Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dum Dum Dum Dumdedum dumdedum....

That's right, Dwarfvader was back in action last night. The new guy at work is slowly but surely becoming a Warcrackhead, and last night his lvl 15 Pally and DV, at lvl 16, teamed up.

We knocked around Loch Modan and caught him up quest wise to Vader. It really is amazing how much easier playing a warrior is when you have heals! Some fights, Turion would just stand back and heal me, and others, he'd carve on the mobs. I got some great practice at tanking and keeping the mobs' attention. Now THAT, is harder than it looks. Thankfully Pallys wear mail, so I had a little room for error.

The Good: We both gained a level. We mined some ore and leveled some blacksmithing. And we both got some very good practice at our respective roles.

The Bad: We died on a bad Trogg pull. We hate runners. Period. And you can't make us change our minds.

The Ugly: At lvl 17 and 16, we took down Ol' Sooty; it was hilarious, cause all three of us died! I got him down to almost dead, and Turion finished him off with his last swing before dying. I was afraid that we wouldn't be able to loot the corpse if we both released and ran back, so I guarded the body while Turion ran back. I think I was probably wrong and we both could've run back But it all turned out ok, and Turion didn't mind.

Lessons from Tanking.
1. Sure I knew why Tanks always seem to want to go go go - rage just goes away when you sit around. But actually going through the experience gave me a new appreciation for keeping rage as high as possible. I did, however, make sure that my health battery Pally was good on mana before heading off to the next mob.

2, Tanking one mob is a piece of cake.
Two mobs is a little more difficult, but still ok.
Three mobs starts to get a crazy, and I usually end up running after one that's headed for the healer.
Four mobs......MOMMY!!!! Tabbed targeting helps, but is not always consistent. And defensive stance is a must! Sunder Armor, Sunder Armor, Sunder Armor. Well, you get the idea. I'd throw a Revenge in there a couple of times if it popped up, but I really need to practice this and get it down. BBB posted a macro that I may have to adapt for DV; it has a nifty "mouse over switch mobs to Druid equivalent Sunder Armor". The only thing is, I'm not sure of the mechanics. It appears that you move the cursor over the mob and hit a hot key to activate it. I probably should ask...lol.

3. I need to learn how to deal with runners (both cowards and Healer aggro'd). I know Hamstring will slow them down, but that's only available in Beserker stance. Must find answers.

As with everything when learning something new, I have more questions than I have answers. I am beginning the "I know that I do not know" stage of the learning process, and now must cruise the blogs in search of answers. It's nice to be out of the "I do not know that I do not know" stage, but the real work is still to come.

3 comments:

TheBigBearButt said...

Lol... the way the macro works is, you put the macro button on yuor bar...

when you hover your cursor on screen over what you wanna whack, you hit the macro button.


The macro casts the attack on whatever the cursor is hovering over (the 'mouseover') without actually changing your dedicated target.

In practise, this means you can mark your chosen "die now!" target with a skull, and pull him with a bow and arrow or gun or whatever you warriro thingies use.

Then you can use normal numbered attacks from your button bar and they'll go slamming in on your skull, while your cursor wandfers over the adds and you occasionally hit the macro button and give them some love too.

Technically, you could make multiple mouseover macros for different attacks, if you wanted to do more than sunder armor.

For example, for a bear druid, having a mouseover for mangle as well as lacerate could be fun if you're more concerned with keeping everybodies' attention on you rather than burning one down fast...

why? just for fun, to see how long you can keep everyones' attention on you, or if you wanna go for a mage sized AOE pull... just to annoy onlookers.

Anonymous said...

You can use hamstring in battle stance. This is one of the things that you might want to use stance dancing for. You can use charge to commence the battle (gives you a nice bit of rage to start off with), hamstring, then switch to defensive and go to town. If you spec tactical mastery, you can retain rage between switches.

I personally don't like stance dancing a great deal, but with runners you really need to do it just so you don't lose control of the situation.

Rusty said...

Whoops! Newb warrior here. I don't have beserker stance yet, lol. I meant Battle stance.

I did pick up the talent that saves rage when switching stances, but I don't like changing stances as a rule.

But, I'm sure there are more things that I won't like that I'll have to live with...lol