3.0.8 Tanking Spec

3.0.8 Is finally here!

I can say with full confidence that this patch has been nothing but a buff to me. I have more defense, armor, and health than I did before. I am also putting out 1-200 more DPS (and correspondingly Threat) than I was pre-patch due to the changes in Killing Machines functionality. I know they were trying to nerf it for DW and buff it for tanking but they may have gone to far. It seems to proc once per rotation and cause a frost strike or icey touch crit. One crit every 5 attacks is a lot more than my 5 % to crit would indicate =) I had to give up a few things from my previous build, but I think my new spec has similar mitigation/avoidance and greater threat.

I am a bit upset with the treatment that Howling Blast got. I understand that they added the cooldown back shortly before the patch went live, but that is no excuse for the way it was implemented. Howling blast tooltip says nothing about a cooldown. When you use the skill, no cooldown timer is started and the ability is not greyed out. However you get the "that ability is not ready yet" message when trying to cast it a second time in succession. Don't get me wrong, the cooldown is shorter and I use the ability twice as much as i used it before, I just think that it hurts the polish of the game to not show the cooldown. It seems such a small thing that could have been fixed before the patch was pushed. Its kind of like the bug that happens when you use a cooldown ability on a deathknight and instead of counting down the actual time left on the cooldown, it counts down the time until those runes are ready again. So your UI may show that the ability has one second left on cooldown, when in reality the ability still has a minute left and the runes it uses are about to come off cooldown. Once your aware of it, its not a big deal, but it is annoying and hurts the smoothness of the game.

Raid Tanking

I missed out on our guild's naxx run due to being out of town. I was pretty disapointed by that because I had done a lot to improve my gear from the last run and wanted to see if it made anything easier. Once I got back from Kansas I made up for my missed time rather quickly. In quick succession I tanked 25 man Arch for the first time, Tanked 25 man Sarth for the first time, and got the heroic daily done over the course of 2 hours. I have been reading a lot about Sarth +1 and really want to give it a shot next time we do OS. It may be asking to much of my small casual guild but I think we can do It.

I talked a bit to thedoctor about him and I setting up and running some PUG naxx 25. I think once we/I have more experiance in the 10 man version It shouldn't be to hard to get some pugs going. Pug raids are very active on our server and we could get the people easily.


PUGS

I got a lot of feedback on my article about pugging, some agreeing with me, some disagreeing. I still plan on rolling on anything I need against strangers in pugs, but I have decided to make sure my intentions are known before we start.

On another, related note. I have pretty much all the tanking gear I can get with heroic badges. I am holding off on buying the tier Chest piece for a few reasons:
1. 80 Badges is a lot of heroics.
2. They may release new badge gear with the next content patch.
3. I gotta want something out of naxx right?!?!

My DPS/PVP gear is also coming along rather well (thanks to running heroics that drop my needed dps pieces) I now have the 2 piece tier bonus (gloves/chest)! Just need to scrounge up some gems and enchants now and I will be melting face with the best of them. Have any of you run into this problem? Overabundance of hit on gear. I have almost 11% to hit in dps gear and I really want to drop it (as it is above the cap) and get more Strength, Crit, Expertise on my gear. Every time I replace a level 75 item with an 80 item i get more and more hit! With all that Hit i contemplated dual wielding as dps, but it doesn't really appeal to me. I like hitting things with my big hammer!

Until next time.