The Burning Crusade - R.I.P

The burning crusade is dead, done, over.

What did we like, what didn't we like. Well here are a few things of each.

1. I was quite late into TBC, I wasn't around at all during the level 60 time of raiding, and my main character was around 35 when TBC was released, I play wow with my wife and we enjoy doing quests, instances and raids, but at the time our guild friends were desperate for more stable and reliable tanks and healers, so we were rushed from 60-70 very fast and I always regretted that.
2. This time with Wrath of the Lich King I fully intend to take my time with each zone, explore every corner, read every quest, do every dungeon and fully "complete" each zone as best I can before moving on somewhere else.
3. When I first started doing Level 70 heroic dungeons everyone wanted to group with warriors, people used crowd control and focus fire and dungeons were a mix of tense pulls, skilled crowd control and fun but difficult bosses, but towards the end of TBC came the age of paladin tanks going into heroics and saying to the group "forget cc, just aoe nuke everything" which made doing a heroic very fast and very easy, just what everyone wants right?
4. WRONG, this way of doing heroics made tanking a pug or even a semi guild group a nightmare as a warrior, people would aoe from the pull, you would lose mobs leading to ice blocks, vanishes, feign deaths and dead healers and wipes.... after enduring about 2 weeks of this total dps disaster I decided to give up doing 5 mans and stick to raids.

On the more positive side, there were 2 amazing moments in my tanking life, not necessarily big end bosses that I tanked but more the times we got stuck on bosses for weeks before finally getting them down.

For me, the big three pain in the arse bosses were -

1. Shade of Aran
My god this boss was a pain, partly due to his trash respawning, the LONG gy walk and general annoyance and luck factor of the fight itself, you always get one person who moves on their first time and generally screaming at the screen, but since the first time we got him down we have never had a problem since, best tactic we found -

Nuke aran, nuke adds, nuke aran

OR if you have a warlock -

Nuke aran, warlock banishes and fears, tanks take anything left over and the dps stays on aran for the full fight.

2. Akil'zon

Now this is a weird one, we had the right tactic from day one, but it seemed like one way or another someone was always late, never the same person either, the tactic by the way is to all move to the boss when the storm arrives.
We tried to move to the person who was being lifted during the storm but that was chaos and sometimes people were miles away.
I made a macro and turned all sounds but ambient sounds off, this meant I could hear the storm coming maybe 1 or 2 seconds earlier, spam the macro to move to the tank and all the boss was dead and farmed.

3. Jan'alai

Didnt really spend that long wiping on this boss, but I remember him being very annoying at the time, bombs, birds, aoe, trying to keep the birdy tank alive and watching wear you are standing got the better of us for a while, but we focused made 100% sure the birdy tank survived and once all the eggs were gone, it was plain sailing and the boss was down.

4. Zul'Jin

Well, what a total git of a boss, at first we were losing melee dps due to the whirlwind, then it was people not watching agro inbetween phases, the bear phase hitting like an absolute truck because of his overpower ability. Then the killer phase... eagle... we spent WEEKS trying to get through this phase, no caster dps, it took forever it seemed to get through that 20% and when we did it was always a few more people down, now the first time we got through eagle phase was a joyous moment until he went lynx and decided to own all our healers in a row, bang, bang, bang all three healers dead... and maybe we got lucky because the first time we downed him, he targeted a paladin (bubble) a rogue (vanish) and then the paladin again, being a paladin with all that plate it was easy for the healers to keep her alive.
The last phase has never been a problem and its not meant to be, the last phase is a test of how many people are still alive not got enough? you are going to wipe.
So after going through all them phases it was amazing to finally clear ZA, which we did in August 10th of this year. As a guild with very busy people and dodgy time zones we stick to 10mans and it felt great to get all of the 10mans cleared and farmed.

Patch 3.0 and its impact

Ok, so 3.0 hit a few weeks ago now and we have all had a chance to try out new abilites and new talents.

This patch has made wow really fun to play again, during the final months of the burning crusade it was very obvious that pugging a 5man instance as a protection warrior was a recipe for disaster, dps were just too used to instancing with a paladin and not used to having to use crowd control.

I think most of us have had that.... "/sigh" feeling when you start a pull and see a hunter pet fly past, shadow bolt or pyroblast go over your shoulder.
But with the unlimited thunderclap, damage shield and shockwave, managing multiple mob tanking is now something to enjoy instead of something to dread.

I sincerely hope that in wrath mobs will hit way harder and without being overgeared for heroics we will need to use cc and carefully planned pulls again, because things are way more fun when they are difficult and you have to work hard to finally get that boss down.

As far as tanking raids goes, its too easy at the moment, but that is because blizzard reduced raid mobs health by 30% and in turn this made all raids so much easier than before.
That doesnt mean things have become EASY just EASIER.

My guild went from successfully getting the 3rd chest and having 7,9,11 minutes left on the timer to getting all 4 chests with 17mins LEFT on the timer... quite a bit of difference I think you will agree.

Patch 3.0 also brought with it achievements and glyphs.

Achievements are really fun to do, exploring the world, doing all the old instances and raids.
In the past people always said "oh yeh I'd love to do BWL, AQ40, MC" etc etc, but it just never happened, but now with achievements to get, people have the interest and will to do it, and thats all they needed, once they do turn up everyone has a lot of fun.

Glyphs.
For a protection warrior I really like Glyph of Revenge, which is amazing for threat.
This macro works great with it -

"/castsequence reset=5 Revenge, Heroic Strike"

Glyph of heroic strike is great too, it has really good harmony with the glyph of revenge, they work together very nicely.

As far as minors go, charge(increased range), bloodrage(decreases the health cost by 50%) and thunderclap(increases the aoe effect) are literally the only ones to get as the others either don't apply to us or are just no good.

Introduction

First of all, I want to explain what this blog is all about.

This blog is about my experiences and thoughts of being a Main Tank and Raid Leader for my guild, I will stay away from number crunching and explain things from my experiences.

I play a protection tank on Quel'thalas EU, the guild I am in is called "Knights Of Ni" we are semi casual, we take our raiding very seriously during progression but we take it easy most of the time.

My wife plays a holy priest and we both live in Japan. Which can make playing wow difficult because of the dodgy time zone differences.