Tanking the Elemental Bosses

Funny how I often only recognize a need for tank education while playing my healer. After many painful Gahz’rilla runs, it has become apparent to me that there is significant room for education here.

The Elemental Bosses are four holiday bosses associated with the pre-Cataclysm event. They’re mostly updates of vanilla bosses, with one completely new boss who appears to be a knockoff of Thunderaan. They drop item level 251 gear, i.e. gear of equivalent quality to that which drops in ICC10 normal.

All four of the elemental bosses are unlocked by the defeat of the invasions of Orgrimmar/Ironforge and Thunder Bluff/Stormwind. These happen roughly every 3 hours, and the cities of either faction will always be attacked simultaneously. If the invasion of Org/Ironforge is defeated, Flamelash and Theradras become available; if the invasion of TB/SW is defeated, Gahz’rilla and Sarsarun become available. They’re only available for about half an hour after the defeat of the invasion, but you don’t have to participate in the fight to queue for them. You can only queue for one elemental boss at once.

Plate tanking gear drops from Flamelash (Salamander Skin), Theradras (Barrier of the Earth Princess), and Gahz’rilla (Twilight Offering Bands). Melee leather, for our druid friends, drops from Sarsarun (Pulmonary Casing).

Screenshots are up!

The New Effective Health Formula

As we discussed before the patch, there have been some changes to armor on items. Bonus armor’s item point cost has been drastically increased on all items except for trinkets, shield armor has been reduced, agility no longer grants armor, and the Engineering tanking benefit, Reticulated Armor Webbing, has been nerfed from 885 armor to 250 armor. Between the reduction in our personal armor, the removal of some armor raid buffs, and the relative nerf to the -AP debuff, we would expect to be taking a bit more damage on physical hits.

We would not expect to be taking this much more damage.

Happily, a Death Knight tank named Valen, of Temerity – Windrunner – Alliance, figured out what was wrong and posted it on the official tanking forums. I highly recommend you read the original post if you like theorycrafting, are interested in the details, or just like the visual of Algalon dual-wielding Lich Kings.

Vengeance

Holy shit, you guys. Holy. Shit.

Sorry for the messy UI; I haven't set up SBF and Xorcist to ignore any 4.0.1 effects yet.

This is Blizzard’s answer to everything about protection balance, from our low DPS not feeling fun, to prot PVP being OP, to how easy it is for us to solo low-level raids. If they want us doing it, Vengeance helps. If they don’t want us doing it, Vengeance hinders. It’s ingenious, really: they’ve solved all of their balance problems in one ability.

The Diseaseless Blood DK

Diseaseless blood tanking has come up once before, and with Death Strike no longer scaling with diseases, it’s looking awfully attractive again. My cotank in our HICC 10  run, Uth, ran diseaseless last night; here are our impressions.

The basic idea of Diseaseless is that 1 Death Strike takes the same runes as 1 Frost Fever and 1 Plague Strike. By Death Striking instead of applying diseases, you gain a significant amount of self-healing and absorption throughout a fight. Naturally, without diseases you lose a decent chunk of threat; it’s up to you whether the tradeoff is worth it. (Don’t let the name of the spec fool you, though: you can still apply diseases in situations that call for them, most notably on trash.)

By the way, you should only run diseaseless if you are absolutely sure that a) your cotank is willing to apply the attack speed and -physical damage debuffs, and b) your cotank knows you’re running diseaseless, so they know to apply the debuffs. A slight increase in healing does not compare to a large reduction in damage taken.

Anyway, here’s my cotank’s Diseaseless build.

I probably would have gone with Blood-Caked Blade instead of RP Mastery, since Glyph of Death Strike tops out at 100, but whatever.

To All Of You Googling For Uncrittable 4.0.1

You probably don’t want to see my ramblings on tanking. You probably just haven’t been keeping up with 4.0 developments and are now scrambling to find resources on how to become uncrittable. Here you go.

The only way to become uncrittable in PVE in 4.0.1 is to fully talent Bastion of Defense (warrior), Improved Blood Presence (death knight), Thick Hide (bear druid), or Sanctuary (paladin). The defense stat has been removed from the game, and resilience no longer reduces your chance to be crit.

Overlapping Nameplates in 4.0.1

The patch reset my nameplates to disallow overlapping. Unfortunately, the interface option to allow overlapping nameplates was removed from the game in this patch; so I suffered through a few heroics with jumbled jumping nameplates that wouldn’t stand goddamn still. I couldn’t tell if mobs were in front of me or behind me, it was that bad.

Anyway, the guy in charge of Tidy Plates has a solution. Simply enter:

/console spreadnameplates 0

(That’s a zero, by the way, if you can’t tell from the font), and your nameplates will overlap like a pro! You’ll still get the occasional disappearing nameplate, but that’s a bug on the server’s end.

The command will work with default nameplates as well as addons. If you decide you preferred non-overlapping nameplates, just enter that again, but with a 1 instead of a 0.

Incite and Crit

While waiting for my final (hopefully) download to complete on my ridiculously slow connection, I finally simmed out Incite like I’ve been meaning to. Please note that this particular sim is only applicable to Prot and Fury, because simming Deep Wounds requires taking into account possible overwrites from other abilities and that’s really more hassle than I want to go to at the moment.

Tanking Specs for 4.0.1 – Death Knights

This is part 5 of a 5-part series on tanking specs in 4.0.1. I recommend you view the introduction to the series first.

I’m very sorry for the long delay in this post. The paladin post took longer than I expected, eating up my free time on Tuesday and forcing me to postpone further blogwork until this weekend; when, of course, I was busy preparing myself for the patch. So here it is, the DK post.

EDIT: Please see the comments for discussion on a couple places I went wrong.

Death Knights

The usual disclaimers apply: my death knight is not yet 80, I do not play as blood and I do not tank on him. These recommendations are based on my knowledge of tanking and my research into death knights, not on experience. Shaker-full of salt and all that.

My Picks

A few thoughts on prot warriors in 4.0.1

Yes, I know my DK tanking article is way overdue. It’s partially completed – it’s been partially completed for over a week now, though it has crept along in fits and starts – and I hope to have it up before the servers are tomorrow. A combination of real life and laziness has conspired to keep it from you. But these thoughts about warriors are on my mind right now, and I think I’ve got to get them out in order to get down to the DK business.

Tanking Specs for 4.0.1 – Paladins

This is part 4 of a 5-part series on tanking specs in 4.0.1. I recommend you view the introduction to the series first.

Paladins

I’ve never played a paladin. These are my best guess predictions/recommendations based on what I know of protadins, but take them with about a shaker-full of salt.

My Picks