Yeah, that’s right, Diablo 3. It’s here, it’s out, and with Warcraft in a bit of a stable state while everyone awaits the release of Pandaria, we’re going to be hopping over to the other side of the pond and seeing what life is like in Tristram.

Today we’re going to be covering the feel of the various classes you can use to save the world with; not necessarily the way the skills and the abilities they have work, but more about the general feel of the class as a whole to maybe help you figure out what to run through the game with or to help you figure out what you want to try out as a secondary class.

We’ll take a look at the melee classes to start.

Right off the bat, you know that the melee classes will have skills that make it a little easier for them to take the odd bit of damage here and there. As they’re forced to get up close and personal to deal their damage, they tend to have slightly more effective ways to survive that damage.

From the start, the barbarian really feels like a powerhouse, with high profile, wide swings that look more than capable of clearing an entire group of monsters at once provided that they’re packed tightly together enough. Due to multiple ways to close gaps, either by dragging the enemy toward you or by jumping across to them, the barbarian feels speedy, despite his bulk and the way Rage works helps develop that mindset of moving quickly from fight to fight so as to have as much of it ready for the next fight as possible.

Though they are melee as well, monks truly feel different from the barbarian. While the barbarian feels powerful but a little messy with their impactful aoe attacks, monks tend to feel a lot more precise with their attacks. You definitely don’t get the same sense of smashysmashy as you do while playing the barbarian, there is a definite sense of control to the fight. You’ll feel it when you start using your skills, teleporting around the screen to take out the more dangerous targets first or using your heal or aoe blinds to save yourself or your teammates when things are getting desperate.

Compared to the ranged options, the melee classes have a much more immediately visceral presence, right from the start as you smash them with your weapons or your fists so if you want the feel of immediately beating things to death, you may want to consider being either the barbarian or the monk as your first choice.

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Not deep and philosophical musings about the nature about emotions and their purpose in our lives but that little red bar that lives under our little green bar that we seem to be spending an awful lot of time staring at (or different colors and numbers depending on your choice of UI modifications).

When I first started playing the warrior, I thought that it was the perfect system for warriors to use as a resource.

It made sense, you know? It fit the aesthetic of the warrior class where you gain the ability to perform more tasks the more angry you get…which is dictated by how often you hit things and how often you’re hit.

Tanking a lot longer though, you see a lot of the flaws inherent in the system.

For one thing, have you ever had to function as an offtank on a boss that wasn’t tauntable? How much fun was that, right? Without being smacked around for 30-40% of your health every other second means that you really don’t have enough rage generation to keep up with threat and you end up falling behind, then the off tank needs to be on top of the threat list but you’re nowhere near it and now all the melee have died and it’s technically all your fault.

These thoughts were sparked by a recent post from Blizzard stating that they might experiment with protection warriors only gaining rage from certain rage generating attacks,

This would alleviate the warrior off tank problem I mentioned just above because they would hopefully have to tweak out the numbers to give us more rage from our attacks to balance not gaining any rage from being hit.

But wouldn’t that just lead to other problems? I mean, in a non-boss situation, you’d be generating the same amount of rage being attacked by one monster as you would from being attacked by a group of six.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I’m tanking an instance, I’m casually slapping at some keys when I’m tanking one mob and smashing my keyboard like a monkey on crack when I’m dealing with five or more.

Using more skills would mean you’re generally expending more rage so…wouldn’t that sort of change lead to a distinct disadvantage when it came to fighting multiple mobs?

On the more positive notes, it would alleviate the upgrade problems, right? You know when you get completely geared up from raids…then your new friend asks you to tank a heroic. And you end up completely starved for rage throughout the whole instance, mobs wandering off left and right until you get desperate and you drop your shield and you slap on another one hander only to have your new healer friend yell at you for being too squishy for a raid geared tank because you’re not really blocking anything anymore…

Fun, right?

With Blizzard and their iterative design philosophy, all we can do right now is hope that they’ll strike a good balance with their newly proposed system.

You can always help though!

If you’re in the beta for MoP, spend a bit of time with any changes to the rage system that they throw up there and offer some feedback, let them know what you think!

Any other thoughts on our current rage system? Do you like it or maybe can’t stand it?

Let us know!

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Well, a couple of weeks ago, we covered the fact that tanking in newer MMO’s might present a bit of a challenge due to the lack of certain amenities that one might have grown accustomed to with the long-standing World of Warcraft.

Stepping foot into the Star Wars universe, I spent a bit of time covering what it was like tanking without a threat meter and how that experience helped me when it came time to return to Azeroth.

Well, this past weekend, I was fortunate enough to give the first betaweekend for Guild Wars 2 a decent try and let me tell you, if you thought that the lack of a threat meter keeps you on your toes while tanking, you haven’t tried anything until you try to fulfill the tanking role without THREAT.

Guild Wars 2 does away with the whole idea of a threat meter for each mob completely and instead, the mobs and bosses are pretty much free to head after anyone that looks at them funny.

While I wasn’t able to get into any of the few instances available, I spent time doing the tanking role for the big dynamic events as well as protecting a less gaming-inclined friend and performing such tasks without the threat mechanic was really an eye opener.

Tanking in Warcraft usually means that you burn through your high threat moves as quickly as possible and only have to go chasing after mobs when your damage dealers are a little too overzealous or in the rare occasions when someone accidentally pulls some additional mobs.

The experience of tanking in Guild Wars 2 usually had you chasing after mobs that just didn’t want to play with you and utilizing your controlling abilities, the ones that knocked back, knocked down, stunned or blinded mobs, much more efficiently.

Without threat to rely on as a crutch, your crowd control abilities functioned as your only hard tools for easing the damage that was headed toward your squishies and it behooved you to save and utilize said abilities effectively. You couldn’t really use all of your abilities as quickly as they came up and, instead, had to judiciously save them for certain occasions. Those occasions being NOT when a mob stopped paying attention to you, but when an ally was nearly dead and could really use those few seconds to gain some distance and to heal.

As with many aspects of tanking, I highly recommend that you explore the role of tanking, not just in Warcraft, but in other games to see how the role itself evolves and to hopefully make us all better tanks by broadening our experiences and forcing us to fulfill our group-saving role without certain mechanics that we may have grown to rely on as a crutch.

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This week, we’ll be digging a little deeper into the tanking spec of the Monk class, the Brewmaster and looking over some of the signature abilities of the tanking spec and what sort of playstyle we can expect to see from it.

Many of the Brewmaster specific abilities seem geared towards not just a flat reduction of damage like the classes we work with now, but taking the damage dealt to you, dicing it up into more managable chunks instead of the big spikes and setting those up to hit you over time to make it a little easier to keep your health up.

For heading down the tanking spec, you’re given the Stance of the Drunken Ox right away which reduces the damage you take and gives you a chance to stagger any remaining damage which will cut any incoming damge by 50% and then dealing the remaining 50% after a few seconds.

This provides an immediate benefit to survivability as there is a much lower chance of being unexpectedly spiked to death before your healers can react.

This theme of abilities and talents to give your healers a chance to catch their breaths continues with Drunken Haze which has an additional effect of giving your targets a small chance of redirecting their attacks upon themselves, which, again, usefully lessens the burst of damage you might take in a given moment.

They also borrow from the paladin textbook of tanking by bringing to the table a number of abilities that help to reduce damage taken by any nearby allies as well.

Avert Harm is an ability that has the fairly low cooldown of 1 minute and reduces all damage taken by nearby allies by a certain percentage and then redirecting half of the damage they take to be inflicted upon you instead, which can be suicidal if used without cooldowns but with a little preparation and coordination, can be a very useful tool when it comes to raid utility.

Brewmasters are also capable of dropping statues which function sort of like the holy priest’s Lightwell, where allies can click on the statue to gain a short duration buff in the form of a bubble.

The Brewmaster is looking to be a bitmore of a raid utility focused tank.

While it definitely looks like the new tank will fill a certain niche role between the paladin and the warrior, it also means that they’ll likely be quite a bit more effective in larger parties (raids) as opposed to smaller ones where there are less people around to take advantage of the benefits that the class brings.

Keep that in mind as well as your preferred tanking playstyle before you maybe think about deciding to reroll as a Brewmaster come the next expansion.

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In his Debut appearance, please welcome Dellingr, Tankhard Author!!!

Dellingr has been a prominent name on the official World of Warcraft warrior and tanking forums for a good portion of the cataclysm expansion. His guide has been received as one of the most comprehensive Protection warrior tanking guides available today, and covers every aspect of  the role/spec in great detail.

With the release of Mists of Pandaria on the horizon,  I’m really excited to welcome Dellingr here at Tankhard. 

So Without further ado!!

 To engage in open discussion about this guide, please refer to tankhard.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?37-Warrior

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If you’re like me, I’m sure that you’re a little bit overwhelmed but worry not! We’ll get you up to speed on the latest tanking class that will be joining our ranks with an overview of some of the abilities that the Monk, and more specifically, the Brewmaster, will be bringing to the party.

We won’t be covering every single ability that they have available in this two part article, but we’ll go over the broad sweeps of the class to get a bit of an idea as to what kind playstyle they’ll make available to you.

So glancing over the classe’s baseline abilities, we immediately see the dynamic between energy and chi. There are a number of abilities that cost energy and generate chi for you to use. Energy appears to be the same as the rogue and druid resources while chi seems to function sort of like death knight runes with the exception that they appear to only be generated through hitting with various abilities.

Alternatively, there are some abilities that cost a certain amount of chi and then refund a smaller amount on use.

One example of an interesting utility skill is Disable where you can stack it on a target up to three times, each stack increasing the clow until the third stack ends up rooting the target for 8 seconds.

Another example of a utility skill is Quaking Palm which strikes a target and CCs them for 4 seconds or until they’re hit again. Such a skill would be essential when it comes to controlling loose adds or to prevent something nasty from tearing off the face of your healer.

Monks also have interesting variations of the classic skills such as Spear Hand which serves as the Monk’s version of the spell interrupt. What makes this intersting is that it’s a conditional attack. If used against a target while they’re casting, it will cancel the cast and lock them out of that spell school for 5 seconds, pretty typical of an interrupt. However, if the opponent is facing you when they get interrupted, they’re also locked out of all of their spell schools for the duration instead of just one.

Another interesting ability that can prove to be extremely situationally useful is the Touch of Death, overdramatic name and all. This ability comes with a decent cooldown of a minute and a half and costs 4 chi to activate but the description reads that it will instantly kill any non-player target that has equal or lower health than you. While all of the ramifications of the ability are a little unclear at this point, the wording suggests that it might also be usable on the pets of pesky warlocks and hunters and the like which could prove to be an incredible advantage in the PvP areas, not to mention troublesome adds and monsters one might run into in the world.

That’s it for the overview of the baseline Monk abilities so check back next week where we dig into the specifics of the Brewmaster, the tanking spec for the upcoming Monk class in Mists of Pandaria.

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So what’s out ther that we should be concerned about?

As mentioned in a previous article, one of the big questions facing a lot of us with the upcoming expansion is the question of whether or not we’ll stay with our current classes or will we potentially be switching out to another tanking class, perhaps taking a gander at the pandaren brewmaster that’ll be popping out for a completely different look at tanking altogether.

Well, with some of the information out there, that decision won’t have to be made completely in the dark.

From the looks of things, the pandaren will be operating off of a dual resource system much like the death knights. The close range pandaren talent specializations will be using energy as well as an alternate resource called Chi which presumably builds up along side it in much the same way that combo points and runes built up.

The Brewmaster’s skills will operate off of both energy and chi, which will cause the player to think hard about their choice of abilities and create many decision points during a fight where you may prefer to spend that chi early versus hanging onti it a few moments longer to be sure of having the resources available to pop a potentially life-saving cooldown at the opportune moment.

The Brewmaster actually has much of the look of a combination between a tank situational buffing class with a host of abilities that interact in fun and interesting ways. These abilities include ones like “Summon Black Ox Statue” which is a Lightwell style ability that allies can click on to gain a bubble or “Avert Harm” which functions like the ‘raidwall’ already in the game which will reduce the amount of damage that nearby allies will take by X%.

There are also interesting baseline skills that play upon this theme with things like “Meditation” which is a channelled spell that reduces all damage you take by 99% and redirects all harmful spell damage cast against your nearby allies to you but including the factor that being hit by melee range would break the channel.

Interestingly, they seem to be trying to apply the indirect playstyle in regards to the tanking aspect of the class as well, including things like Provoke which functions as a taunt but modifying it if you have a black ox statue down by turning it into an aoe taunt if you provoke the statue instead of a specific enemy.

All in all, it’s looking a lot like the new tanking class is going to be an attempt to introduce a new type of tanking style altogether. The only real question now is: With four tanking classes already in existence, does this new one have enough of a niche to not feel like a copy of one of the other ones?

Only time will tell.

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There are no more content patches planned to be released in the current iteration of the game.

The rate of subscribers deciding to take a break until the next expansion is released to sort of give themselves a chance to recover from burnout.

There’s a progressive buff in the current dungeon that opens up the content of the final raid dungeon to a wider portion of the population.

All signs that point toward the upcoming release of another expansion.

These pre-expansion blues are hitting yet again, ladies and gentlemen and just as with the upcoming release of Cataclysm, there’s a lot of preparation to be done if you’re planning to continue onward into the Mists of Pandaria.

In this preliminary phase of expansion preparation we’ll be taking a look at some of the more long term preparations. Given that the next expansion has yet to be given a release date or even a beta test, it’s definitely not something that will sneak up on you but still, there are some things that we want to do that require a bit more time for preparation.

The foremost among them is to decide what the hell you’re going to want to play once it hits.

In the case that you’re happy with your current class and have no real urge to change what you’re doing, your job is pretty simple. If you haven’t done so already, start putting together as strong a DPS set as you can. The reason being that levelling as a tanking spec, while it heavily favors survivability, usually tends to be quite a bit slower than levelling as the damage specialization and given the option for dual spec, there’s really no reason not to have that set up. Doing so will allow you the option of tanking the new instances when you need to but also not being disadvantaged when it comes to solo levelling.

On the other hand, maybe you’re not happy with your current class. Maybe you have tank envy for another class or maybe even you’re just plain tired of your class altogether.

If that’s the case, this is what the early preparation is for as the advance warning will give you plenty of time to level up a new alt of something that you want to try out and get it prepped and geared up in time for the expansion.

If you happen to already have an alt that’s mostly ready, then all the better as it means that you won’t need nearly as much time to be ready.

The expansion changes, more than any other time during the game serve as good opportunities to swap out what you’re doing to prevent the burnout that hits so many of us when we’re forced to play any single class/role for too long at a time.

Though it may seem a bit early to consider, keep these things in mind as you play in these final days, really think about whether you’re still enjoying the class you play and if you can stand being it for yet another expansion.

If you find yourself getting overly stressed or frustrated while playing, I would highly recommend moving away from tanking for a while, maybe even move away from tanking as your main role for the length of the next expansion to help keep things fresh.

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You know, with the inclusion of the new (now fairly old!) Transmogrification system, I’m kind of surprised by the fact that I still see people wandering around showing the fairly bland and generic armor sets that Blizzard put together for them by just putting the more attractive stats on them.

Aren’t these people tempted? Isn’t there the smallest spark of originality left in the general player base?

I’m really surprised that more people don’t take advantage of the appearance customization with more abandon.

I can’t really speak for the all of us but generally speaking, in my day to day WoWtime, the majority of the transmogrified warriors and players I see have a tendancy to follow fairly closely with the various tier sets.

Now, granted, those tier sets are generally designed to be pretty visually appealing but for the first time in the history of the damned game, you can look however you want without any penalty to your utility and usefulness in your day to day daily questing and dungeon spelunking. It’s really a wonder that more poeple don’t take advantage of it and push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable a little.

You should be more creative! You should stray far off the beaten path and try to find an outfit that nobody’s put together before.

Now, granted, given the huge population of the game, it’s going to be a little hard to be completely original, I’m sure that the most of the obvious gear combinations have been tried already but that might be the more mainstream ones.

I defy you to try something ridiculous. Go out there and try to get your hands on the absolute ugliest item combination you can possibly imagine. Keep in mind that it’s not necessarily a bunch of grey items that will yield the ugliest results but more like, a really bad combination that will do it for you.

Go out there and experiment!

Pick your favorite color and do your best to slap together a nice looking set that uses only those colors. Have YOU ever seen someone wandering around that’s just a big red blur as they pass by you? I doubt it…or if you have, I’ll bet that you could do better if you put just a little thought and effort into it.

So why not try? What’s stopping you? I mean, hell with the end of yet another expansion nipping at our heels, it’s really not as if there’re that many things left to do in game other than to farm for that last elusive piece of gear that you’ve always wanted or to raise another alt in preparation for the next expansion.

Live a little! Unleash the hoarder within and go out there and expand your wardrobe in preparation for future endeavors!

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