[Barghast]

Hello Peoples of Heresiarch,
My name is Barghast and I am a protection warrior with an arms offspec. I am far from "mastering" both those specs but I'd like to think of myself as somebody who can squeeze out a decent level of competence. I've been playing wow on and off since 2004 and have many incredible friends along the way. I hope to only make more as I send this application into Heresiarch.

Discuss your talents and tell us how long you have been this particular spec:
I have a very control-based protection spec which would likely change if I were to begin raiding. I have been this spec since I started doing heroics (a few months).

Ventrilo and do you have a mic:
Yes and yes (I also have skype which I use for arenas).

Do you have an authenticator?
It's in the mail, literally.

Typical Weekly Playtime:
Too much. I play mostly between 2pm and 2am.

Time Zone:
Western

Previous Guilds:
I have probably been in about 30 different guilds. Right now on Drenden I am in Warlocks of the Sunspire which is the only guild I have been in on Drenden.

Previous Raiding Experience:
Most of my raid experience is from vanilla. This is where myself and the other warriors learned vital techniques in kiting, LOSing, stance-dancing, gnome punting, and more. Though I do have a lot of tanking experience from Wrath, I find that I didn't learn a lot from it. Cataclysm is offering the same fun and challenging experience that vanilla offered which is why I have recently taken it upon myself to find a guild to learn with.

Why are you applying to us:
Well there's the above answer.. which doesn't belong there..
I think what really attracts me to Heresiarch is the community of people that play to experience new content and have fun while doing it. Though this is true of many raid guilds, I have found Heresiarch to have an excellent reputation. It's hard not to be attracted to it.

Link us your Armory:
http://us.battle.net...barghast/simple

World of Logs Report:
To be honest I have no idea how WoL works..
http://worldoflogs.c...yqic/details/4/
This report shows me DPSing on Twins and tanking Council. This was my first experience with these encounters as the listed class/specs.

Do you know anyone in guild? If so please list your pals.
Does Wrath count if I annoying him daily? Awww...

Tell us a bit about yourself:
I am a 24 year old steamfitter from Vancouver. I live in a house which I am currently renovating and making more beautiful every day. My education lies purely in trades and my love for hands-on work. My strengths are simply that I'm always happy and easy going, I'm quick to learn new things and I love meeting new people. My primary goal in life is to enjoy it. My biggest weakness, however, is that I do get distracted from time to time.

I look forward to meeting as many of Heresiarch as I can and building both friendships and opportunities.

~Barghast

[Locklove]

I dont know too much about tanks but looks applicable o.0\

[Guinthel]

in b4 block mechanics

NO IT NEVER GETS OLD

PAD THAT POST COUNT BABY

[Stabandtwirl]

Overall attitude and gear looks fine. That said, the gems and reforges are questionable. Expertise while being the best stat for threat generation, is not needed because of Vengeance mechanics. With the Cata changes to parry, expertise is no longer a pseudo mitigation talent. Also Mastery is the BEST mitigation talent for warriors. While stacking mastery you will take more damage than a avoidance tank overall, but it will be less spikey, and easier on healer mana. Once you have acquired as much mastery from gemming/reforging, you should have your parry:dodge ratio to be like 1.5:1.

I think you'll be fine with a little work, but I'm going to point out my "issues".
-Most of your gems where possible should be mastery focused imo, but that is debatable. I overall like parry/mastery in red slots, mastery/stamina in blue slots, pure mastery in yellow slots and in slots where I don't care about socket bonus.
-Reforge out of expertise and hit into mastery/parry/dodge.
-Get a belt buckle.
-Field Dressing is a must for most tank builds. I understand why you took Blood Craze, because I'm assuming you wanted to get Piercing Howl.

If you want the chat, or rage at me for being an idiot, I'm generally on my warrior Trashmob.

[Wrathblood]

Ran most of Stonecore with him earlier and I've been chatting with him on and off for a bit. Like his attitude a lot, calm and joking despite 2 of the 3 dps being absolutely terrible (despite +15% buff, the mage was well under 6k dps for the run, and the hunter narrowly beat my fire elemental for damage done to shards on Corborous), very much has that "experienced raider" vibe doing a lot of the little things I look for (knowing that you don't have to stand there when the Flayers channel Flay ftw). Also, I like that his dps in the WoL parse when not tanking wasn't bad (we expect tanks to be able to carry their weight as dpsers and it looks like you've been working on your dps of-spec).

Spec and stat set-up are intended for heroics and are fine for them (he had 203k buffed health in Stonecore which was pretty hilarious). Some things certainly need to be changed (gonna want that belt buckle and the flip-plates. Also, going to need to make sure you've got the Mirror trinket from TB), and Hit/Expertise are a lot less important in raids so you'll probably want to shift points out of them rather than into them. Trash has pretty close to the standard general purpose tanking specs (plus gearing emphasizing Mastery and minimizing hit/exp), so something similar for gemming/reforging and spec would be the safe way to go (its what most of the prot warriors in top guilds do.).

That having been said (And I yell at people on boards like EJ for this a lot), its easy to get dogmatic about the "right" way do things. If you feel strongly about a particular concept, think it through, and can defend it, then I'd be curious to see how it works out. But if it doesn't work out, then you'd have to be willing to change.

[Deceax]

I like the tone of the app. Having two 525 profs and being able to write an app that doesn't look like it was written by a monkey smoking crack helps as well. My only concern is room for a tank since we have both Wrath and Trash who are pretty solid on attendance. In the end though I would love to give him a shot as it seems like he at least halfway knows whats up and we would be foolish to pass up a solid player.

[Locklove]

Deceax, on 11 April 2011 - 08:43 PM, said:

I like the tone of the app. Having two 525 profs and being able to write an app that doesn't look like it was written by a monkey smoking crack helps as well. My only concern is room for a tank since we have both Wrath and Trash who are pretty solid on attendance. In the end though I would love to give him a shot as it seems like he at least halfway knows whats up and we would be foolish to pass up a solid player.

^ is he going to be a back up role? So far in my time here I have not really noticed a tank issue.

[Deceax]

Btw having a pic of frieza would up your chances more than cell.

[Locklove]

Deceax, on 11 April 2011 - 09:14 PM, said:

Btw having a pic of frieza would up your chances more than cell.

Vegeta all the way =P

[Wrathblood]

Nope, not a backup role. If he joins us, we'd likely move Diablo more firmly into healing on his druid, and since Barghast, Trash and I can all dps reasonably competently, it would reduce our need for another dps. That's how I see it, but things are always fluid.

[Locklove]

Wrathblood, on 11 April 2011 - 10:00 PM, said:

Nope, not a backup role. If he joins us, we'd likely move Diablo more firmly into healing on his druid, and since Barghast, Trash and I can all dps reasonably competently, it would reduce our need for another dps. That's how I see it, but things are always fluid.

I know im not available on sundays until may 16th +, is that the day where you guys come across dps availability issues(is this my fault)? I know last Tuesday we had an issue but from what I can tell it was just a real life day for some people that couldn't be helped.

[Ballack]

If you are looking to maximize the prot warrior experience, I would recommend the following changes.

Following up on the gem/reforge I would suggest as follows.

Blue > 20 mastery/30 stam
Yellow > 40 mastery
Red > 20 parry/20 mastery

These are only if the bonus stats are viable otherwise I would gem pure mastery. Mastery has the double benefit that expertise once had. It increases block and also shield slam damage through the additional block. My warrior is currently at 5% hit, 12 Exp, with 14/14/45 in mitigation stats.

As far as protection spec goes I think you have a pretty good understanding of mechanics save one or two things. The biggest gaff I see is blood craze > those 3 points equal a 10% chance for a 600hp heal. This is such a minor heal that the points can be better spent.

The other things I see are Thunderstruck, Gag Order, and Blood and Thunder. I am assuming these are for AoE threat in heroics which make sense but I have a far better suggestion. I would recommend putting 8 points in the arms tree for Deep Wounds and dump all those extra points I listed above. Try spell reflect instead of heroic throw to handle those pesky heroic casters.

When I MT on my warrior in raids I use the same spec adjusted several ways. I use a basic 8/2/29+2 spec with 3/3 War Academy, 2/2 Field Dressing (which provides far more healing than Blood Craze), 3/3 Deep Wounds, and 2/2 Cruelty. The extra +2 in the Prot tree depend upon the boss fight you are on (I never spec based on trash since you can just Vigilance the other tank and have never-ending taunts)

Blood and Thunder or Thunderstruck > Maloriak (add tank), Nefarian (p3 add tank), Halfus
Gag Order > Ascendant Council (Arion - ranged interrupt), Nefarian (p2 extra interrupt in 10 man), Chogall (p2 tentacle interrupt)
Safeguard > Chimaeron (during double attacks), numerous heroic fight applications as tanks get trucked hard at certain points.

I do like the tone and presentation in this app. I don't raid with Heresiarch but feel free to bounce tank mechanics off me when you see me on one of my alts.

[Sobeyet]

Seems like you've already made most of the changes, but to add to what's already been said:

Stabandtwirl, on 11 April 2011 - 07:15 PM, said:

Once you have acquired as much mastery from gemming/reforging, you should have your parry:dodge ratio to be like 1.5:1.

I wouldn't really worry about maintaining any parry/dodge ratio; there's not enough stats on T11 gear for diminishing returns to make much of a difference. Given a choice between parry and dodge as a warrior you should always go for parry for Hold The Line.

Ballack, on 11 April 2011 - 10:57 PM, said:

The other things I see are Thunderstruck, Gag Order, and Blood and Thunder. I am assuming these are for AoE threat in heroics which make sense but I have a far better suggestion. I would recommend putting 8 points in the arms tree for Deep Wounds and dump all those extra points I listed above. Try spell reflect instead of heroic throw to handle those pesky heroic casters.

When I MT on my warrior in raids I use the same spec adjusted several ways. I use a basic 8/2/29+2 spec with 3/3 War Academy, 2/2 Field Dressing (which provides far more healing than Blood Craze), 3/3 Deep Wounds, and 2/2 Cruelty. The extra +2 in the Prot tree depend upon the boss fight you are on (I never spec based on trash since you can just Vigilance the other tank and have never-ending taunts)

Blood and Thunder or Thunderstruck > Maloriak (add tank), Nefarian (p3 add tank), Halfus
Gag Order > Ascendant Council (Arion - ranged interrupt), Nefarian (p2 extra interrupt in 10 man), Chogall (p2 tentacle interrupt)
Safeguard > Chimaeron (during double attacks), numerous heroic fight applications as tanks get trucked hard at certain points.

I don't really see the point of putting in 8 points in the arms tree. War Academy / Deep Wounds are nice for threat / DPS, but if you wanted to maximize survivability I'd take Blood Craze and Impending Victory (neither of them are great talents, but at least they impact your HEP unlike the DPS talents). And Piercing Howls isn't a bad talent for certain hard mode bosses for add control (if you were going for it I'd replace glyph of Thunder Clap with Piercing Howl), I'd probably drop Thunderstruck/Gag Order depending on the fight. DPS talents are for people with shitty TPS like Stab and Ballack.

Few more things:

• Change dodge cogwheel to mastery.
• Mastery enchant to gloves.
• Should get the better leg enchant, it's not that expensive.
• Rend uptime could be better, it's essentially free TPS.
• Need to keep up tclap and demo shout in raids at all times, especially if you're solo tanking a boss. Didn't cast demo shout at all in the WoL, tclap uptime was low (didn't cast it at all on the kill). Just tclap as it's running out, you can use it to refresh rend. I'd glyph demo shout so it's easier to keep up.
• For example, on the Council kill 77.7% (1.89 mil) of the damage you took was from melee swings. If you kept up tclap/demo the bosses would've swung 20% slower for 10% less damage, easily several hundred thousand damage you're mitigating - much bigger difference than nitpicking over talents.
• Feludius got off 31 Hydro Lances in 7 attempts that hit the raid for 2.8 mil total. Taking a few attempts to get a hang of the interrupts is one thing, but on the kill attempt he still got off 3. Since we're ranged heavy overall the tanks need to be solid on interrupting, not seeing it in this parse.
• Took 877k damage from Glaciate total, 96k on the final attempt. No reason you should be getting hit by those, especially with the mobility options you have as a warrior.
• Need to work on maintaining your CDs better.
• Popped shield wall 6 times, could have probably doubled that. Popped it once on the last attempt, but that was after one of your healers died. If you noticed the raid damage was high and preemptively rotated CDs you may have made it easier on the healers to keep the rest of the raid up.
• Only used last stand 3 times, one of them was after frenzied regen (maybe you fat-fingered it, but either way you could've fit more in)
• Don't see you using the engy glove enchants at all, maybe you didn't have them during this raid. Either way you should add it into your CD rotation.
• So overall you could've saved the raid at least 3.5~4 million damage in 7 attempts just by playing better. I realize it was your first time seeing the fight, but as a tank you really have to nail down the fundamentals (managing debuffs, interrupting, avoiding crap) so you can apply it to any fight you're thrown into.
• P.S. I like the app, doesn't mean you're not getting critiqued.

[Ballack]

With enrage mechanics for certain fights being tighter than an 8 year old, sometimes the extra dps/tps from a tank helps. Just wait until your butthole puckers as chimaeron enrages on heroic and you wish you had one dps left alive.

The burst threat for warriors really is non-existent which pisses me the fuck off. I used to have a boss glued to me 3 seconds into a fight. WTB Rage normalization

Having deep wounds will provide the AoE threat that 4 other talent points were being used for a cheaper cost.

War Academy provides steady tps/dps at a cheap filler cost. Dev is better tps use than HS simply because Dev can proc SnB.

Even with field dressing, the blood craze heal is only like 700 which is pretty sad for a three point skill. And the heal from impending victory can only be used below 20% and only has a 50% chance to proc. With Prot rotations being SS >= Conc Blow > Rev > HS (rage >70) > Dev trying to fish for a 5% (8K heal on a 160K tank with a 50% proc rate) is just a waste IMO. The extra damage you throw away fishing just hurts.

That being said Sobe is correct and you could add survivability to the spec as well I just haven't hit a fight outside of Nefarian where survivability really becomes an issue for tanks. (ie not someone else's fault.)

[Sobeyet]

Ballack, on 12 April 2011 - 02:05 AM, said:

With enrage mechanics for certain fights being tighter than an 8 year old, sometimes the extra dps/tps from a tank helps. Just wait until your butthole puckers as chimaeron enrages on heroic and you wish you had one dps left alive.

The burst threat for warriors really is non-existent which pisses me the fuck off. I used to have a boss glued to me 3 seconds into a fight. WTB Rage normalization

Having deep wounds will provide the AoE threat that 4 other talent points were being used for a cheaper cost.

War Academy provides steady tps/dps at a cheap filler cost. Dev is better tps use than HS simply because Dev can proc SnB.

Even with field dressing, the blood craze heal is only like 700 which is pretty sad for a three point skill. And the heal from impending victory can only be used below 20% and only has a 50% chance to proc. With Prot rotations being SS >= Conc Blow > Rev > HS (rage >70) > Dev trying to fish for a 5% (8K heal on a 160K tank with a 50% proc rate) is just a waste IMO. The extra damage you throw away fishing just hurts.

That being said Sobe is correct and you could add survivability to the spec as well I just haven't hit a fight outside of Nefarian where survivability really becomes an issue for tanks. (ie not someone else's fault.)

Sure, tanks can deal out some decent damage nowadays, especially warrior AoE. But it depends on the strengths and weaknesses of your raid and your general philosophy. If I'm raiding as a tank my first priority is to shrug off as much damage as possible, and if you're faceplanting against enrage timers your DPS is probably more to to blame than your tank doing ~2k less than he could (and that's being generous). Yeah you're probably going to be sweating for TPS the first 30 seconds or so, but after that it shouldn't really matter. If you're in a raid with MDs/Tricks/Salvs even better. Heresiarch has strong DPS and is relatively weak on healers atm, so I'd probably worry about survivability as a tank more than anything else.

[Barghast]

I haven't heard a tank discussion this good in about 5 years. I like you guys.

[Ballack]

Sobe was in Exodus on Ysondre during the Ulduar days playing with Kripparian and Kaywarrior arguably some of the best at their classes in the US. Being a top 5 hardcore guild Sobe is a high quality player and knows his shit well. Being Asian doesn't hurt either those tiny fingers somehow mash keys faster than the speed of sound.

I currently play in Encore on Illidan which was up Blood Legion's ass at the beginning of Wrath. I know a handful of players from BL and also talk mechanics nonstop in guild. We peaked out in the top 100 for US guilds. I'm not Sobe but I'm not a slouch either as I fill in occasionally on my heroic geared toons shitting out pretty solid numbers for Heresiarch.

Surround yourself with good players and you find yourself getting better. Yes this post is nothing other than a pat on our backs.

[Sobeyet]

Speaking of Kaywarrior, he seems to go with 2/6/33: http://us.battle.net...alent/secondary No War Academy / Deep Wounds, though he does take Piercing Howl.

Generally speaking it's not a good idea to just copy the talents of top players without knowing why they're doing it (not to mention the content they're doing will be vastly different than what we are), but from looking over their last log it seems like he's the designated add tank on heroic Nef, Magmaw, etc. so his build revolves around that. But his single target TPS can't be that bad without War Academy / Deep Wounds, he held off a mage that was doing 50k sustained DPS in heroic Cho'gall (seriously wtf, I need to roll mage).

And Ballack I probably have bigger hands than you, I'm 6'3". Proportions and shit.

[Wrathblood]

And they're not even the tanks! Alright, alright, I'll stop slacking.

Lock, yes, its all totally your fault. And, btw, so is global warming. Quit it with the methane emissions.

Back to tanking stuff. First, a couple thoughts on the Council WoL and responses to others who've commented on it. Rend is "bonus" damage, but it still costs GCDs and rage to apply. The rule of thumb is that, barring TC, you never refresh a Rend with another Rend, and Rend is only worth using if its gonna tick 4 ticks (with bleed debuff) or 6 times (without). In the WoL raid, it looks like the debuff was probably available, whereas with us it generally wouldn't be, but bosses almost always live long enough to get the 6 ticks. So, 28% uptime can be improved upon, but I also wouldn't want to see it too high for fear Rage is being wasted refreshing it early. Not sure where the cut-off is. 50%? 60%? Somewhere around there, I'd guess, depending on the fight.

As Sobie noted, need much higher uptime on TC (and Demo shout). Once you got to phase 3 the paladin would have taken care of it, but up to that point, keeping the debuffs up would help your survivability more than all of the reforging, re-gemming, and talent changes we've discussed, combined. Also, TC will help a lot with the Rend uptime.

On the good side, your damage from Glaciate is fine. You have to stay relatively close to Feludius to catch the post-Glaciate Hydro Lance so you're going to take some damage. On the kill, you were hit by 3 of them for ~30k each. The last time we killed Council Trash was hit 3 times for ~20k each, with the difference being positioning. Trash has done that fight a bunch of times, so I'd expect him to be better at it, but you were fine. Interruping Hydro Lance is all about practice and getting the timing down.

Also, cooldown usage could be better but was generally ok. You're using SB pretty much on cooldown, which is good. It looks like you were tanking the Monstrosity at the end, saving things like Shield Wall for phase 3 is probably a good idea, which means that the 3 of 7 attempts which wiped 2-ish minutes in wouldn't have given full opportunity to use cooldowns. Still, can probably do better. Popping SW on the first or maybe second Glaciate (don't go back in TOO quick, if you're in melee range when it goes off, even with SW up he'll wreck you) would mean its back up in time for phase 3, which is nice. Sobie, he didn't have the glove enchant then but he's since put it on. Could have gotten more usage out of the trinket clicky, though.

Re: talents, warriors have some of the more interesting talent choices among tanks, and interestingly they're considered relatively fragile among tanks (though tanks are WAY, WAY closer together than they were in Wrath, are almost certainly the closest they've been in the history of WoW, and will get even closer whenever 4.1 comes out), yet are also the only tanking spec that routinely skip survivability talents. To be fair, its because Blood Craze and IV are indeed crappy talents. Blood Craze would be merely poor, except not only is it a small heal, but its got a cooldown on how often it can proc. 3 talent points to buy a double-strength Mending enchant is really, really weak. IV is better, and I even talked Zarko into including it during his Beta Tank Survivability modeling (Blood Craze got left out), but its really situational. During the last 20% of a boss's health, dropping into a Dev/Dev/VR "rotation" can generate a surprisingly large amount of healing, roughly twice what a Paladin in full SoI/WoG-spam can do. If the last 20% is a key burn phase like Cho'gall, this can be really nice. But if its, say, Chimaeron, it sucks ass. I talked Trash into spec'ing into it, but I see he doesn't have it anymore so I guess he was underwhelmed.

Looks like you've done the re-spec/re-gem/reforge to raiding status and I generally give the efforts a thumbs up. You're a little heavy on parry, but I've seen warrior "rules of thumb" ranging from 1.5:1 to shooting for 400 more parry rating than dodge rating (for paladins, its assumed that raid buffs will provide about 300 more dodge than parry, so you want to shoot for 300 more parry rating) to keeping them about even. As Sobie notes, yes, DR bites harder as you go up, but at this early stage of the expansion, we just don't have enough itemization points available for it to actually hit all that hard yet, so I think you're fine as you are. I also actually kinda like the few pure stam gems you've got left. You're a cow with a pair of stam trinkets already, and there are moments when it'd be useful to the raid to have a tank with a bit more health.

There are a couple of enchants still to tweak (gloves, shoulders, etc) but I assume you'll get to those.

Lets get you into a raid and see how you do.

Glyphed Piercing Howl suggests a lot of add tanking by Kaywarrior, and I wouldn't look into the spec too much deeper than that. Also, it makes me a little sad that the BiS tanking cloak and gun for warriors are both AGIL pieces, but that's the way it goes sometimes. There was actual serious discussion on Maintankadin over whether the Mastery/Int cloak off Sinestra was BiS for prot pallies. Its not, but its surprisingly close.

[Sobeyet]

Wrathblood, on 12 April 2011 - 10:19 AM, said:

On the good side, your damage from Glaciate is fine. You have to stay relatively close to Feludius to catch the post-Glaciate Hydro Lance so you're going to take some damage. On the kill, you were hit by 3 of them for ~30k each. The last time we killed Council Trash was hit 3 times for ~20k each, with the difference being positioning. Trash has done that fight a bunch of times, so I'd expect him to be better at it, but you were fine. Interruping Hydro Lance is all about practice and getting the timing down.

If you have Gag Order: Heroic Leap as he's casting glaciate + Heroic Throw Hydro Lance + Charge = Zero glaciate damage

If you don't have Gag Order: Heroic Leap as he's casting glaciate + Charge as glaciate's going off + Shield Bash Hydro Lance = Zero glaciate damage

Like a lot of movement abilities in the game, Charge doesn't update your position in-game immediately to the server, so you can charge as the Glaciate's going off and not take any damage. This can sometimes be a bad thing (hunter disengaging while trying to kite Atramedes breath), but as a prot warrior you can take advantage of it most of the time. Good example is Sindragosa's blistering cold, warriors/bears could just charge right back in as it's going off and not worry about moving her unnecessarily (lol@paladins).

Also, we all know how bad Trash is at interrupting so that's not the bar we're shooting for here. I want to replace all of you scrubs eventually.

Wrathblood, on 12 April 2011 - 10:28 AM, said:

Glyphed Piercing Howl suggests a lot of add tanking by Kaywarrior, and I wouldn't look into the spec too much deeper than that.

Probably for Heroic Nef more than anything else.