Game-Changing New Powers

[Frag]

It's a few things. I'm assuming here that the difficulty is in the trash, not the bosses. Because I can't see people having problems with bosses.

1) shield block is not something I really spam in 5-mans. You noted the healing being not terrible. I go aggro then damage then mit on trash. "Death is the best CC" school of thought. Mostly I will use shield block to trigger revenge (if I'm in a 5-man with casters so sunder isn't strictly necessary) or when a mob is about to die to get revenge queued for waking up a sheep, so I have good initial threat for that guy.

2) The Terenas Lurkers are generally very good about focus fire and making a target order before each pull. It makes tanking much, much, much easier when people are focus firing well. This is the primary difference between most PUGs I've been on and the Lurker runs.

3) Know when to quit throwing aggro on a mob. If you lose a mob at 20% to DPS and it's under heavy focus fire... it's not going to kill anyone. Healers can deal with some DPS getting a hit or two. Trash killing DPS is not a huge worry unless there was a focus fire gone wrong scenario. As long as they aren't on the healer, this is usually fine.

Having done quite a bit of at level 5-manning before TBC, I can honestly say that it's not a huge difference in TBC. For warriors that have raid tanked most of their characters life, it's probably the (rather significant) differences between 5-man tanking and raid tanking. They are very different, and people who are awesome raid tanks may have forgotten or never really learned how to 5-man very well. I don't think it's something to be ashamed of, it's normal if you spent a year doing raiding to be rusty at 5-mans.

I went into TBC expecting horrible things based on what I had read on the WoW boards about how poorly warriors were able to hold aggro. Now that I'm 65 and have tanked everything through mana-tombs, I don't see it yet. Seems very similar to all the other at-level 5 manning I've done.

The rage starvation in beta it was bosses/trash/solo/group, I felt it everywhere. Somewhere in the last 3 weeks of beta they changed *something* with the formula, we weren't able to nail it down and I had stopped playing over there pretty-much but whatever it was they changed was nice.

You likely have a point. Tiga grew up tanking lots and lots and lots of 5 mans. I tended to level inside instances as the frustration of trying to level outdoors on Tich didn't do good things for my blood pressure. After hitting 60 and starting to raid, I really only did BRS Key runs or an occasional jaunt to Dire Maul, but for the most part I haven't 5-manned in quite some time (until beta). That "shield block spam" I mentioned earlier is a hold-over from raiding, and served me well at endgame TBC, but not in pre-Auch instances (now that I think of it).

As for the test with my warrior, I pulled Tiga out yesterday and did Ramparts with a ~+1/2 level group to him, we were going for speed and the only times I had aggro issues was when dps was going all over, per usual. At no point did I feel rage starved, I was doing a large amount of cleaving / twist + thunderclapping / twist + whirlwind, all of which are fairly expensive manuevers and can only recall hearing "You don't have enough rage" a few times. That's pretty great. :)


As for 10s lead time... you want me to give him ~2s lead before I pop the whirlwind of death macro? I end up tanking 2-4 mobs in that case unless they're feeling generous and pop an aoe taunt. :blush:

Cheers,
~Tiga :D