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If you are a knowledgeable tank, either in WoW or other games and are want to be part of the team, just send us a note through the Contact Form and we’ll see how you might best fit in.

Please include what type of content you are most interested in providing.

Cheers!

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Last week, we spoke of the components that make up the fight atop Deathwing’s spine so now we’ll push onto how these elements come together to make up the fight.

At the start of the encounter, the group will want to kill off three of the four corruption tentacles, with the tanks temporarily holding onto the three hideous Amalgamations that spawn as a reaction to that.

Once they’re out, the group should intiate a Deathwing barrel roll by stacking up on one side of his back on one of the open wounds to make sure that they don’t fall. Once the roll is finished and all of the extra adds have fallen off, everyone should focus their attention on the remaining tentacle and burn it down, spawning a last Amalgamation which must be tanked.

For efficiency, you’ll want to tank it by one of the armored plates. Once that’s in place, make sure that you have a good threat lead on the large add and do what you can to bring the many smaller Blood adds to you where you’re tanking, be it by taunting them whenever you can or using some of your ranged abilities to get their attention. It will primarily be the DPS’s job to burn them down to just pay attention to their location in case they die a bit too far away and you have to shift over to absorb them into the large add.

From a tanking perspective, the fight isn’t that complex. You just need to hang onto the Amalgamation and be sure to get ready to book it onec it’s absorbed 9 of the Bloods and is getting ready to blow.

Keep a close eye on the health of the thing when it’s fully grown and move away from it as soon as possible when it starts to cast its explosion.

Blowing up an Amalgamation next to an armored plate will blow off the armor and reveal a Tendon that holds it in place temporarily. The DPS requirements on these tendons are fairly high so be sure to do what you can to assist in their demise, be it with your own small contribution to damage or saving certain abilities like Shattering Throw for when you know they’ll be ready to be burned down.

Once the tendon is killed, the armor will fall off permanently and the fight will essentially reset, spawning four more Corruption tentacles and restarting the entire process.

So essentially, once you get down the first Amalgamation, that’s pretty much the sequence for the rest of the fight and it’ll just come down to a matter of getting everyone to hold it together and repeat the procedure enough times to land the kill.

Best of luck on your dragon ride!

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The fight with Deathwing will last through two entire boss encounters at the end of the Dragon Soul instance, the first of which we’ll be covering today which actually all takes place atop his back as he flies around, trying to shake you loose like a dog with fleas.

The majority of this fight doesn’t really have anything to do with Deathwing directly so much as it’s about dealing with the various adds that you’ll find atop the dragon.

There’s actually quite a lot to cover for these last two fights as they’re fairly complex encounters so we’ll be breaking this first fight atop his spine into two pieces.

So jumping right in, the fight will begin by initiating a cinematic event aboard the Skyfire. The fight essentially begins the second the first person cancels the cinematic sequence that will play once you start the event so you’ll want to make sure everyone’s on the same page about when to hit Esc and start the fight, be it right as soon as it starts or some arbitrary point in the middle.

In this first segment, we’ll be covering the adds that you’ll encounter throughout the fight.

The first are four large orange tentacles called Corruption. The corruption will either hit a couple random raid members with a debuff that will absorb a large amount of healing before being dispelled (200,000) or target a few random members with a stun that deals a large amount of damage over time.

The debuff can only be removed by healing past the shield or outlasting the 5m duration on it and the stun that it does can be stopped by burning through about a fifth of the corruptions HP.

The two other add types throughout the fight will be Corrupted Bloods and Hideous Amalgamations.

These adds will spawn once a corruption tentacle is killed and the larger Amalgamations will need to be tanked as they hit pretty hard.

When a Blood is killed, it’ll burst for a small amount of AoE damage and leave a small portion of itself on the ground that the Amalgamations can absorb if they’re close enough to it. Once a given Amalgamation has absorbed 9 Blood fragments, they’ll power up and start radiating a damaging fire aura that pulses to the raid every few seconds. Once you kill an Amalgamation that has been powered up in this way, they’ll channel a final spell where it self-destructs and loosens one of the armored plates on Deathwing’s back, provided that they explode near one of them.

The loosened plate can be released by attacking the tendon that it’s attached to which has the result of removing the plate as well as spawning two more Corruptions to begin the cycle anew.

And, of course, there’s Deathwing himself who doesn’t attack you directly but will try to shake you off his back as he flies around.

Having met the players, stay tuned next week where we go into how these disparate elements merge to form the happy encounter that I’m sure you won’t possibly be frustrated with after a week or two!

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Engaging with this encounter will remind you a lot of the airship battle from way back in Icecrown Citadel. Similar to that fight, one of the big things that you need to watch out for is that the ship that you’re on, the Skyfire, has it’s own HP bar and if it dies, so will you. So you’ll have to take as much care of the ship as you would your main tank.

You can’t heal the ship so your only real method of taking care of the damned thing is prevention. There are three main thigns that will hit the ship during the fight. Blackhorn’s mount will cast a spell called Twilight Onslaught at the ship which you can see as a swirly purply thing heading towards the ship, marked by a swirly purple mark. If the purple ball is allowed to connect, it’ll do a huge amount of damage to the ship so you and your raid need to intercept it it by standing IN the thing on the ground. The damage is split amongst whoever’s standing in there so get as many people into the mark as you can to make the damage more managable.

There’s a much smaller version of this cast by the drakes which is managed the same way but deals much less damage so it doesn’t take as many peple to soak.

The third method are the sappers who will drop onto the deck of the ship and run for the cabin where they turn into suicide bombers and deal a HUGE amount of damage to the ship so they need to be cc’d and killed asap.

Throughout this there are two types of adds, Dreadblades and Slayers running around that need to be picked up and held close enough together that they can be cleaved but not close enough that both tanks are getting the stacking debuff from each add so it’ll take a bit of management at first but a few tries and you and your offtank should get sense of distance needed.

There will be three waves of these pair of adds so to negate their stacking debuff, the tanks will need to alternate which one they tank from one wave to another to give the debuff a chance to drop off.

After three waves of this, Blackhorn will land and phase 2 will begin.

His dragon will stay overhead hurling void zones on the ground that need to be moved OUT of instead of gathered under so watch out for that and deal with Blackhorn.

He’ll stack an armor debuff on the tank he’s on so there’s a tank swapping going on that’s nothing really new. Figure out what amount of stacks your raid is comfortable dealing with and switch out from there.

He throws out an aoe that will hit everyone that can’t be avoided and one that can where he targets someone randomly and throws out a conal aoe so if you see him getting ready to unlease that, you need to step lightly and get the hell out of the way.

He will also increase the damage he deals as he gets lower in health so keep a ready finger on your cooldowns as the fight nears completion and you should be fine.

This is the last fight before you take on Deathwing so when you manage to get him down, better put on the big boy pants because this ride is almost done.

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This is a fight that follows a fairly stable formula throughout with only a few small quirks to mar the simplicity.

The fight swaps in and out between the Twilight realm and the regular realm, with the switching being handled by a context sensitive button in the middle of your screen called “Heroic Will” which will boot you out of the Twilight realm for a few seconds.

The main use of this is to deal with an ability called Hour of Twilight where the boss essentially kills everyone that remains in the Twilight Realm.

Due to the nature of the fight, you’ll have various buffs on you that will lower the cooldown of your Shield Wall and other class specific defensive abilities and also extend their duration so you generally never have to worry about having a cooldown active for this ability. When it comes, as three people NEED to remain behind to be hit by it or the group will wipe, more than likely, as a tank, you’ll be tasked with staying behind and surviving the blast with your cooldown.

Keep in mind that should you need to use that cooldown for any other reason and end up not having something ready when the Hour of Twilight is about to be cast, communicate with your raid so that they can make other arrangements ahead of time.

The other ability to keep an eye out for as a tank is one called Fading Light. Ultraxion will lay this down on a tank and two other raid members. When the duration of the debuff ends, if the character is in the Twilight Realm, they will be killed so when Fading Light Happens, there is usually a need for a tank swap as the affected tank returns to the normal realm for a brief interval and the secondary tank assumes the job of keeping the boss busy until it rotates out again.

For the tanking role, this is actually pretty much it.

Other aspects of the fight that’s good to know is his buff called Unstable Monstrosity. This buff causes him to do a pretty significant amount of shadow damage split among everyone that’s currently in the Twilight Realm.

He’ll cast this every few seconds but as the fight drags on longer and longer, he’ll begin to cast this more frequently so keep a closer eye on your health and your cooldowns as the fight drags on and be prepared to use a cooldown if things get hairy a little later on.

Finally, Ultraxion has a hard 6 minute enrage timer that will kill everyone in the raid if he isn’t killed so when you start coming up to that 5 minute mark of the fight, pop everything you have and do what you can to survive and help your raid finish him off as best as you can.

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The problem is that while she has a number of mechanics to watch out for during the course of the fight, they’re largely simple ones so if you’re one of those that can pretty quickly grasp the various mechanics of a fight within a few tries, oh boy, be prepared to tear out what’s left of your hair if the rest of your group isn’t quite there with you.

As the fight starts, Hagara starts in a neutral phase that she slips into in between her other phases.

As a tank, the only real thing that you need to keep an eye out for is her Focused Assault. While she channels, she’ll attack much more quickly but will also be rooted in place so all that you really need to do is take a few steps away from her while this happens and keep an eye on the threat levels of your raid when it ends to make sure that she doesn’t end up rampaging after someone else in the raid.

She has a couple other abilities but they’re nothing that should effect you or your job directly.

After a relatively short period, Hagara will transition into the next phase of the fight, either the Lightning Phase or the Ice phase. Which one she initially selects is random but after that first choice, she’ll simply alternate back and forth between the two of them so you’ll always know what’s coming.

For the lightning phase, four crystals will spawn at the edges of the platform along with a lightning elemental will spawn that needs to be picked up by the tank. The elemental doesn’t really do anything scary on it’s own but once it dies, it will overcharge the nearest crystal and destroy it so you might need to coordinate with your raid so that everyone’s on the same page about which crystal will be blowing up.

Once a crystal is destroyed, it’ll send out bolts of chain lightning to anyone nearby which will then jump to other players until your raid chains it to the remaining crystals, destroying those as well. Hagara also channels a lightning spell that will hit a bunch of random targest in the raid, leaving them with a stacking damage debuff so if you notice your stacks growing higher than comfortable, don’t be afraid to hit a cooldown to endure the remainder of the phase.

The ice phase similarly has four crystals to destroy. The catch in this phase is that the center of the platform becomes very damaging and four waves of ice rotate around the platform in a clockwise manner. What this means is that your raid will have to be running laps around the outer edge of the platform while knocking those crystals down. There are also icicles that will be landing periodically from the ceiling to make the marathon a little more dangerous but nothing relaly to write home about.

Hagara will alternate between one of these phases and her neutral phase so once you’ve seen them all, it’s really just a matter of getting everyone on board with the simple strategies for each phase and you’ll pull through.

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As we move onto the third boss of the Dragon Soul raid encounter, we really see them rachet up the complexity of the fights to a startling degree.

You’d think that they’d give us at least one more boss to acclimitize or something!

But nevertheless, let’s dive right in.

The third boss is Yor’sahj and it’s a bit of a pain.

The boss himself has a single mechanic to watch out for which is a stacking DoT effect. This is taken care of easily with the standard practice of swapping between the main and the off tank periodically depending on your raid and what your healers are comfortable taking care of.

The fight really gets complicated as he will periodically three different colored “bloods” that look like giant oozes that spawn at the edge of the room and move inward towards the boss.

Each ooze will allow Yor’sahj to cast a different ability and only one ooze can be killed per wave so at any given wave of bloods, you’re going to be looking at dealing with two abilities combined that might cause your raid to alter it’s positioning or strategy depending on the situation.

The good part about the fight is that there generally isn’t all that much for you to keep an eye out for specifically as a tank.

Of the various potential bloods that might be left alive to hit the boss, the one thing you really need to watch out for as you tank him is if the green blood is allowed to reach the boss. At that point, since this blood will allow the boss to inflict a splashing AoE attack on a random target with a range of 4 yards, it’s very important that you stay away from other raid members, including your offtank for fear of causing a damage spike that might be impossible for your healers to handle.

The other main thing to watch out for is if either your main or your off tank is a paladin and the blue blood is left to reach the boss at which point, he will summon an add that will drain the mana from every blue bar in the raid, returning it all once it is killed.

If you’re the offtank in that situation, be very cautious and alert. While the paladin tank at the time SHOULD have enough of a threat lead to coast on it until the add is killed, it’s definitely possible that the add is spawned at the worst of times, right when a vital spell or cooldown needs to be hit and the raid is prevented from doing so due to the lack of mana.

When offtanking this fight, or any fight really, keep your taunt ready when you’re not an active tank and your cooldowns close at hand to pick up and hold the boss just long enough to revive your other tank and get the fight back under control.

Best of luck!

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Hopefully, we’ve all had the chance to mop the floor with Morchok a little bit and maybe even land a kill?

In any case, we’ll be moving straight along to the second boss of the instance and pushing onto the fight with Warlod Zon’ozz. He’s a big and shadowy version of the General Vezaxx from back in Ulduar and there’s a lot of movement and turning to be done in the fight so you’ll have to follow the standard rules about tanking/moving around large model creatures.

Zon’ozz is significantly more complicated than the Morchok fight just before him so you’ll have to get your raid to really pull together if they’ve grown complacent over the last little bit.

For the first phase of the fight, there will be a number of things that you, as a tank, will need to keep an eye out for.

The first is a stacking buff on himself which increases the damage he deals to you by 5% every 5 seconds. This is something you really need to watch out for as a bit of inattention can lead to the damage suddenly spiking harder than you’re equippped to deal with, leading to a careless death.

He also does a conal attack that will heal him based on the damage dealt so it’s important to make sure to keep him faced away from any other potential target at almost all times.

His last ability is a flying purple ball that will ‘bounce’ back and forth like a ping pong ball off of raid members, the wall or the boss. This isn’t something that you really need to concern yourself with save at the very start. He’ll spawn the flying purple bouncy in front of him and you need this to head over to wherever your ranged group is standing so start the fight by having the ranged group behind you until the orb spawns and then immediately turn him away from everyone to avoid hitting your raid with the conal attack. The quickest way to accomplish this will probably be to run right through him as soon as the orb has been spawned until he does a 180 degree turn to keep facing you.

Eventually, when your group is ready to move into phase 2, the ranged and the melee groups will coordinate to allow the ping pong ball to hit Zon’ozz where he’ll rush over to the center of the room and do an aoe channel for a while.

The raid should be bunched up with you on the boss so there isn’t much need for tanking so you’d be better of concentrating on higher damage on the boss if at all possible. Remember to make sure that those armor debuffs don’t drop off during this important time and also remember that you have that Shattering Throw to help add to the damage output.

After a bit of channeling time, Zon’ozz will return to phase 1 and repeat the process all over again.

Go through the repeat of phase 1 exactly how you handled it the first time and it should be just fine.

Good luck out there and don’t be discouraged if this second boss takes a little more work. Just put those fingers to keyboards and grind away at him and he’ll go down eventually.

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All in all, this first boss of the dungeon is a fairly easy one, especially given that most of us will be coming off of the more complex fights from the end of the Firelands instance.

Morchok only has a few abilities to keep an eye out for and the fight doesn’t really differentiate too much between the various classes that might comprise your raid so the explanation of the fight will be pretty much the same for everyone, unlike the last few bosses we’ve all dealt with.

When the fight begins, you’ll be tanking (of course) and the rest of your raid will be grouped up behind him fairly close by. This is due to his first ability which is a nova style skill that splits it’s damage between every member of the raid, more damage being dealt to the two closest players to him. These are usually the two tanks so make sure that you’re standing as far inside him as you can to prevent any other member of your raid from accidentally twitching closer and taking the hit in your stead.

Periodically, he’ll toss out a little red bubble on the ground. This is typically not your responsibility to deal with as a tank so just make sure that you stay away from it when it spawns as it will ‘attach’ itself to the players nearest to it and explode, doing more damage the further away the player is from the orb.

There is your standard armor debuff in this fight so as you tank, keep an eye on your stacks of the debuff and coordinate with your offtank to taunt off of you when you feel like you’re taking too much damage for comfort.

Every now and then, Morchok will throw out his final ability where he drags everyone to him then drop a number of fragments along the edges of the path. Shortly after, he’ll throw out his final skill, black blood. It’s pretty hard to miss this when it comes knocking so you’ll have to double-time it to one of the fragments that were mentioned previously and hide behind it until the black blood fades away, at which point, you’ll be back to tanking him as normal.

He does have a bit of a mini-enrage when he hits 20% HP where he attacks a little faster and does a little more damage but talk to your healers, talk to your offtank and make sure that everyone’s ready with their taunts and cooldowns to help out and you should be just fine.

Grab some loot and get ready to move deeper into the instance.

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That is the question that we really must ask.

With all of the fancy new gear out, not to mention the new dungeons, raids, Darkmoon Faire and the kitchen sink on top of it all coming out to play, it can be a bit tough at times to figure out just which way you want to turn to get your hands on the new items as soon as possible.

There is a question that most of us are asking ourselves at this point.

With all of the new crafted gear released, is it really worth the time, money and/or materials necessary to get them crafted?

True enough, when you see some new upgrades just sitting in the auction house waiting for your money, i can be hard to turn down the temptation, especially if you have a decent amount of expendable cash just sitting around.

At the end of the day, it comes down to a matter of risk assessment. There’s rarely a worse feeling that you can have in the game than to drop a huge truckload of gold on a new piece of crafted gear (whether it’s done through gathering materials or just buying it straight off the auction house) only to have an upgrade drop for that very same item slot with the next boss you kill.

Like many things regarding tanking, it ends up coming down to how you play the game and what exactly you spend most of your time doing.

If you’re sitting right there on the bleeding edge of content, then I would have to push for a yes. If you’re in a cutting edge guild fighting for progression kills and you’re NOT doing everything in your power to eke out every last bit out of your stats, you might want to question whether such an environment is the best fit for you.

Maybe you still raid but you’re not quite as hardcore about it? In that case, I’d advise waiting a bit and weighing the options. If you’re maybe one of the first to have access to upgrades that the new crafted pieces cover, you might want to just hold off and use your money elsewhere. If you’re in this situation and it’s looking like it’ll be a while before you have the chance to grab an upgrade for that slot…you might want to consider investing in the BoE pieces, always keeping in mind that in such cases, the sooner you get them, the more use you’ll get out of them before they’re eventuallyr eplaced.

If you mainly play casually with a much more sporadic raiding schedule, there are actually two ways you can go. If you have the expendable cash, you might as well go for it as your chances of seeing an upgrade for those slots coming your way will be a little more of a long shot. However, if you don’t really raid all that often, you may want to ask yourself if you really need that upgrade all that badly? If perhaps you can make do with what you have.

All good questions to consider, and I hope that you all do or do not snag the new BoE’s according to your own situation and judgement!

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