The Cranky Tank

Last week’s progression raid night was, for lack of a better word, EPIC. We got our first normal Imperator kill on our second attempt of the night, on our second night of attempts. We then flipped to Heroic difficulty and took down Kargath and Twin Ogron, since those are our heroic “farm” bosses. With forty minutes remaining, we decided to try Heroic Butcher. This was a fight that roughly half of the raid was dreading, while the other half was enthusiastic. The naysayers were shown that the fight wasn’t “too hard” via a slightly messy one-shot! Buoyed by our victory, we hustled over to Heroic Brackenspore, which was another fight that the group was a bit unsure about. Guess what? It was another one-shot! Now that I’ve seen these fights, here are my thoughts on tanking them:

Imperator Mar’gok (Normal): Meh. The boss himself is fairly easy to tank, though he hits very hard. The small Volatile adds can be a bit of a pain to pick up if they try to slip through a cluster of mines. Gorian Reavers hit HARD. Mark of Chaos: Fortification is by far the most annoying part of the encounter to tank. Basically, you get rooted in place and expel a massive AoE explosion to anyone within 35 yards. If the entire raid fails to move away, there will likely be a few deaths. The solution, as a warrior, is to have a Heroic Leap ready to propel you out of the group the INSTANT you get the Mark of Chaos warning. If your Leap fails (which it often does), the raid has at best 6 seconds to get away from you. Yuck.

The Butcher (Heroic): Ouch. The mechanics of the fight aren’t any different than the Normal version, but the boss hits MUCH harder in Heroic. Keep Shield Block up, weave in Shield Barrier whenever you can, rotate your defensive/self-healing cooldowns, and pop a Ravager when you tank-swap (it boosts your Parry by 30%, which may prevent a stack or two of The Cleaver). Good Luck!

Brackenspore (Heroic): Meh. Much like The Butcher, your primary concern is the increased incoming damage, especially during Necrotic Breath. Self-heals won’t help you here, so you’ll want to have a big Shield Barrier and a Demoralizing Shout ready for this attack. Also, keep in mind that the Creeping Moss grows much faster in Heroic difficulty, so you’ll have to pay a bit more attention and move the boss if the moss starts to get close to the raid.

Whew! That fight is one of the most brutal gear-checks yet for a solo warrior! It’s a DPS race WITH enormous ramping incoming damage, so it doesn’t seem possible to succeed without a lot of brute force. If you’re at all interested, my setup was the following:

• Item level 659,
• Greater Draenic Strength Flask,
• Draenic Armor Potions,
• Versatility food,
• Battle Shout,
• Dragon Roar, Sudden Death, Bloodbath, Gladiator’s Resolve

Not “optimal”, perhaps, but after over a dozen attempts this was the combination that worked. It will get easier with better gear, which seems to be the ONLY way for warriors to solo bosses in Warlords of Draenor given the complete nerfing of our previously useful self-heals.

That is the poorly-phrased question that I’ve been pondering today. I certainly WANT to stream some of my WoW antics; I have OBS all set up with a nice chat censor, viewer count, timer for speed runs, new follower pop-up, and such. I’ve even announced my streaming sessions on Twitter (mostly mount soloing runs, for testing purposes). Most of the time, my streams have somewhere in the vicinity of zero viewers (one, if I count myself). I suspect that there are a few reasons for this:

• Lack of audio commentary,
• Lack of a webcam shot of my face in the corner, which seems traditional,
• Lack of self-promotion and/or presence in the “community”,
• Boring content

The first two possibilities are probably the least likely to change any time soon. For one thing, I don’t own a webcam, and if I did I wouldn’t subject viewers to my ugly mug out of courtesy. The lack of audio commentary comes primarily from the constraints of my PC’s location: it’s in a shared family area, and my commentary would likely annoy others and contain a fair amount of background noise. Also, I’m very self-conscious about speaking, though that might improve if I were to attempt some “enhanced” streaming.

I’m not entirely sure how to increase my streaming presence, or if it’s even possible at my level. I’m not going to beg for followers (though I am grateful for every one), and I don’t have the means to do prize giveaways (which seems to me like low-level bribery when starting out). Announcing my streams on Twitter and posting links to my Twitch channel on all of my posted media seems to be my limit. Here’s hoping for favorable word-of-mouth?

Finally, I suspect that my streams may be, well, BORING. I don’t PvP, so that’s out. I don’t stream my raid nights out of respect for the privacy of my colleagues (though I do make first-kill videos for YouTube). I solo old raids on a nightly basis, though I think that might wear a bit thin when I don’t take down any new bosses for a while. There are others that cover the gold-making/professions scene MUCH better than I, so I’ll spare my viewers that bit of my routine.

I don’t know. After reading what I’ve just written, it seems to me that maybe streaming just isn’t something I’m cut out to do, despite my desire to do it. Or maybe I’m just being my usual cranky self. What do you think?

After an eternity of soloing Dragon Soul (Spine of Deathwing, you suck), I finally obtained the Blazing Drake from the Madness of Deathwing fight. Well, it felt like an eternity, but it was really just a couple of months. At any rate, it was the last mount I needed for the Awake the Drakes achievement. This meant that not only is the achievement 100% soloable, but I also got the awesome Emerald Drake!