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I just came out of an Ulduar 10 PUG. When I noticed it on trade chat, LF1M healer, I thought that’d be fun (and no waiting, since Character data not available. was the last slot required). Before that I’d just been passing time. In fact, just doing that alone is worth comment. I thought “hmm what should I do tonight, I’ve a few hours free”. I did the random daily of course, then actually sat and stared at the On the train this morning I read Everblue’s blog on the coming raid changes, and he pointed out a factor I hadn’t thought of yet: the varying healing requirements of 10 and 25 man. I quickly checked plusheal.com and wom, no comments there. Whilst Everblue’s a clever chap, surely one of the thousands of noisy bloggers has talked about this already? He points out that tanks will have the same stamina in 10 and 25 man raids, unlike now, April 28th, 2010 | 17 comments |
 From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta |  Tags: balance, healers, mmorpg design, raid, tank For the general non-hard mode tanking population, glyph of rune tap is a bad glyph. A few readers noticed (and one commented on other forums, in fact in their guild application as a DK tank) that in my grid of Blood specs, the hard-mode specialised AOE spec includes this glyph. Firstly, how’s its maths work? Your Rune Tap heals yourself for an additional 10% of the effect, and also heals your party for 10% of their maximum health. This April 19th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: blood, glyph of rune tap, hard mode, healers, lich king, Rune Tap, sindragosa, tank I’m really enjoying the anticipation of Cataclysm, the news snippets from Blizzard which fuel more speculation and conjecture about what’s in store for us. Being a tank in Cataclysm, and not dying in two hits from a boss, will be quite refreshing. I’ve talked about this quite a few times before. One of the age old topics of avoidance vs stamina recently came up, and for once it wasn’t a redundant circular argument; because in Cataclysm dodge and parry April 17th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: avoidance, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, healers, stamina, tank Let’s say you had an equivalently geared alt of any class/race you chose, so his pwnage matched your current tank character. I’m talking to people who’s main character is a tank. If you couldn’t tank (for some magic theoretical reason), what would you play? No fuzzy answers now, prioritised list. I know it’s tough, but in this hypothetical you can’t say ‘err maybe the warlock or the hunter’. You are allowed in to answer that your current offspec would My gratitude to Honors for tweeting this. Theckhd is a serious maths guru. He worked out the avoidance value of expertise. He has now looked at the -20% dodge aura and I’m basically going to adopt his findings as Fact, because (a) I can’t fault it, and (b) if it’s wrong, he’s humble enough to correct himself (he did this in the expertise analysis) pretty rapidly. Theckhd’s post is on maintankadin (scroll down to near the bottom of the thread). I’ll copy here most of his key statements. I won’t go on about what I said the other day and where I was right or wrong. Who cares. Here’s the current state. I have mixed in below Theckhd’s points with mine; he’s indented in colour. » continue reading October 31st, 2009 | 3 comments |
From: Gear and stats, News discussion, choose equipment | Tags: 3.3, avoidance, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, healers, tank Icecrown is going to nerf your dodge by 20%, with an aura similar to Sunwell. Daelos' post on it:»For tank gemming, you are basically just dealing with your discretionary gem slot and enchants, maybe you can choose one ring or trinket over another too. Probably you can vary your character by +/- 5% avoidance and +/- 337 stamina (those two ranges have similar item budgets). So, just stack stamina. Don’t gem for avoidance. At such low levels of avoidance, the relative gain from avoidance isn’t great (at high levels it gets excellent, even with diminishing returns). Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.4 October 29th, 2009 | 12 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, News discussion | Tags: 3.3, avoidance, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, ghostcrawler, healers, stamina On PTR tank forums, that question was asked. Players scale up, why not bosses too? Ghostcrawler’s response: It’s something we actually talk about quite a bit. We won’t do it for Icecrown, but it could happen in the future. The basic problem is that bosses don’t scale with gear. Their health and damage go up. That’s it. You might avoid a first tier boss 30% of the time and a final tier boss 60% of the time. That means October 23rd, 2009 | 2 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, expertise, healers, mmorpg design, tank This deserves more discussion. One of the difficult balances a leader has to manage is the number of tanks required in a raid, or the guild, as a proportion of the total guild. The problem is largely caused by the ratio required of tanks to others:
That’s half as many tanks for 25-man raiding as for 10-mans. The problems this brings are manyfold:
Also tanks need to be amongst the better players in your guild. They need more situational awareness, better reaction time, often more leadership personal characteristics. Luckily, you don’t need a lot of tanks, but good ones can be hard to find. Tanks tend to stick with their guild, they’re not chopped and changed so freely as deeps, which in turn means a tank will guard his raid slot more. He’ll try to attend more nights and be more active. No doubt, dual-spec helps us all with this problem, but doesn’t solve it. Tanks want to tank. Personally, I don’t enjoy dps. So this complicates the roster management for leadership, since you are juggling people’s personal desires too. Point is: the divergence of ratios between tanks:rest whilst a guild is growing from 5, 10 to 25 man raiding is a pain in the ass for guild leadership. Here’s the blue post that reminded me of this prevalent issue. » continue reading September 18th, 2009 | 4 comments |
From: Guild management, Tanking in general | Tags: dps, guild, healers, raid leader, roster, tank Two comments from Ghostcrawler recently are clearly pointing at a design change which means we’ll have a more strategic playstyle for Cataclysm tanks and healers.
The significance of this is exciting! It means healers will have time to choose slower heals. Your tank won’t die if you go for greater heal because you will have the time. Whether boss fights also become longer in duration is unclear, but that would be a nice change for the better; to feel more epic and to be consistent with a strategic gameplay. » continue reading September 4th, 2009 | 2 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, Tanking in general | Tags: avoidance, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, ghostcrawler, healers, player, raid, stamina, tank The raid leadership interviews I’m pleased to present the first in a series of detailed interviews with guild leaders on the management of progression guilds, which will be jointly published on wowraid and here at pwnwear.com. I’ll interview guilds you can relate to, in the top 250 worldwide. Today I’ve interviewed Saha, an Officer and Raid Leader from the guild Wrath. Saha has been playing WoW since the European launch, and been in the guild Wrath since summer 2007. You’ll June 20th, 2009 | One comment |
From: Interviews | Tags: culture, guild, hard mode, hardcore, healers, heroics, interview, leadership, learning, progression, recruitment, roster, situational awareness, ulduar, voice |
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