Dug through my screenshot folder to see what was laying around, and here’s what I found:

Frost at the highest point in Dun Morogh, high above Ironforge.

At some point we started claiming our ICC kills for different factions. Hrist always claimed them for Gnomergan, and I for Ironforge. I have no idea who put out that other silly banner.

Ah, Hrist in Guild Chat.

And the WHU BBQ poem of the day:

WHU To Arms
by Ali Farstrider

Hear me lads and lasses of the bow and the gun

The horn she is a blowin the hunt has now begun

Grab yer ale, yer ammo pack, and an extra pint for me

We be goin’ to war me lads to set all Azeroth free

In the icy north does descend a King with ghastly power

All yer sons and daughters, husbands, wives he will devour

In death’s cold hand does rest the most foul blade er’ born

So come ye lads and lasses we go to clam Frostmourn

Oh gather round ye Beast Masters an all yer fancy pets

Call them to yer sides, we march off to face these threats

All ye marksmen come with me, may yer aim be true

The Lich King will be full a holes once you lot are thru

To the trappers and the stalkers ye lot best look alive

Without you in these halls we ner a chance ta survive

For the glory and the honor and most generous reward

We best be gettin to the ship before them stinkin Horde

We are the best, the brightest, the toughest lot around

We be the Warcraft Hunter’s Union and we be marchin on Icecrown!

Here’s a closer look at what shocked me:

Is it possible that there’s another Hatorade in the world? And how can he be rage-filled when he doesn’t even have rage? Is this some kind of Hrist impostor?

In other Hrist news, our beloved Cheerleader recently gave in to the dark side while on her alt an launched a stream of bitter hatred in the MNK chat channel. Hrist was pleased.

Incidentally, I continue to get requests every now and then for Hrist to make a tanking blog similar to the WHU. He continues to resist, insisting that other sites do it better and he wouldn’t say anything different from them anyway. In particular Hrist endorses Tankspot. However, even after the endorsement many people say they find it difficult to find information there and they’d rather see a Hrist point of view.

Since it’s unlikely that Hrist will ever share his vast hate-filled knowledge, I figure I’ll try to toss in the occasional tip when I can pry it loose from him. Here’s a little tidbit of Hrist wisdom that should help you on your way:

10-man raid night and the schedule says we’re going to TotC to pick up a couple of new achievements along with our weekly emblem farming run. Only one problem: our off-tank doesn’t show up. We sat around for about a half hour until  Cheerleader checked her Facebook to find a message that he’s stuck at work and doesn’t know when (or if) he’ll get out.

We do some looking, and no other tanks online. We’re screwed.

Then Hrist starts another one of those conversations that lead to epicness….

Hrist: I could probably solo Gormok if we had a paladin do Hand of Protection at just the right time, and then I remove it immediately and taunted.

Arust: But what about the worms?

Hrist: No we’d need two tanks for the worms.

Frost: Wait — I can tank the stationary worm! I’ve done it before when the OT died.

Hrist: Oh yeah you can. Okay, let’s try this…

And epicness ensued.

We picked up an extra dpser and went after the Beasts of Northrend with only the Hate Tank between us and horrible impaled death.  Of course we weren’t just trying to beat the Beasts, we wanted to get the Not One, But Two Jormungars achievement, which added just a bit more spice to the evening.

It took a couple of attempts for the healers to get used to my squishiness on the worm phase – but Hrist never had any problems soloing Gormok. It required a delicate dance halfway through where he had the pally Hand of Protection him (and at the same instant the rogue had to vanish — the rest of us were at max range) and then he dropped it and taunted before Gormok could reach the #2 on his aggro list.

So we beat them and got our achievement. And then we got to thinking…

Jaraxxus was next on our list, and we were planning on getting the Three Sixty Pain Spike achievement. No need for a 2nd tank there, right?

Indeed there was not. Hrist was tanking one Mistress throughout almost the entire fight, and two mistresses for the last 20% on Jaraxxus (and of course tanking Jaraxxus as well). During the infernal phase Arust and I had growl on our pets to tank them for a few seconds, but mostly we just relied on massive dps to kill them before they could reach us. And best of all, Jaraxxus was a one-shot.

So after getting our achievements for the night, we figured we should see how far we could get… Faction Champions was easiest — we just changed our kill order to take out one of the melee 2nd and we were good. Also a one-shot.

On the Twins we made some changes to our normal strat to compensate for the lack of Hrist threat on his off-target (we had all dpsers on the same target at all times) and again we got a one-shot.

Then Hrist verbally kicked me in the balls over vent when he said:

Hrist: Wow. I wish you were FRAPSing this Frost.

Yup. Rookie mistake. I was so focused on all the various strat adjustments we were doing to one-tank each fight that I never even though of recording it. So at the very least I recorded our final fight, Anub’arak with 1 tank, also one-shot.

And I should point out that I think we can all agree that this is seriously badass tanking skills, but a huge chunk of the credit also needs to go to our healers who managed the extra strain they were never meant to, especially healing Hrist with 4 stacks of impale while he’s tanking a worm, or healing me tanking a worm, and Hrist tanking both twins – not to mention both Anub’arak and one of the adds at once.

Badassedness all around, I think.

So it was a nice change to pick up an extra couple of buffs and I saw the difference right off the bat on Koralon. Now it’s been a while since I got an upgrade, so I’m pretty used to doing darned close to the same damage on simple fights like this. But on Sat POW! The right buffs can make a significant difference.

After clearing out VoA we wandered over to TotC where again out of the gate I noticed not just my dps higher, but higher dps across the board. The entire raid was killing stuff substantially faster, which helped make the raid much smoother sailing than our 25s usually are.

And then the magical moment. After a super sweet Twins fight (I got empowered twice, with well-planned cooldowns available both times) the Twins actually dropped Death’s Verdict. This trinket is frickin’ phenomenal, and I had been drooling over it for a long, long time now.

Now our guild uses a variation of the loot council, which is to say, Hrist.

Upgrades are handed out based on attendance, size of upgrade, who it would do most for, and in general spread out so that everyone gets their turn. The idea is to put loot where it will do the most good for the raid as a whole. Hrist’s general hatred of everything and everyone ensures fairness.

Luckily for me it has been a while since I saw any loot (and still haven’t got a trophy) and Death’s Verdict was a massive upgrade and BiS for the content our guild clears. And after close to half the raid put in for the darned thing and about 15 hours of waiting, I actually got the trinket. Shortly thereafter I got a tell from AFK Rogue that went like this:

AFK Rogue: That’s an awesome trinket. What will that do to your dps?

Frost: It will make it go up.

And indeed I cannot wait to raid with that puppy proccing me 450 agility every 45 seconds! Wooo!

VoA / TotC overall meter

]]> http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2009/11/trinkets-make-me-happy-in-the-morning/feed/ 23 http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2009/11/extreme-tanking/ http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2009/11/extreme-tanking/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:00:56 +0000 Frostheim http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/?p=3062 I was recording the final bits of the Hunting Party podcast on Tuesday with Euripides and Darkbrew and before we got started we were chatting about raiding, and the 10-man raid I had just finished. At some point it came up that my 10-man group usually just has Hrist as the only tank on Ony, and they were shocked.

Now I’m not a tank, and I’m only tangentially aware of tanking stuff. I had always assumed that’s how it was done. Why on earth would you need a 2nd tank? Hrist just gathers up the adds and the whelps and we dps them. Dark and Euripides assured me this is not the way most groups do it.

I think that sometimes I’m a bit spoiled when it comes to my tank. I sometimes forget, for example, that people can have threat problems – just MD and possibly you’ll have to FD once. But then I’ll run an instance with a different tank and suddenly realize, oh yeah, threat can be an issue.

So last night I was gathering some footage for my video project and had just finished shooting something with Arust when Arust asked me if I’d do the daily, VH. Hrist hopped on board, and then Cocky Mage joined us.

Unfortunately, no one else in the guild was free. And certainly no healers. Then we had a conversation that went something like this:

Hrist: I could switch to my healer and you could pet tank it.

Frost: Nah, I’ve pet tanked VH before. I’d rather just race though it. Would you mind if we got a healer from LFG?

Hrist: That’s fine.

Frost: Crap – no healers in LFG.

Hirst: You know, I don’t take much damage from heroic mobs and you guys kill stuff fast. We could try it without a healer.

Frost: OMG, hell yes. We’ll want to get a fifth – a dpser from LFG?

Hrist: But that wouldn’t be as epic.

Frost: I’m on board.

Arust: Hell yes.

Cocky Mage: ….

So here it is, our 4-man of Violet Hold heroic, with no healer.

It wasn’t exactly a smooth run. We didn’t do much planning other than Hrist telling everyone to single target down my target since he’d be dancing in and out of melee.

And Violet Hold is a tough place to be doing these shenanigans. The mobs just keep coming – you can’t wait to eat up to full health, you can’t wait for cooldowns to become available – you just grab what you can in a few seconds and keep going.

Right off the bat, on the first pull, I suddenly realized I was in my BM soloing spec… not a dps spec, which was very bad. A couple pulls later I went ahead and switched specs between portals, meaning I had to be in viper for a full portal. Then our mage pulled aggro badly (by aoeing) and got ganked. While he was running back we didn’t have the dps to kill the next swarm fast enough and though Hrist tried kiting them, he got killed. Fortunately we just had time to use Jumper Cables on him (Arust and I both – one worked) and get him bandaged up a wee bit while he was eating to keep going.

In the end those were the only two deaths. No wipes, and we cleared it and got our Emblems of Triumph. And I’m sure that now that we know what we’re doing we could go in and smoke it easily (with no aoe and no solo specs).

But hopefully we’ll be able to find a healer next time

In cleaning out my screenshot folder it’s really no surprise that so many were Hrist-related. Looking through them makes you ask the really deep questions in life:

Will Hrist’s rage some day consume all the happiness in the world? If kindness and love are such better emotions, why is hate so much more effective? Are Hrist and I plantonic life partners? Or does a darker fate await us?

Hrist DC'd just after a double pull in a 5-man, and with Bella the Cheerleader's healing, we all somehow survived. She gets rare praise from the Haterade.

A WHU sneak-peek at the newest upcoming companion pet -- the mini-Hrist!

Smackens was happy that I gave him that silly brewfest mace we had laying around. I suspect you'll all be hearing more about Smackens in the near future with his WHU video debut.

Hrist frequently bashes tanks for focusing solely on stamina and not going after threat-generating stats as well. I'm very happy Hrist gears for threat as well as survivability. Remember tanks: threat IS a survival stat... for the rest of your raid.

I think I sense a new t-shirt slogan here...

The super secret addon reports in Hrist and my super secret chat channel. Hrist doesn't ride the failboat.

Hrist and I ride out of the sunset.

But I still gotta do that pesky daily heroic to get my 14 extra triumph emblems each week. And boy do those get dull.

For a while we kept things interesting working on Glory of the Hero, but that’s done now and the dailies keep going on. Fortunately, there’s Hrist.

Hrist has always been big on moving things along quickly and strangely obsessed with how quickly we can kill Loken, but lately he’s just insane. And I, of course, love it. The crazy Hrist speed runs bring me back to the days of chain pulling MC (except, you know, Hrist won’t let me pull, probably because he’s insecure about my mad skills. And there was a couple of wipe incidents, one of which totally wasn’t my fault).

Hrist pulls like crazy and never stops for mana breaks. He usually pulls at least two groups of mobs at a time, sometimes more. He doesn’t care if one of those mob groups is a boss, either. Coming up to a boss he grabs the mobs in front of it and then charges the boss as well. Holy crap is it fun.

Of course you need a good healer to make it work, and often we only have 4 people which really slows us down. But I highly recommend it as a way of staying on your toes and keeping things entertaining.

So now I’m thinking I need to keep a running scoreboard of our best time for each instance — and then try to beat that time everon subsequent runs.

Current best is Nexus in 14 minutes. I haven’t been keeping track of time on Old Kingdom, but we skip every boss but two, and a good chunk of mobs as well, so I suspect our time is good there. ToC and VH suck because of the downtime of waiting around for more stuff to fight. HoS as well, I suppose.

Anyhow, current goal is to beat 14 mintues.

So when Hrist brought up going for the Glory of the Hero achievement (completing 40 different heroic achievements)  this sounded like something that could present a challenge – and at the same time make doing the daily heroic a bit more interesting.

Well, it took some time, but we finally got it.

A bunch of the achievements everyone already has just by accident – anything involving fast kills (all of the HoL ones) or just generally being competant. But some of them were a real chalenge. Here are a few of the memorable achievements that we had to do – including some that had a very special hunter role in the way we tackled them:

Better Off Dred
This one isn’t hard with a good tank and healer, but as the hunter it was my job to basically ignore the first chunk of the fight and just keep MDing raptors to the tank. I made sure to use just one shot per raptor, so I could get 3 with each MD. When MD was down I just pulled them to me, popped deterrence and ran to Hrist.

Split Personality
This one was just plain hard. Fortunately we had a group willing to wipe whenever we failed to kill them close enough together. The really difficult part is one of the mirror images casts a frost aoe, and is unkillable while casting — which makes it really easy to accidentally kill the others while she’s untouchable.

When we finally got the achievement, it was partially luck. We got the first set of mirror images down all together, and then while she was whipping us around in the air we killed her (go kill shot crits!) before she could split a second time

Intense Cold
The hard part about this is when Keristrasza freezes you in place and you have no ability to move to remove the stacks. I’ve never been dispelled fast enough to get the achievement, so I finally switched to BM for it, and used my pvp trinket. Between the two I was able to break out both times I was frozen and score the win. This nice thing about this is it’s one of the few personal achievements that doesn’t require your entire group to be doing it (What the Eck may be the only other one).

Chaos Theory
Another crazy, insane fight, that took us two attempts (the first time we accidentally aoe’d a rift down). Hrist slowly backed down the ramps during each portal phase, with the rest of us following. By the end Hrist couldn’t contain the dozens of mana wraiths spawning every couple seconds and they were flooding through to the healer. At least one dpser died aoeing the mass on our healer (and I was only saved by FD).

Share the Love
A special hunter opportunity. This is pretty easy as long as you have a really strong healer. No one attacks the boss (except the tank) until everyone is impaled. The problem is that Gal’darah doesn’t impale his primary aggro target (the tank). So do get this one I switched to BM tank spec and had my turtle tank the boss until Hrist got impaled, then he took over.

Less-rabi
Just super fricking hard, for us anyway. I think we once went 5 attempts in a row (we deliberately wiped if we ever missed an interrupt) until one attempt Badass Mage has his mirror images out when we screwed up and called for the wipe. He ran, but his mirror images finished the boss off, damn them.

Later Hrist and I got the acheivement on just a speed run of the daily without even trying for it. Ah well.

Volazj’s Quick Demise
This also proved pretty tough for us. We went for it severa times and lost by only a handful of seconds. From a hunter perspective, the ideal group for this is all ranged dps and a priest or shaman healer. Worse run every was in a group with three pallys, all healing each other and staying in melee range, blah! 

We finally got it when we were doing our 4-man clear for The Party’s Over. With only 4 people the nightmare phase went much faster, letting us down him with time to spare.

Ruby Void
Just surprisingly hard, and the one I think we wiped on the most (not intentionally). It doesn’t help that everyone hates the Occulus to begin with. We ended up using all 5 bronze drakes and cycling time stops to try to keep the whelps from spawning.

Respect Your Elders
While I don’t recommend this, we happened to go after this one during our 4-man clear as well, so I think we get bonus badass points for doing this with only four people!

Hrist, the healer, and Arust pulled the boss out into the courtyard to dps him down. Meanwhile I switched to BM solo spec and tanked the guardians as they spawned. I found I could hold two, and the third one quickly burned through my pet (I ended up dropping a frost trap and doing some back & forth kiting). Fortunately Arust and Hrist had plenty of dps to kill the boss within 10 sec of the third guardian spawning (well, on the second attempt anyway – when Arust wasn’t in viper!)

Hrist has two girls. I can't imagine they'll survive for long.

But after a bit of work we got everything up and running and spread the word to the raid group. It was strange hearing everyone’s voice for the first time. If you were to judge by voice, one of our healers is a 8 year old girl. We assume she’s not because we know she’s married, but then she is from the south. You never know how they do things down there in the bayou.

Hrist wisely decided on push to talk mode to avoid letting too much of his hatred spill over.

I still predict that voice chat delivers twice the Hrist hate as typing ever did.

So we went into TotC with voice chat going. We had our best, fastest, and cleanest takedown of the Beasts yet – waiting 45 min for a DC’d healer – then blew through Jaraxxus, and then after a lot of work, we were finally able to get past the dirty stinkin’ Faction Champions. It was a good night, and we got a nice easier fight ready for us on Thursday

So let’s hear it for voice chat! Instant communication mid-fight that no one misses. Yeah, I guess there’s something to be said for that.

Never Question the WHU

So I had posted on here as we were discussing switching to voice, and several people had some headset recommendations. Overall the consensus was to go with a USB headset, and to spend the money on something comfortable as many headsets can get uncomfortable with hours of raiding.

So naturally when I was looking at headsets I went ahead got a cheap $20 one that seemed like it would do the trick. Holy crap after 1 hour of raiding my ears frickin’ hurt. So yeah, I predict I stomp these into oblivion soon and go get a good pair.

Had I just listened to you guys in the first place… *sigh*

Not really a fair meter tonight, as this includes a *lot* of Faction Champs attempts - so CCing and kiting and stuff were the main duty for a ton of the time with many of us in pvp offspecs.

*Bonus points for the first person who can identify the reference of the title of this post!

Actually, in those days I was the assigned guild secretary. The raid leader would explain the fight over vent, and I’d type whatever he was saying into raid for the benefit of those without vent.

At any rate, something about being a casual guild has kept us from ever setting up voice chat. I think maybe it’s because we don’t want to make people do anything. Maybe it’s because all the Aussies have horrible internet and voice would only slow things down more (though, to be frank, I think we can agree that’s karma punishing them for being all bronzed gods with accents connected directly to the genitalia of the opposite sex).

At any rate, whenever the subject comes up, several people in the guild speak out loudly against the idea of having efficient, instant communication amongst the raid during fights. And the thought is that having somne people with voice chat and some without would be like crossing the streams (it would be bad).

So Hrist and I, in our continuing mission to defeat the Lich King, both independantly decided that we should be using voice chat. Of course the first step is that we’ll have to get microphones/head sets of some sort (can anyone recommend one?) but then Hrist hatred will be transmitted directly into our ears!

So when I shared this with some MNK peeps during a daily heroic run, they were excited and happy at the prospect.

So now some predictions.

Most common Hrist hate over voice chat?

• Heal me now!
• Get out of the fire/void zone/aoe hell
• Shut up!
• Weee! We all suck.
• I need a hug

Have you got anything else to add to the list of soon-to-be Hristisms?