4501

I haven’t raided, but in normal dungeons I get some really weird numbers with recount. Half the time I wonder if something’s bugged. That’s an 8k mage, on a boss where they were doing 100% extra damage, which means the mage was doing 4k. Was the mage severely undergeared?

My recount often has significantly different numbers from other players. : /

4502

nope she lived through the entire fight until the very end, where boss went enrage with 600k health 1 shot both our tanks, and our rogue manage to tank it with evasion for like 10 seconds, and finally we down it, when my priest and pally healer throw whatever we had on him.

last person alive was the pally healer.

yeah our tanks both put out excellent dps on that fight, we had to 3 heal that one because we decided to do the unlock both drake at same time, even our resto shammy put out 5k dps. only 4 out 10 people had ilvl over 340, all 3 healers and our dk tank, and that fight basically is a dps fight.

Oh yeah the mage score the dps cloth bracer over the warlock who came in 2nd on dps…

4503

No, they’re generally speaking terrible compared to an actual tanking piece a tier behind.

And tanks shouldn’t value expertise. You get a certain amount of it by default, but you should be reforging it off ASAP.

Miss strings…feh. That’s what taunts are for.

I know I’m coming off a bit strident here, but seriously. If you’re having threat issues, fix your playstyle. Don’t gimp your gear to compensate.

And yes, I can pull threat on my DK early in the fight if I’m not careful as well. Oblit crits are silly, and a couple of quick KM procs will generate an awful lot of threat. Once the tank has a decent lead, though (seriously, like five-ten seconds into the fight), no way am I pulling threat unless I badly outgear the tank.

I tank with as close to 0 hit and expertise as I possibly can, and doesn’t nobody pull threat off me unless something weird is happening.

4504

Alright, this is my offspec sadsack collection of tanking equipment my 5-man tanks have passed on.

Tell me what I should enchant/gem for, you number-crunchers.

I hate and have no plans to raid. 5-man enjoyment is at my upper level of sinking time into WoW before it becomes a second job. I would like to do heroics but am too unskilled at this point. For now, I just faceroll through regulars in order to fast-queue my DPS guildies/friends for their loot upgrades.

I’m definitely looking to get better trinkets from the heroics but this equipment is basically where I stop trying to push for better gear.

4505

Mastery > dodge, mastery is one of the best stats.

4506

Check out Maintankadin’s gemming and enchanting guide.

4507

Enchant/gem for parry/dodge/stam/mastery, whatever you can fit in there. Make sure your meta (dunno between Austere and the shield block one for you) is activated, then go for socket bonuses with a bias toward stamina and mastery. Yellow = dodge/mastery, red = parry, blue = stam as far as colors go.

Reforge hit/expertise off in search of more p/d/m. Cursory scanning of paladin tanking resources suggests go with mastery first, then whichever is currently lower of parry/dodge (to minimize the diminishing returns on those two stats).

The Cataclysm-level agi/stam patch for your legs is superior to the armor patch.

That should more or less get you into shape for heroics.

4508

Maloriak is pretty serious business.

4509

Ozruk in Stonecore really is pretty bullshit. It was somehow bugged for us tonight; the Elementium Bulwark would sometimes refuse to reflect any spells; which would cause our casters to eat damage from paralyze.

4510

I felt really bad about my DPS (13th place on damage dealt) on Maloriak until I looked closer at the meters and realized that only two of the twelve people above me on the meters had higher damage done to adds, and half of them had negligible add damage done.

Balance is definitely an absurd dance of juggling cooldowns, Eclipses/transitions, and spell choices on movement, not to mention the ridiculousness that is the rotation when even the smallest amount of movement is involved… and we don’t do particularly amazing DPS even when we do (though we do very well when we play perfectly).

Reminds me being a TBC Shadowpriest, actually.

4511

He was always buggy like that. Almost every time I fought him, at some point I’d get paralyzed because none of the dots I was spamming got reflected. Overall it’s probably the worst designed heroic fight IMO.

4512

I had this happening to me in a recent fight only to find out our party’s mage was spell stealing, or at least so he claimed. Once he stopped than the fight seemed to work as normal.

Maybe he’s not spellsteal or purge friendly?

4513

best advice for Ozruk is having anyone with dispel magic preferably healer go in and melee, then right after the paralyze, run out and dispel all the range. and have whomever dispelling dispel the elemental bulwark instead trying to bounce spell off of it, since it drop your magic dps by a lot.

4514

“The mechanical nightmare section of the Vanessa VanCleef encounter has less sparks of doom, and is notably easier and faster to navigate.”

Looks like all the whining is working.

4515

It’s definitely one of those fights where communication matters a lot and isn’t really pug-friendly. If someone’s stealing/purging the boss’s bulwark too early before everyone gets a chance to bounce a dot off of it, it gets frustrating. If they’re doing it too late, then there’s a lot of time where the casters aren’t doing damage. But I have also noticed that sometimes your dots don’t get reflected properly at all, even when everyone’s doing it correctly. It’s really just a dumb fight.

4516

we down the theralion and valiona fight in Bastion of twilight so far so good, took us about 5 tries.

4517

Consider going Magmaw next if you haven’t already, we poked him down in roughly an hour and you should be able to do that even faster considering we needed more tries before killing double dragon.

4518

Glad it’s not just me having fun and games with Balance.

I have to come clean and say that I consider it my offspec so I was running in my resto gear which packs a huge amount of spirit and haste at the expense of DPS favouring stats. So yay I’m hitcapped for raiding and OOM is something I’ve never considered but I’m doing relatively low DPS compared to the rest of the group in Heroics (6-8kDPS at 339 level gear on boss fights) especially when looking at trash, which I don’t care about. I consider myself a mainspec healer but owing to guild makeup at the moment I’m snoozing my way through normals now trying to get other tanks up while our far more available than me priest heals the Heroic runs, so if I want to run heroics it’s as DPS.

With regards to your earlier post, I was under the impression that instant cast starsurge > everything else followed by starsurge when off cooldown but I’m also of the opinion that sometimes that depends on what Eclipse is up to and whether you think you can get a lunar Moonfire off before the starsurge hits/eclipse updates. I also tend to make use of the last solar eclipse over starsurge if there’s a choice in the matter or I’ve just started a cast when starsurge procs.

I suspect I’d improve my DPS measurably if I just remembered to re-enable sqawk and awe next time I logged on.

There’s an awful lot to do now as a balance druid (decurse this, root that, hibernate the other and keep your DPS up ffs!) and I’m not helping myself on that front at the moment.

4519

Ask the prot warrior/mage/shaman to kindly not knock off the Bulwark :)

We made a start on Blackwing Descent last night. Magmaw was fun and fairly straightforward. Omnitron Defence System was just mindbogglingly confusing for the first few attempts but we got the hang of it and got it down in the end. Great fun, more about reacting to circumstances and being clever than just following a script and relying on your gear.

4520

Exactly how can a port warrior knock off the bulwark?