The Queue: Tanks
by Michael Sacco 
May 1st 2011 at 12:00PM
I'm tired. I've been tanking all weekend. Let's do this Queue so I can sleep and do it all over again tomorrow.
Crispn asked:
Is it me or are the new Zandalari fights way too healing intensive? The eagle boss in Zul'Aman for example, I had 17.8k hps that fight, just to keep us alive. This is a little much, no?
While the new instances are definitely on a higher difficulty level than current heroics and they do require more healing output, most fights are types of brain checks as opposed to heal checks (Nalorakk and Halazzi excepted). For Akil'zon, as I discovered tanking the place yesterday, he only gives one person the Static Disruption debuff at a time, but it'll chain to people who're within 12 yards of his target. So if everyone is spaced out 12 yards, only one person will get hit with it, guaranteed. You then have until the next Electrical Storm phase (or until it expires) to deal with the debuff.
Also, though this has nothing to do with healing, you can melee, stun, and slow the white eagles.
Draol asked:
Is there a particular reason they stopped implementing Dungeon Sets? There were 1 & 2 during Vanilla, and it carried on into BC with Dungeon Set 3, but when Wrath came around they were nowhere to be seen.
Was there a special reason, or did Blizzard just think it was unnecessary?
I can't speak for Blizzard, but nowadays you already have all the elements of dungeon sets in the cohesive art styles of heroic, rep, and point vendor gear at the same item level. The only thing missing is the set bonus, and I think that might be the reason why you don't see named dungeon sets now, actually. Set bonuses encourage people to keep their set pieces together when, nowadays, pre-raid gear is intended to be a stepping stone to the next level of gear, a this'll do for now kind of thing. Besides, jealousy is a pretty good motivator to get better gear. "Aw man, I want a set bonus too!"
Mayanvampire asked:
In vash'jr, one of the shaman mentions that there is a fifth element, which allows shamans to connect with the creatures of the land, and maybe nature, are there life elementals? if so, could there be a life elemental lord?
Commenter Jormund Fenris sums up the fifth element for those who don't closely follow lore:
If you're looking for a life elemental, the closest thing would probably be any of the giant plants you see in various zones or on bosses like Freya and Ammunae. As for an elemental lord of the wilds, well, we don't know for sure, but there sure are a lot of demigods (especially night elf demigods) that could fill that role, such as Aessina."Spirit of the Wilds. The essentials is that shamans primarily use the first four elements, and very rarily the fifth. In contrast, druids focus entirely on the fifth and disregard the other four. The only shaman spell of the fifth element in-game is Ancestral Spirit, the shammie-ressurection spell."
Metzganator asked:
Did the feature to reorder your characters on the loggin screen come in 4.1? if so how do i access it?
Blizzard recently stated in its UI Q&A that it's slated for arrival in 4.2.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!
Filed under: The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
sorenhk May 1st 2011 12:05PM
Q for the Q:
When do you think a guild should be able to venture into heroic raids? I've heard that heroic raids are very hard in Cataclysm, so I would expect that a fairly high average item level is needed.
I guess, what I really want to know is: can we somehow tell if if we are ready to try (and perhaps down) some bosses on heroic mode? Does the fact that we can down boss X on normal mode mean that we should be able to down boss Y on heroic? Any (relatively) easy bosses to try out first?
Thanks for your help :)
Hithoion, EU-Grim Batol
Angus May 1st 2011 12:07PM
If you can beat the last boss in the place, you should be able to handle the first one or two in HM.
Sidone May 1st 2011 12:15PM
first one minute of halfus on hc
if you can survive that long, you can down him, which means you kill your very first hc boss,.p
to be somewhat helpful, burn all your tanksaving/raiding cd in that first minute
Sleutel May 1st 2011 12:47PM
You can't just access Heroic versions of raid bosses automatically. You need to have killed the endboss of a given raid on regular to toggle Heroic for the instance. That's your biggest gateway. If you're at the point where you're comfortable doing a full clear on regular, you're probably ready to start the earlier bosses on Heroic.
As Sidone said, Halfus is a good place to start. There are no new mechanics for the fight: the only difference is that all five adds are active, instead of having two inactive. Your raid should already be familiar with how everything works; you just need to figure out how to deal with everything at once. My guild leaves Slate down but pops everything else, pretty much right away, using Tricks/MD to get everything to the tanks. (We wait a few seconds to release the whelps, so that I can establish initial aggro on Storm.) I take Storm, Nether, and the whelps; the other tank takes Halfus and Time. We burn Lust/TW as soon as the whelps are out, at which point we kill Storm > Time > Nether > Halfus. (The whelps go down through incidental AOE.) We BOP off the initial stack of Malevolent Strikes when it gets high (usually 10-15); Storm should be dead by the time the stacks get back up into the 6-9 range where we need to start swapping. After that, we trade Halfus and redistribute remaining drakes as necessary until everything is dead. The one downside to using two tanks rather than three is that you sometimes get really bad RNG at the beginning of the pull with MS stacking, which will pretty much guarantee a wipe. We've found it's worth it for the extra DPS, though.
A note of caution: the requirements for 10-man raids in the current tier are very tight. Because of the way the fights are designed and balanced, there is frequently only one "right" way to kill a boss. Making a simple change can be the difference between endless wipes and comparatively easy success. The Wrath model where 10-man was usually easier than 25 no longer holds, at least for now.
Angus May 1st 2011 12:06PM
Has anyone even seen "Call to Arms: DPS" yet?
I haven't even seen "Healer" but I thought I'd check.
Gennifurfur May 1st 2011 12:10PM
No, no DPS. However, I received a goody bag as a healer already. It didn't have anything good in it but yeah, it's happened.
Necromann May 1st 2011 12:13PM
The only times I've seen healer called up was for tier 1 heroics, and tank wasn't, so I'm going to guess that at that time, there was such an influx of tanks in those heroics that healers were needed.
agridulce May 1st 2011 12:47PM
I've seen it for heals a few times and it's definitely encouraged me to queue for whatever needs me.
Of course, getting my Polar Bear my very first goodie bag helped too.
PeeWee May 1st 2011 3:10PM
"To be eligible for the additional rewards you must solo queue for a random level-85 Heroic in the role that is currently being Called to Arms..."
-4.1 Patch notes
Thereby, pure DPS classes are effectively eliminated from ever receiving the satchel, and a flood of people with alt-tanks/healers trying to nab their way to new pets and mounts has already begun. Last night I saw a DK signed as tank with an Unholy spec (and no Dual-talent achievement), trying to pull groups in HoO HC.
Problem is, we can't kick them all, not with the penalties for inciting kicks and agreeing to kicks in place.
I prefer to wait 10 minutes longer and get a "proper" tank over "maybe" getting a good one. While I wait, I can farm dailies or mats and watch movies or series on the other monitor. Lately, I've begun to particularly enjoy "The Joy of Painting" with Bob Ross, I have all seasons downloaded.
Ooo, a happy little bush, right there!
Chetti May 1st 2011 3:32PM
Happy trees... happy trees everywhere. :)
AutumnBringer May 1st 2011 3:52PM
I saw someone on Blizzard's forums claim he/she saw DPS have CtA for a short time yesterday as they waited in queue as a tank.
Take that for whatever it's worth I guess :P
It should be theoretically possible, just not very likely.
gamerunknown May 1st 2011 5:17PM
I'd rather have a 10 minute queue for a 40 minute run than a half hour queue for a half hour run. I'd much rather be playing the game than waiting to play it...
Though I haven't seen the numbers yet.
I'd say it's very unlikely that dps will get a call to arms given that every class has access to a dps spec and thus those enticed to run instances would just requeue as dps.
That said I could imagine it happening at very off-peak times when there's hardly anyone on and dps just aren't queueing due to hour long waits and tanks and healers are a little more optimistic.
SR May 2nd 2011 2:24AM
I do recall sitting in the queue as a tank for around 10 minutes waiting for a single DPS. This was long before the CTA system (It might've been Wrath, actually) and might not happen for a long time, but I've seen it happen before.
/gets back to grinding 100g goodie-bags
Necromann May 1st 2011 12:10PM
I can't wait to move my toons around on the log in screen. I want to move my goblin up a few spots, but I can't do that yet without deleting the ones between.
Eldoron May 1st 2011 12:10PM
The ilevel 346 items are totally sets, they just dont have bonuses.
Gennifurfur May 1st 2011 12:12PM
I did 18k hps on the eagle boss yesterday (resto druid), and we wiped at 30%. I'm average i-level 351 and I like to believe a decent healer. I don't know what I could've done differently to win that fight, but I ended up with a bloody knuckle after I punched an inanimate object. Yes I know, anger issues and whatnot.
Chrisamcnicholas May 1st 2011 12:29PM
did you have a lot of melee? that fight is a nightmare with more than the tank and maybe one melee.
Saeadame May 1st 2011 3:01PM
Definitely the group is a factor... I did that fight for the first time and my group got it with no problems... because there was only the tank in melee and everyone knew what they were doing. It's not really a very high damage fight if everyone's standing where they're supposed to.
Cinnaminsin May 1st 2011 4:50PM
If you are pulling 18K and wiping, that is a group problem, not a healer problem. I usually do around 10-11K and we get him down. you really just have to pay attention to the mechanics and the healing is not that intensive.
Gennifurfur May 1st 2011 5:19PM
Yeah I believe we had 3 melee including the tank. I tried again after posting this and 3 melee again. (Probably hard to avoid when I queue with my wife, a rogue). What really helped was this time, the priest helped me out with mass dispel. When 3 people get that at a time and I spend 3 GCDs (not to mention that much mana) only to see 3 people get the debuff again... it's depressing.
On the plus side, I found every other boss in the place to be easy compared to that!