Instancetalk: SV, UBRS and MGT

So, just having caught up on reading Ciderhelm's blog at www.tankspot.com, I got to thinking. One of his entries was about how he learned tanking - the general gist of it was that UBRS taught it and Naxx refined it.

Personally, I think I learned to tank in Steamvaults. I wasn't a good tank pre-bc at all, nor as I levelled to 70 (I still remember joining a Slave Pens pug at level 64 or something, pulling a group of six lobsters, and them running over and killing the rest of the group. Everyone left after that, leaving me feeling rather inadequate). Right as I hit 70, a rogue in my guild asked if I wanted to run Shadow Labs with him, so I said 'okay,' specced prot and regretted it when I slogged through the Kara attunement prereqs the next day. But we cleared Slabs fine.

Steamvaults, however, was pretty much my instance. My small group of RL friends ran instances together every now and then, most usually SV and BM. When I started tanking SV the first time, I basically knew that I had to make the mobs not hit the others. Now I know all my tools - thunderclap, taunt, concussion blow, and intervene first and foremost - inside and out, as well as how to use line of sight, how to mark, what kinds of mobs to prioritise for CC, about how long I can leave mobs before the healer drags them off me, et cetera et cetera.

Anyway, tanking UBRS at level 60 was, I found, great fun, because you would run with two tanks. I think working co-operatively with another tank is a lot of fun, and it teaches skills you need in raid instances. It was always a great feeling when the second Warrior in the group worked well with you, and you found a nice balance of when to grab loose mobs, when to leave them to be re-CC'd, and when to let your co-tank get them.

So one of my hopes for WLK is a 10-man of UBRS's level - no lockout, blue loot (two items per boss, four from the last one), no more difficult than, say... Arcatraz. Trash that comes in numbers of two to eight, bosses that encourage more than one tank (saberlash kthx), and a good reason for people to run it a lot - say, trinkets in the vein of the [Bangle of Endless Blessings] or [Quagmirran's Eye], or a faction with awesome rewards.

On a side note, I recently brought my Warrior out of retirement and ran Magister's Terrace on the PTRs. I can really feel the difference between then and now, so to speak - I was tanking fairly badly the whole instance, I los'd mobs wrong, I lost aggro to healers, and I lost track of mobs. I think one main factor for this was the fact that, when a Druid tanks, they ideally keep their mobs all in a cone in front of them (swipe). When a Warrior tanks, although it's better to keep mobs in front of them, thunderclap is a 360 degree ability so they can generate aggro on stuff directly behind them. I think, once I'm finished with farming badges for my feral gear, I'll start playing my Warrior again while I'm not raiding - running heroics aplenty for all the delicious badge loot that's been and is being added.

Of course... I need 95 badges to finish my bear gear, plus more come 2.4, and then I need some ridiculous amount for my cat gear, and THEN I can start looking at my Warrior (if WLK's not out by then).

MGT, btw, was a fun instance. Trash was varied and interesting, although it did feel kinda funny at times - why are there ethereals and naga in the Sunwell? - and casters seemed more predominant than was neccessary. The Warlocks seemed slightly too powerful - their Immolate ticked on me for ~1.1k in def stance, on normal mode - but not entirely unreasonable for the difficulty of the instance. There wasn't very much trash anyway (plus!).

Bosses were mostly the same - the first boss is pretty much Kalithresh, except when you don't kill the thing in time he just hits everyone in the party a bunch of times for about 800 fire damage. Even if you do, he still does it once or twice, but if he breaks his crystal before you do it's a lot more. The second boss, I wasn't really sure exactly what was going on - he seemed somewhat similar to Curator, but he hits for arcane damage and the sparks seem to latch on to whoever kills them and make them deal more damage or something. I just tanked him and hoped the rest of the party killed him in time. Third boss is somewhat like Moroes - four adds and a boss. I dunno if the adds come from a larger table of possible adds or not. We had a naga who feared and meleed, a shirtless male bloodelf demon hunter, an ethereal who seemed to heal, and a gan'arg who threw bombs, I believe. The boss is a red shivan, who might also have healed. All of these adds and the boss are humanoid, despite shivans and gan'arg being demons, and the adds can be sheeped, iced, etc. They are all, however, immune to taunt - I lost control on the pull and was unable to get it back, so I basically ran around frantically trying to generate aggro on whatever was near me at the time, being mostly useless. Fourth boss is Kael, and he's somewhat simple. In his first phase, he fireballs (reflectable and interruptable), summons phoenixes which should be killed (you then have to kill its egg or else it'll respawn), and flamestrikes, which is really easy to avoid - a huge spinning yellow thing appears and basically screams 'GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE' for a few seconds before it hits. At 50%, he goes into his second phase, where everyone is thrown into the air and you get to swim around - he apparently turns gravity off. This deals about 500 damage per 3 seconds. He also summons five gigantic pink balls which fly around, and they hurt you if you get hit by them. If you swim down to the ground you get thrown up again, which means you can't really melee him, however every now and then he says something to the effect of 'arrrrgh' and falls to one knee, turning off the gravity lapse and the big pink balls for a little while.

The highlight of MGT was definitely the questline. (lolspoilers?) I got a quest from the Aldor guy who accepts marks to go talk to a guy on the Isle of Quel'Danas. Said guy told me to find someone in the Magister's Terrace. In the room of the second boss, we find him dying on the ground, hand the quest in to him, he tells us that 'they're feeding the sunwell' and to use some orb on a balcony, then dies. So we clear through the second boss, and there, hey, here's a balcony. We can see a different part of the Sunwell with a bunch of demons from here - perhaps that's part of SWP? There's void terrors and shivans and doomguards hanging around. Anyway, the orb (looks like the BWL teleport orb... teleporb?), so we click it, and are treated to a nice little cutscene which is basically just the camera flying through the bit of SWP we could see. It goes in a door, then we see M'uru (hella cool looking), then it goes a bit further and pans around and we see a few eredar channeling into... well, the Sunwell I guess. Looks like a pool of lava. Then the camera pans up again and zooms in to a closeup of Kil'jaedan's face, which is on the wall for some reason.

Okay, that's pretty cool, we say, and we turn around to go further into the instance - when all of a sudden a dragon flies out of nowhere! 'Wossat?' we cry in suprise. Well, it's Kalecgos, and he's pretty cool - he turns into a human with blue hair, lets us hand a quest in to him, and gives us a quest to kill the new Kael'thas. Awesome. Rewards are Crimson Spinels - the choice of a Bright, a Teardrop, or a Runed (no subtle? tch). These are special Crimson Spinels which are bind on pickup. Also rewarded from the quest is being attuned to Heroic MGT. Awesome, no repgrind. (Although... Seeing as I want jewelcrafting recipies and an epic neck from exalted on my Druid, and enchanting recipies and an epic shield from exalted on my Warrior... repgrind. Awh).

All in all, I'm really looking forward to running MGT on live, with a group of guildies that work together better than a pug. I'm also looking forward to getting the 'Of the Shattered Sun' title - but not looking forward to having to shell out 1000g for it. Awh.