Rage: love it, hate it...change it?

It seems like everyone is talking about changing rage lately, since it seems Wrath widened the gap between trash/heroics and bosses.

I agree that the rage mechanic is seriously messed up in current content, but if you follow the advice of some posts I've seen, it starts to look a whole lot like energy. Personally I like how it starts low and goes up as you deal/receive damage. It creates opportunities to show off your skill at keeping up your rage bar, as well as allowing you to pull as quickly as your healer can go. What I don't like is that, as many have mentioned, the better your gear, the harder it is to tank (after a certain gear threshold). What if rage had a slow regen up to maybe 20 or 30, and above that, a slow decay. If that's not good enough for you, the regen could be sped up perhaps by some secondary tanking skill like AP. Let's face it, if I'm preparing for combat, it's because I'm already mad, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to start at 0, but I'm not nearly as crazy as I am once the "battle" begins, so from a logical standpoint, this approach makes sense (to me anyway).

This would keep our unique mechanic, which is part of the reason I enjoy my warrior, while giving us a small part of what all the other classes enjoy, starting out with resources.

EoE: My First Look

So my guild got adventurous, now that we've downed KT a few times, and thought we'd try out Maly.  Let me tell you, we were not prepared.  I know I for one will be doing my Wyrmrest daily every day this week until we go in again on Saturday.  I had done it before, but apparently not enough.  After the first couple of tries, getting used to the fight, we pretty consistently made it to phase 3.  Phase 3 was pretty consistently a disaster.

Anyway, some things I learned from this:

1) Everyone was right.  Strafing is very important.  Now I'm not a noob when it comes to strafing, but I'm not really a vet either, so this did present minor problems for me.  It has definitely moved my boot re-enchant to get a little speed increase up on my list of things I need to do.  I'm probably also going to find some trash with decent HP and just strafe around in a big circle, keeping up my normal rotation.  This will also help with #3.

2) I still need to learn my left from my right.  There were a few times when I almost turned my back to the boss because I was using the wrong mouse button to look for the sparks

3) good DPS + damage buffs = threat cap.  Even with vigilance on the highest sustained DPS in the group, DPS was getting threat capped.  I suppose this means I need to up my threat game (read as: "get a new, not awful tanking weapon").  I keep waiting for one to drop from Naxx10, but I just need to bite the bullet and run heroics more.  UP isn't so bad, and I need that sword anyway, even if I get the Naxx drop, 'cause you can never have too much gear.  I'm sure I could use it at least to enchant differently and put in different gear sets.

4) My guild has awesome healers.  Seriously, they were keeping me up through more damage than I'm used to taking.  I don't know how many times I heard my low health alert, yet I only went down before the group on a couple of tries, mostly while we were still figuring out the encounter.

In conclusion, I hope we nail him to the wall on Saturday, so I can achieve my new goal, clearing all progression raiding content (10 man) before 3.1, unless they decide to throw a curve and drop 3.1 this week :)

So I think I may have passed from casual to addict

So I started a project recently that I believe pushes me out of the realm of casual WoW addict into the real thing.  I've made a spreadsheet of all my gear and then labeled it based on its strengths.  Then I've used that to put together different tanking sets (assuming best enchants and blue gems).  I'm sure I did something wrong, but check it out:

My Spreadsheet

You might note that my gear isn't really the best, but that's ok.  Some of it is pretty nice actually :)

Kel-Thuzad Down!

So it finally happened (I'm the short one on the left arm).  It was the craziest fight ever too.  We had a pally, a shaman, and a druid for heals.  Well the pally got frozen, and neither of the other healers caught it in time (no instant heals) so he went down.  Well we were doing alright until the Shaman went down.  Not a big deal, he popped himself right back up.  Well, then without instant heals our healers were missing the occasional frost blast, and down they were going, 7, 6, then the OT makes 5, it didn't look good, adds running around the raid doing their worst, but we were so close!  Just 50k to go, 40k, 30k, another one down, 20k, another one down, burn him with all you've got, 10k, 5k, 3k, dead!

That's right just 3 of us left at the end.  Me, a hunter, and a shadow priest.  Talk about a DPS race!

Anyway, now I guess I need to set higher goals.  My previous goal is now achieved, which was to clear out Naxx before 3.1

I guess my new goal is to clear EoE, which will mean for the first time since I've started playing I've cleared all current content.  Yes, it's just the 10 man versions, and no, I haven't killed Sarth3D, but I have killed Sarth, and my guild doesn't have the geared numbers for 25 yet (scheduling problems mostly), so to me it counts :)

For being in a casual raiding guild, clearing out current content is no small achievement, so to everyone else in that picture, if you happen across this: Thanks for helping me reach my goal, and let's move on to clear out EoE!

Multiple Gearsets

so one thing I should probably mention is that my main all through TBC was my mage.  My warrior was a product of getting bored with my guild's slow progression (we aren't a raiding guild, more of a social guild that raids), but now my Warrior is more or less my main.

Why should you have multiple gearsets?

so I'm pretty sure any serious warrior tank would laugh at this question, and even before I read what Vene posted about it, I would never have asked that question.  I know warriors need multiple gearsets because tanking is all about being the best you can for the encounter you're facing.  Unlike DPS, who can for the most part use the same gear and rotation for any boss encounter, tanks have to think about things like "How hard does this boss hit?" "Do I have to move a lot?" "Is there an excess of physical or magic damage?" and while simply knowing the answers to these questions will help you adjust your rotation, or perhaps help your healers know how/when to heal you to get the most out of it, as a tank you can take it one step further and set up your gear to match the encounter.

How many gear sets do I need?

This is a question that's better left up to you, but a good rule of thumb is, don't ever throw away tanking armor.  I'm not talking about that lvl 52 green chestpiece you have sitting in your bag.  Obviously you shouldn't ever need to make use of that.  But to use a current example, the crafted blue gear at lvl 80 (or lvl 78) has extreme amounts of defense on it.  Some pieces have upwards of 75 defense on one piece of gear.  While it's lacking in other stats, it's still worth hanging onto.  Let's say you're putting together your threat set, and you find yourself short on defense, well, sometimes it's worth it to put on that blue piece to round out your gear, rather than using an epic that means you have to trade out 3 or 4 other great pieces just to hit 540 def.

Personally I have 8 gearsets right now, and 6 of them are for tanking.  I have a generally balanced best in slot set, a block set, a boss threat set, an avoidance set, an EH set, and a Stam set.  I plan to put together a raid trash set and, if I can, heroic versions of some of those sets, so that I can use better pieces without having to worry quite so much about defense.