Tuesday, July 22, 2008

In Which Prin Convinces D to Go Heroic

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We've run the Imba reports (thanks, Misery, for the link!) We've spent hours pouring over Druid blogs and picked up some valuable advice. We've upgraded gems and re-distributed the over-capped Defense / Resilience. We've practiced on dozens of quests, lower-leveled 5-mans, and even the Nagrand Circle of Blood event. We're ready.

By "we," of course, I mean D's feral Druid. I know that he can tank a beginning heroic. I KNOW it. All we need is 3 other people, one of them a healer, who understand that it's a learning process.

But see - there's the problem. Prin's a decent 5-man healer, if pressed to be, but everything I've read says, "don't try to heal a heroic while Shadow-specced." And if I'm not the healer, then some stranger will be putting his repair bill into D's hands - and that's a lot of pressure for my bear. So - any words of advice out there from experienced bear tanks?

2 comments:

dfv said...

My partner is a pally healer and she often remarks that healing bears is easier than a warrior tank.

So, I reckon you could do (some) heroics as shadow spec, providing you pick something on the easier side (i.e Slave Pens) and go with a bunch of CC (a couple of mages) and nothing that takes much splash damage. i.e melee

Hey - if it turns out that his gear is not up to it, or your healing isn't, at least you would have had the experience, and second time around you could dps and he'd be more confident with the pulls.

I guess all you can do is try. Isn't that what guildies are for?

Anonymous said...

When I first started with heroics the one I did often when I first got geared for them was Ramparts. It's a very forgiving heroic and easy for the beginning tank. The biggest problem going to a heroic is sometimes mobs hit as hard as a boss so the whole team paying attention to aggro is pretty big.

But with Ramps the druid can actually CC for a bit and hibernate pull on some of them (and follow up with moonfires before going bear). If you don't have a lot of CC (mages/hunters work best, rogues are situational since the dogs see stealth) and are getting hit too hard early make sure to always use the minute-cooldown stun early on to prevent too much initial pain, especially if your healer is also just venturing into heroics too.

Just a few tips, hopefully they're helpful.