Avoidance vs Stamina

This is one of the hot topics of tanking and has been for a very long time now; essentially an argument, with one side arguing for the supremacy of their choice of tanking style, based on either avoidance or stamina. This means that one side prefers to stack gear that increases their dodge and parry, allowing them to avoid most of the hits that a raid boss throws at you. Stamina based tanking still has a lot of avoidance, but relies instead on a large health pool, letting more hits land and survives because he can take the hits.

Reading discussions like mmo-champion forum threads, gives me a strange sense that we have entire culture of tanks clashing, with avoidance tanks carrying themselves a lot like french nobility, sophisticated and demure, believing in supremacy through class. Their attitude towards stamina tanks seems very much like talking to hicks and hillbillies. Of course, this is not true but the general attitudes are fascinating :)

So, which side is right, which is better?

I would like to say that everyone are born equal but this is not true. Sadly, stamina tanks are just more reliable than avoidance tanks. The answer lies in studying current raid design, with bosses that hit massive. Anyone who has been tanking Ulduar hard modes know how much damage is flies around with bosses like Freya or the Assembly of Iron.

The general rule is that you have to be able to survive at least two boss hits without a heal. Shrewed but so is life. With Freya's hard mode, the hits that she lands on you are consistently around 18k. That means that as a tank, you much have more than 36k health after all the raid buffs, along with a healthy sortment of cooldowns because extra damage from ground tremors.

A tank with 39k health can survive this no problem. An avoidance tank, with 35k health will dodge most of the hits, but that is like playing russian rulet. Eventually the minority occurs and he will take two hits in a row, quickly dying, taking rest of the raid with him. This is what it essentially comes down to and each time the stamina tank is simply more reliable.

From a healer's point of view, this is even more desirable because healers like predictability. As a death knights, I'm no strange to healer-rage about taking heavy spike damage, so this is especially important for me. Avoidance tanks are prone for a lot more, big spikes of damage that can lead to unnecessary wipes, even in easier raids or even heroic dungeons, if a healer is unable to react quick enough.

And before you spam my mailbox, shouting that it doesn't happen with good healers, do not bother. I have been tanking with healers of all shapes and colors, so I know it happens more often than some like to admit. The same story is told by many avoidance tanks, feeling unfairly treated when they are removed from raids because of low health pools, even if they have the achievements to proove they can do it.

However, you cannot blame this on raid leaders. An experience raid leader wants reliable tanks. Running with an unreliable one is like driving a car with nitroglycerin for gas; could blow up at anytime and even more with pugs, can blow your raid up along with it. In the end it also just comes down to raid design and Ulduar is a prime example of this; an encounter's difficulty curve is not so much in the mechanics, but just in surviving the massive damage.

Take the hard mode of the Iron Council; once only Steelbreaker is left, it comes down to a dps race. The tanks literally sacrifice themselves to buy that time for them, with the first tank blowing his cooldowns until he blows up and then the second tank does the same thing. There, if you do not have the health to survive, you are useless and this is true for most Ulduar encounters.

Union of the Three Towers

It is no secret that summer is a bane for raiding guilds, for most of a guild's roster will not be available for majority of the raids and they rather go on holidays, camping, out and just generally spend their time with family and friends. However, this is no reason to stop a guild's progress. you can get away with a lot, even under difficult circumstances.

We almost did not get a raid together last night, but what first started as a walk in the park, just killing time, taking down easy bosses like Malygos, actually turned into a progression. Naturally, I was happy as a cucumber because I finally got my Malygos kill. From there, we were just suppose to take down Flame Leviathan on easy mode and call it the night.

Thanks to Maaki, our resident imbalanced mage, the suggestion circulated that we should go wild and try it with three towers. I had never done it with more than one and the guild had never done it with more than two. But heck, browse some wowwiki.com and after a 15 minutes of talking tactics, we were ready.

What we did was settle on simplified tactics. We only had one choppa for the encounter and my demolisher was the only one dedicated to throwing dps on the boss. Usually tactics say you need two on the boss, but we only needed one at a time. The first dps loaded into my catapult just before the fight started and my first button was #6.

We would then rotate the two in my demolisher; open up with pyros before first overload, reload before it came and again open up with everything once the overload came. As the choppa picked the dps up, my second passanger got on the catapult and the moment overload ended, he was already on the boss.

For the towers, we chose to leave out Life, for it has to be the hardest one, mitigating damage that the boss take and constantly summoning adds that you have to deal with. So keeping storm, flame, and frost we had to constantly dodge the various light pillars and constantly moving fire aoe but it was all surprisingly easy. The trick is to a) always empty you pyros on the boss when an overload comes b) do not take unnecessary damage from the elements, and c) do not let the boss hit you.

When driving a demolisher, always try to move to a vicinity of the falling pyros that both demolisher should be constantly shooting down. Your passanger should give you a boost for a quick getaway, if and when the Flame Leviathan chooses to come after you.

In the end, you will get a glowing achievement bar for your trouble and believe me, it feels really good ;-)

Ulduar Breakdown

Ulduar is, in every way, a step up from Naxxramas. Of course, your gear has to be much better than what you could venture into Naxxramas. It is designed for full naxx10 gear, but having bits from the 25-man instance helps a lot. The fights are now much more complex, and in my opinion, more unforgiving. I remember people complaining about the nuances of defeating the Four Horsemen or Kel'Thuzad, but I think it is safe to say, Ulduar takes it all much further.

Looking at the first four bosses, they are by far the simplest on the complexity scale, on par with the toughest in Naxxramas, but if you are geared and know the tactics, they should not constitute a huge problem. In fact, the same way that arachnid- and plague quarters in Naxxramas, the first four of Ulduar can easily become the farm bosses for most guilds that venture in.

From there, the fights quickly begin to get tougher. From the antechamber, both Kologarn and Hodir were quite fun for me. True, the new guys (me being one of them) struggled a bit on Hodir but after a couple of takes, dodging the flash freeze and falling rock became quite fun. The one annoying boss, was Auriaya and her two cats. I am by nature a tank, even if I spend most of my time as DPS, and as such I like fights that I can control. If there is chaos on the battlefield, it puts me off and the two cats are an epitome of chaos. The quicker you take them down, the better you will be off.

When you get to the keepers, you are truly inside Ulduar. Tougher than anything you have seen in WotLK, by far (not counting Sartharion with three drakes). We took down Thorim fairly easily, thanks to the fact that we had some experienced people on board but both Mimiron and especially Freya, were a bane. Both bosses share the fact that there are a lot of things to keep track of on the screen and it takes quite a lot out of you, whether it is avoiding mines, dodging shotgun shots, looking for the healing tree, or coordinating to kill lashers. And in middle of all that, you should also do some decent dps.

It is difficult to explain how hard we tried to take Freya down. We did it eventually, with a near flawless performance in the end but I have to say, it was an undertaking. People say that many of the fights in Ulduar are strictly a gear check, like XT-002. While that might be true, Freya on the other hand, is a check on team work. Everyone has to pitch in; to kill the trees, aoe the plants, kill the three children at the same time, and free rooted compared. After my experience, I am a firm believer that until your group can really work as a team, you will fail on Freya.

From there, the next two bosses are naturally only General Vezax and the old god himself, Yogg-Saron. I could not make the last raid so I was only there for two attempts on Vezax but the fights do continue quite complicated. For me, as a death knight, Vezax is very easy because I am unaffected by his most frustrating ability; Aura of Despair which prevents almost all mana regeneration. Healers especially however are at the receiving end of that fight though, without a doubt always running out of mana and having to dodge in and out of green puddles.

Yogg-Saron will be an interesting fight and I cannot wait to get a chance to face him on next lockdown. Research has promised an interesting battle of wills; as another fight with multiple phases and many small nuances. As a whole, I have come to enjoy Ulduar very much. The fights are interesting and very colorful. There are a myriad of challenges and there is much to look forward to, and not not in only killing Yogg-Saron but gearing up for the hard modes and beginning a spree for a bucket load of achievements.

Ulduar Nerfed

I just got onto the blogsphere about this subject and it is raising mixed feelings in me. Nothing beats live testing by millions of players around the clock and it is inevidable that many things needed to be tweaked. However, the reason I was personally very excited over Ulduar was because it represented a step up from Naxxramas, as far as difficulty curve was. It was exciting for the very reason that it was suppose to be difficult.

This is my main grudge here. Seems Blizzard is nerfing Ulduar too much now and it is just becoming another Naxxramas, a farm instance for any uninitiated raiding guild, when it is suppose to represent finess and skill for those who clear it.

Please do not get me wrong, I applaude to the idea that raiding has become more accessible to people who have jobs, children, and life outside the game and who do not claim to represent the highest elite of gamers. This is a good thing because raiding is a natural part of a character's evolutionary process and everyone should be priviledged to experience it.

However, there should still be a line I think, from where on out the game actually gets harder, even for raiders. The difference in 10-man and 25-man versions makes sense. There is a really tangible shift when you move from one to the other, with many Naxx encounters becoming really hard on 25-man versions.

In Ulduar, I would expect the 10-man encounters be on the par with 25-man Naxx and the 25-man encounters to go beyond the hardest of what Naxx 25 has to offer. But now it seems this simple logic is becoming escewed and no one anymore knows what the difficulty curve is. The fact that most bosses also have what's called a Hard Mode only adds unnecessary complexity to it. We already had a mechanism for that in place pre-3.1.

This was the achievement system. To get an achievement to run heroic encounters in a more difficult manner or finishing a wing of Naxxramas with less than nine people already provided what we needed for gifted players to set themselves apart. Sounds to me that Blizzard is just trying too hard. All we really needed was another Naxx size raid instance, which Ulduar delivers beautifully, with an increased level of difficulty and better gear drops.

Let us hope Blizzard doesn't break by fixing what just doesn't need fixing.