The following is gear that you can begin to look for in the Auction House or receive as quest rewards that a casual player can focus his playtime on. Each one of these pieces is fairly easy to get, and yet they are each solid pieces of tanking gear that you may find yourself still using well into Karazhan.

If you look for these items as your starting gear, you should have no problem at all in reaching 22000+ armor, 12000+ health and 25%+ dodge unbuffed in dire bear form, which is solid karazhan beginning tank gear.

EDIT: Also, this list of gear should help you achieve Defense 415. With the talent Survival of the Fittest, you only need Defense Skill (not Defense Rating) of 415 to become uncrittable from level 73 Elite bosses, which is what Raid bosses in Burning Crusade are set to. Therefore, you must keep in mind that whatever gear you choose, it is one of your major concerns to achieve 415 Defense. When evaluating armor, remember that at level 70, 1 Defense Rating = .423 Defense Skill, or 2.36 Defense rating = 1 Defense Skill. So if you need another 5 points in your Defense Skill to hit 415, you need 11.8 Defense Rating added to your gear. And Defense Rating can be obtained from more than just stats on armor pieces. You can use many different gems, for example the Enduring Talasite, which adds +4 Defense Rating and +6 Stamina, or the Thick Dawnstone at +8 Defense. Also, there are Shoulder Enchants obtainable from Scryer or Aldor rep that you can apply that increase your Defense Rating. There is a nice Bracer enchant, Enchant Bracer - Major Defense, that provides +12 Defense. And if those don’t do it, the Flask of Fortification adds +10 Defense Rating for 2 hours. You must get your Defense Skill to 415 to seriously be a Bear Tank.

I thought I’d seen it all.

At least, I thought I’d seen every darn thing people could do to throw me a curve ball in this game.

Last night I was forcibly reminded that I am a casual player, because I’m sure every other tank has had this happen to them before, but I was totally without a clue when it happened.

“When WHAT happened?” I hear you ask?

Well, let me tell you a little story… [grin]

So there I was, in Karazhan again. This time, it was gonna be different. Group 1’s main tank Joppers was going to spend the week straightening Group 2 out, and he had plans for us. Big plans.

“We’re going straight in to Attumen, then we’re going to take down Moroes and after that we’ll take down Maiden.”

Pretty bold plan for one night, considering he’d never run with Group 2 before. A Group that still has yet to down either Moroes OR Maiden due to what I like to call ‘10% issues’*.

I was pretty excited though. Seeing as how none of us had any prior experience in Kara, having someone along to drive us forward that knew how the flow should go could make a massive difference.

So in we go, and from the first it is clear that the tank is going to have none of this ‘coddling the casters’ crap. He does a quick run down of what he expects, Blue Square for ice trap, star for shackle, x for off tank (me), Moon for fear, burn such and such down first, etc. Then he says “Everyone when you need mana get it on the run and stay on your toes we have a lot to get done and I’m not sitting around”.

BOOM! With that the first pull begins and it’s just pull pull pull after that.

Attumen was downed in about 21 minutes from entering the instance, and I had a blast the whole way. As a main tank, I usually pretty much stayed bear and did my thing.

But here I had a clear agenda. The main tank was marking, and if there wasn’t a red X, then there was no off-tanking. That meant that when the tank started a pull, I could be in cat form and gear for DPS on the tanks’ targets, switching to bear only to grab broken traps and such, or shift into caster for spot heals and innervates, etc. I got to actually feel like a versatile class helping out all over the place. Lots and lots of fun.

Like I was saying, we downed Attumen in record time. We were gratified to hear that we pretty evenly matched Group 1 for time to progress to this point. Then we got the next surprise, as instead of heading for the ballroom, the main tank said we’d be taking the shortcut through the pantry to Moroes. Shortcut? Okay, cool.

Well, I don’t know that it was shorter, but it was fun to do something a bit different.

We blasted through at top speed, and it was great seeing the Group come together. The main tank was pushing as fast as he thought right, and the group rose to the challenge. He clearly expected everyone to be on the ball and do their own jobs without coddling. There was no babying, none of the “Is everyone sure you’re ready?” stuff that I tend to do. He treated everyone with respect, with the expectation that they were mature and skilled enough to do their jobs without being told, and most of them responded by damn well doing them. I was amazed and gratified. If there was a pull he thought might be difficult, he’d stop for a second to caution us that so and so would hit hard, and to be on top of things, and he’d pop a Ready Check and then boom! off to another pull.

Things were going so well, that before we knew it we were at the first pull from the chamber where Moroes and his dinner guests reside. That doorway is guarded by two stewards, and the main tank warned us that they hit hard, and he marked a red x and skull, then pulled. I dutifully shifted to bear with bear gear, grabbed my x and dragged his ass off to the side so everyone could see the skull clearly.

Now it was at this point that something went wrong. I don’t know what, but people started panicking as if there were a horde of adds or something among the casters. As far as I could see, as I spun my views around, there were still just the two stewards. Then the main tank went down and all holy hell broke loose.

I still don’t understand what happened to cause the complete panic that I heard on Teamspeak. It’s not as if we were strangers to wipes or uncontrolled chaos. Our previous runs should have taught us to be adaptive and prepared for the worst.

At any rate, when I saw the main tank go down, the skull he was tanking broke for the casters in a straight line. I Feral Charged, picked him up and spun him around on me. Seconds later he died and I still had my original X on me.

Absolutely no worries, right?

YES, there were a couple players dead. But we had three paladins, me and a resto druid, and a priest. We had so much rezzing power that we ALMOST could wipe scores of times and jump right back up.

And thats when IT happened. IT.

Let’s recap… a couple players down, including the main tank, and one steward well and truly focused on me.

Well, what happened next is partly my fault. I still do not know by heart the moves and special abilities of every mob that I will be facing in Karazhan. If I did, I would have reacted a lot faster to find the reason for what happened to me, and I could have fixed it before it was too late.

This is what happened. As I began lacerating the steward to keep aggro firmly rooted on me, my buttons stopped responding, and my movement keys and mousemove stopped responding, EXACTLY as happens when stunned.

And here is where I made my critical error. I assumed that the steward could stun, and had stunned me, and that it would break in 3 seconds. And instead of looking away from the action to check the timer that should have been counting down stun duration next to the minimap, I kept my eyes on the screen, spamming my growl hotkey in anticipation of the stun wearing off so I could stay right on top of things.

And stun didn’t wear off. And still didn’t wear off. And as I waited and waited it STILL didn’t wear off. And I continued to wait in growing panic as the mob finally took off from my still, unresponsive form, and went to go tear the group a new one. And I could only watch in horror as it took down every single other player, and then, instead of coming back after me, it left the room to go back where it came from!

I just couldn’t believe it! I still stood there stunned and unable to move… except, now that I wasn’t surrounded by spell effects of casters and swipes and special effects and heals, I could see there was some sort of glolden glow around me… almost like…

And someone announces in guild chat that they DI’d me so I could rez the group after the wipe.

Someone… cast Divine Intervention on me… without saying a word in Teamspeak… so I could rez the party after the wipe… when we had a soulstone up…. and when we HAD NO WIPE INCOMING!!!! I was on top of that one lone mob so hard it wasn’t even funny. It took FOREVER for it to break off of me and go after the rest of the party.

At this point I gently put my headphones down, and swore bitterly at the screen for two solid minutes.

After getting the swearing out of my system for the moment, I calmly went looking through the 20+ buff icons in the upper right portion of my screen… and sure enough, there was the Divine Intervention icon, with a timer showing about two minutes left.

I gently right-clicked it to shut it off, just as I could have if I’d been smart enough to know that it wasn’t the mob that stunned me… it was one of my own teammates.

Honest to god, that is the very first time ever that anyone has cast Divine Intervention on me, as the main tank, in the middle of a fight, no matter how bad things looked. Ever.

I remained calm as I typed into my friends’ chat channel, to my buddy Jay, who was on the run with me…

“Someone DI’d me in the middle of the fight when we were in no danger. That is SO going in my blog.”

He lol’d

* 10% is a phrase from my Marine Corps days.. back then we took it for granted that we Marines were the ‘best of the best’**… but that even among our ranks, there was that “10%” of worthless asshats that would never do anything right if they could help it. From boot camp on, anytime we’d talk about a situation where one person screwed it up for the rest of us, that person was a ‘ten percenter’, or the situation would just be referred to as, “Well, there is always that 10%.”

** Of course, we also took it on faith that the Navy had 40%.

Just kidding, folks. Just kidding.

Let’s lighten the mood around here, shall we? After all, I am cranky when my buttons are pushed, but generally I am a pretty silly old bear. Let’s talk about druid fun!

As druids, they call us hybrids, but I prefer ‘jack-of-all-trades’.

Hey, we get to sorta melee like a rogue, heal like a priest, tank like a warrior, or blast like a mage. Sorta. Kinda.

Sure, we don’t come ‘out of the box’ as versatile at any one role as a ‘pure’ class does. I’ll accept that. Sure.

On the other hand, the druid class really favors fast thinking, flexibility, and improvisation.

I tend to approach life from an ‘in your face’ point of view, so it should come as no surprise that I favor moving in as a cat in stealth, getting my hits in, and switching to caster to pop some HoTs and then into bear for the long haul if things go wrong. But there are plenty of other approaches to playing our class, and they are all fun!

One of the things I like the most about druid is something rogues have long delighted in; going into group content solo in stealth, and taking on bosses for fun (and profit).

Granted, there isn’t much challenge for any 70 in soloing something like Shadowfang Keep, no matter how much fun it may be.

But there are things in this game that can bring a challenge and lots of fun, even for the 70, and I’d like to hear what your favorites are!

I’ll start the ball rolling by saying that I like to go into BRD and have me some fun in there. I’m a miner, so all that Dark Iron Ore is nice, plus getting to the Black Forge to smelt it down whenever I want. But beside that, if I am looking for fun I can stealth on by the trash and take on darn near any boss I feel like. If I want a true challenge, then I dare myself not to use stealth at all. Take on the trash too! A lot of those early dark iron dwarf pulls are trickier than you might think, what with the multiple healers in the pack.

Obviously, soloing the Scarlet Monastery in search of the rare Tabard drop is something that many folks do at some point, but what else is out there to solo that you enjoy?

Maybe you like to run the Deadmines as a speed challenge, just to see how fast you can get a 100% clear.

On a seperate but related topic, how many of you have put together all-Druid (or druid/rogue) 5 mans to stealth run higher end content? All-60 druid/rogue stealth tribute runs used to be quite a lot of fun.

Come on, share with the bear… what do you like to run?

Talked about Damage Meters yesterday, and somewhere in that muddy post there should have been two points. I’d like to revisit them a little, since it’s early and stuff in guild last night came up that kind of tied in.

The first is that I see Damage Meters abused by people that want bragging rights over other teammates, and in pursuit of the coveted #1 damage dealer position cause damage in excess of the tanks’ threat, pulling aggro away and causing many bad things.

(And most of the commenters have pointed these out, but I wanted to recap quickly… if you pull aggro away from the tank, not only are you yourself now going to find out how good your armor is, but you are now causing the healers to redirect their mana on you in a desperate attempt to keep you up, because they hate to see a player die on their watch. You are also causing the tank to hit his ‘panic overdrive’ to re-establish aggro, because he hates a player to die on his watch. And you might be pulling the mob into melee range of the Hunter(s), which drops their damage output on that mob just when you need it most. All in all, it’s asshattedness at it’s finest.)[Is that a word? It should be.]

The second point I was trying to make in there is that I see players who are not guild or class officers, use the rankings in a judgmental way towards other players, in a derisive or mocking fashion.

Now, in my own personal opinion, it is the second point that really frosts my butt.

The first situation is usually self correcting. It doesn’t take long for people to put their heads together, compare notes after a run, and come to some hard decisions.

“You know, if that (x-class) didn’t pull aggro away from the tank on every run and die, causing chaos and confusion, we wouldn’t have had any of those wipes.”
“Did you ask him to wait for the tank to get 5 sunders before kicking the DPS in, and watch his threat?”
“Yes, but he is still doing the same thing, anyway.”
“I guess we’re going to have to ask him not to go on runs with this group, then.”

Sadly, this apparently happened in our group last night.

I wasn’t on last night, instead I enjoyed a little time with my family… ok, maybe I logged in and did some daily quests quick, but other than that I was off.

But I did see that our group was in Kara, and after a very short run was already at Maiden. I wished them well, and the mood in the group at the time was festive, almost jubilant. Confidence was very high.

When next I logged in, hours later, to check the AH, I find out that the attempt(s) on Maiden were unsuccessful… and some players were asked to leave the group while they address certain, well, threat issues. It’s always a hard thing to ask a guild member, a friend and compadre, to not play reindeer games with the group. I certainly don’t envy the officers their decision. But not everyone can handle threat bombs like our friend Karthis does.

That’s a lot of yakking about obvious crap. I should go back and delete it, but what the heck, you already know I’m long-winded. Stream of consciousness rambling is the only style I got.

Point, point… I had a point when I started, and then I got off topic on asshats, and then I went to get coffee… where the hell was I? Oh, yeah! Right!

It’s one thing for people to throw up their Damage Meter score, in the interests of friendly competition, joking with some buddies. I see that once in a while in PUGs, in 5 man runs, and I certainly see no harm in it at all. Everyone enjoys something different, and I’ve PUGged with a pair of friends who both had Mages, who delighted in taunting each other with their Damage Meter ranking after almost every single pull. And honestly, they had me laughing my butt off, because they were taunting each other with who could do the most damage without going over my threat and pulling aggro. And they were both damn good. It was fun to be a part of. It spurred me on to greater heights of tanking, trying to really establish some serious threat on my mobs to let them play.

It’s another thing entirely when any player uses Damage Meters, or any other measurement, in an effort to belittle, judge or mock another player in game. I don’t care if it’s a guild run or a PUG, there is no excuse that I can think of where it’s ok to dump a bunch of crap on another player when they are being nice, playing the game, and having fun.

I don’t know about anyone else out there, but most of the people I play with or meet are great players, fun people, nice people, generous people, people that are playing WoW to have fun and hang with friends. There is always the hunt for better gear, for higher reputation, for that next rare crafting pattern, whatever. But at the heart of things they are darn great folks to hang with.

So the players I run into that like to hurt other peoples’ feelings or make someone else look like crap in some effort to make themselves look better or wahtever, just pisses me off.

Those players are the ones that make me wish there were no Damage Meters, not because meters themselves are bad, but only because the use to which they are put can be so easily twisted to serve a total asshats purpose for the moment.

I know that if it weren’t a Damage Meter ranking, then it would be using Armory to be judgmental over a players’ gear, or ridiculing their reputation advancement, or their spec, or whatever else they could find to hurt someone else to make themselves feel special. The core issue is not the Damage Meters, but the existence of the asshats themselves.

But I have this horrible dilemma.

My ignore list is full!

Please, Blizzard, please, make the ignore list larger…. much, much larger.

I do go in every 6 months or so and delete every name in my ignore list to make room… I have found that I almost never see any of those names pop up again. Almost as though the players I put on ignore for their behavior in the first place never stay on that toon more than 6 months.

But I’d like to have a list long enough where I don’t have to run that risk.

This didn’t start out as a rant, but being it’s coming from me, guess what this turned into?

This one is all about Damage Meters and the people that use them.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you are fortunate. Run away now. Now, I tell you!

Since running Karazhan with the guild, I have once more had to come face to face with the players that are obsessed with Damage Meters. Coincidentally enough, they are the same players that obsess over PvP. Can we draw some conclusions there? Sure, I probably will later, just for fun. And because they annoy me, so if I insult even one of them it will give me warm fuzzies.

A quick break down is this; Damage Meters is an addon, or a generic term for any addon that tracks the damage done by each member of the party or raid, and compares them, displaying the results usually in a ‘top 10′ format. This comparison can also be done for amount healed, amount OVERhealed, etc. And you can broadcast the results to a channel. Such as the raid channel.

It CAN have a positive use for a guild. If a group of players are pretty tight, and willing to listen to constructive criticism when it’s presented in a respectful way and backed up by comparative “apples to apples” math, then it can be used to compare the damage output of a pair of hunters, or rogues, or the overhealing done by various healers, and help guild or class officers to pinpoint areas of player skill that can be improved with training or practise.

Whew! I love run on sentences!

So, sounds good, right? Yeah, too bad that’s not how it gets used.

Instead, what you get is an asshat that thinks that being #1 on raw damage output in a run makes them the most valuable member of the run, and also gives them a license to talk shit or belittle other members of a run.

I have personally been part of a failed Black Morass PUG run, as the tank, where a full Tier 5 rogue pulled aggro away from me constantly… just a horrible run. And afterwards, when we were trying to talk about how to approach the fight for the second try, the rogue broadcasts the Damage Meters tally, with him proudly at #1, and declares that someone needs to go… and obviousy it’s not HIM that was the weak link.

And that there is one of the biggest problems of Damage Meters. There is more to any run than just who pumped out the most damage. But the asshats don’t want to hear that.

For example, in our Karazhan runs we have taken two different hunters in the last week. Both of them have shown excellent skill in trapping and re-trapping mobs on the pulls. Both of them have kept control of the situation when it goes into the crapper, and both have been joys to work with.

When Damage Meters gets broadcast across the raid channel, inevitably they are both showing up at around #7 or #8.

Who is #1? Why, a warlock or mage, of course… although a retribution paladin is close behind.

I find myself amused to see that I, when tanking, am hitting around #5.

Wow! A feral tank at #5 on Damage Meters! I must be overpowered! Feral bear druids are melee DPS! (yeah, right).

Or, just perhaps, we should examine what ELSE a class is responsible for beyond damage output? Maybe something else is going on there? Hmmm?

As a feral tank, my threat is closely linked to damage output. I sit there and pound away as hard as I can, using every drop of rage to get aggro and hold it. Therefore, that #5 represents the absolute best damage I can generate.

The hunter, on the other hand, is running around trapping and retrapping targets, and hey, guess what? On 80% of the pulls the warlock or mage is pulling aggro and yanking a mob straight back into the casters… and forcing the hunter into melee range.

What Damage Meters do is provide a way for players that get off on bragging that they are better than other players to have some math to prove they are right.

And boy, what do they do to get high up in the Damage Meter rankings? Why they pour out the damage as fast as they can…. and put out so much threat that they pull a mob on top of themselves, and die in one or two blows.

I think of Damage Meters as the ignorant redneck stepchild of Threatmeters.

Threatmeters provide a way for a raid group to see exactly how much healing or damage they can do to a target, without drawing it’s attention away from the tank. Hear that? Without drawing it’s attention away from the tank!

We have been pulling together as a team lately in Karazhan. Those who care about others and are trying their best are being noticed, and those that are in it for themselves are also being noticed. It is only a matter of time before we get it all together and become a strong, consistent team. I’d say the majority are already there.

But it’s becoming clear to me that the people I want to run with aren’t necessarily those that are at the top of the Damage Meters rankings and trumpet the fact.

No, it’s the players that are doing MORE than spamming their attack button as fast as they get the mana. It’s the player that sets their trap, sends their pet to help me, hits misdirect to pull their designated mob to the trap, and then does damage to my mob in a carefully measured stream while watching their trap and readying the next step in the chain.

It’s the Warlock that banishes the demon on the pull, keeps an eye on it while doing carefully measured damage to my mob, and gives out a countdown of the last seconds before the Banish is due to expire so we are prepared.

And by Elune, it’s the mage that comes in second in the Damage Meter rankings… but never once pulled aggro away from me during the run. NOT ONCE.

Now that is something to brag about.

Oh yeah… and to anyone that consistently pulls aggro away from me with ranged damage, drags the mob into melee range of the hunter, and then after the run insults the hunters’ low Damage Meter ranking? Yeah, I got two words to say to you, and they ain’t Merry Christmas.