount Hyjal attunement, and you want to complete your Black Temple attunement. If you're in a guild that isn't running those instances anymore and is focusing squarely on the Tier 6 content, then you still want to go back and get the attunements.

Why?

I'm glad you asked.

Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. People sure can be pushy when it comes to drops. Hands off, ladies. That Netherweave is mine!

Today I share with you one of my deepest secrets. There isn't a week that goes by that I don't lay awake at night, seething about the unfairness of raiding drops. Oh, sure, there's always that elusive piece that has a 0.0002% drop rate that every healer wants. Those are pie in the sky dreams of healing uberness. No, that's not what I mean.

I'm talking about the regular gear that's supposed to be dropping at semi-predictable intervals every week. Most bosses have a fairly limited loot table, and in the raiding world, most of that centers around the tier token system. You are supposed to have a 1 in 3 chance of seeing your token on any given kill. But what if that goes horribly wrong? And worse, what if it starts hurting progression?

Join me after the jump for a tale of woe and angst, plus what Blizzard has been doing to unintentionally fix the situation (sorta).

The idea of being able to customize your character's look and feel beyond choosing one of 4 or 5 basic face and hairstyle choices at character creation or upgrading to a new piece of loot is one that's near and dear to me. I'm an RPer, so I like to think of each of my characters as a unique person with unique quirks, ideas, and fashion sense that I can't always express as I'd like to due to the limitations of WoW's mechanics. I've even had some very good friends quit WoW because their characters weren't customizable enough.

The idea came to the front of my mind a few weeks back when I was visiting my brother. We played EverQuest together, but when it came time to move on from that game, he (and most of our EQ guild) chose Everquest 2, and I chose WoW. So, of course, he ribs me about it quite often, and since I was visiting, he decided to load up EQ2 and show me what I was "missing."

Now to be honest, I'm still a bigger fan of WoW, but that's a subject for a different article. One thing I will say for EQ2 is that I was very impressed with the wider range of options to customize your character and show off your character's accomplishments. There's a few ideas related to character customization from EQ2 and other games that I'd really like Blizzard to continue emulating in future patches and in the WoTLK expansion that I believe would deepen the game experience for me and my friends, and for many other players as well.

Toy News International reports that the World of Warcraft action figures from DC Direct are coming in the last quarter of this year. I love my toys and I love WoW so this comes as great news, particularly with the new selection of figures -- a Blood Elf Paladin named Quin'thalan Sunfire (hell yeah!); Tamuura, a Draenei Mage; an Undead Rogue called Skeeve Sorrowblade; and a Human Priest, Sister Benedron, who can probably cure your allergies. As with previous World of Warcraft action figures from DC direct, the sculpts are mostly based on existing armor sets that players might recognize.

Tamuura sports the Tier 6 raid set Tempest Regalia, while Sister Benedron is depicted in Tier 5 Avatar gear with exaggerated shoulder wings; Skeeve Sorrowblade appears to be wearing a highly-detailed version of Deathmantle, the Rogue Tier 5 set; and Quin'thalan Sunfire looks... well, he looks like he's a generic Silvermoon City guard whom you ask for directions. It's a bit disappointing, personally, although I guess it's cool to have a Silvermoon City guard. It would be kind of like having a named Stormtrooper or something. Historically, DC Direct's action figures have appeared in the World of Warcraft comic, so expect one or more of these new figures to make an appearance in the Chris Metzen-approved canon comic series.

More pictures after the jump. So clickety-click, toy lovers (and uh, WoW fans)...

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.