Losie wrote:
The Ardent Tracker is amazing. It was amazing in TBC and it's even more amazing now. Every time we receive a Stamina boost Ardent Defender becomes more effective, and it kicks in quite often now. Think of it this way... a pre-Naxx Paladin tank now has about 2x the HP of a pre-Kara Paladin tank from TBC (using 26k and 13k as benchmarks) -- hell yea Ardent Defender will play a big role in mitigation with that much of an HP pool.
Where I notice it gets a bit crazy are on long fights where things get a little out of hand and you get the report at the end talling you how much damage was mitigated by AD and how many deaths that averted. On our Instructor Razuvious, I was assigned to tank two of the understudies and in all of the chaos, there were a couple of times when the healers completely forgot about me. I wound up using my bubble wall and LoH before the fight was over, but at the end of it I got a report showing that AD had mitigated upwards of 30k damage and averted 7 deaths :O
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He got 1 shot by a Hateful Strike? Umm... They only do like.. 21-22k in 25man, and it's not like he can hit the same target with another hateful.. even if you only had 2 tanks he'd just turn and gib one of the melee DPS if the OT wasn't healed to more HP than them yet. That just sounds like that Warrior has some kind of deficiency somewhere... like perhaps being crit immune?
It may have been a two-shot affair. Sometimes people don't really think too much, or don't read up on the fights and rely on the RL to fill them in on the mechanics. If he had read up on it, he might have known that there's only 1 second between Hateful Strikes and he wouldn't have used Charge to engage after the MT without waiting for his second tank to join him. It definitely happened fast, though. I have to admit, I was a little happy to see him drop. He was a little dishonest about his max buffed HP and was actually 500 HP lower than me after buffs and just before we engaged. I'll do whatever I'm asked to do in a raid, but I leveled, spec'd, and geared this toon specifically to tank. If I'm going to be relegated to backup Hateful tank, it would be better for me if I wasn't set aside for the sake of folks who exaggerate a bit to fill a spot :P
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Incidentally, if you ever do have to do it with 2 tanks, make sure the Hateful tank holds their shield wall/bubblewall/ibf/barkskin until the last 5% HP. Though it's the same rule for 2 Hateful tanks, you can at least afford to lose tanks when you have a 3-team on him :D
Both me and the MT for sure held our uber-mitigation tricks until the soft enrage. I hit my bubble wall and the MT hit shield wall and it was smooth sailing to the end. Fun stuff. There's that point in the fight where you realize that if all the tanks were to suddenly and inexplicably die, you'd still down the boss. Good times >:D
Much as I kvetch about dishonest tanks getting themselves insta-gibbed and being given a role outside of tanking, I was very pleased with our run last night. I'm not specifically going out of my way to compete for threat (that's just rude), but I notice that on trash fights, the MT engages first and I follow up right after and by the end of the fight, I've usually tanked more than my fair share of mobs. It'll only work to my favor to have the warriors start complaining that they can't hold threat with me as OT unless they spam taunts. That will no doubt change slightly with the nerfs to JoL threat, but we were pretty light on melee last night and the tanks managed to contain most fights such that melee weren't taking much/any damage to get a ton of threat from JoL anyways.
Our Naxx10 schedule for this past week got kind of screwed up...I ran the day I joined as sort of a "trial" and then wasn't able to get a spot in any of the other groups because the raid ID I was saved to was being used by a pre-established group after the trial night. One of the primary warrior tanks in the guild got the tanking sword from one of the fights (don't recall the sword or the boss, unfortunately) and I was a bit disappointed to have missed out on it....but then I realized that it's one less warrior that will be able to compete against me for Last Laugh
when (note optimism) it drops because I'll have the least "tankish" of the tank weapons in the group >:D
WTB Axe skill >.<