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Thank you for all the welcomes and very nice to meet everyone!!

The name comes from two different parts ...

1.) There are seven of us ... me, my wife, and 5 kids (college to 6th grade .. hehe)

2.) I try to live by the belief that there is a Knight in all of us.

So, that's it!!

Hi Az,

A question about your style... when you engage the boss (or mobs for that matter), do you try to turn them around so their back is to the party? I ask this as your deeps are more likely to incur damage if they fight beside you, into the front of the bad guys, rather than from the side or even better, the back. If your deeps are beside you, your healer will probably feel morally obliged to keep the alive, though the healer's priority should be themselves>tank>deeps.

Ironshield's suggestion of judging 'light' may be an answer, but I would hold off on that until you reach 74 and acquire Divine Plea, which is your best mana tool, hence instead of healer going oom at a bad moment, it will be you, and that's just as bad. Don't forget, you can throw yourself a heal from time to time too, which will help the healer out.

It's also important to take a look at healer's mana bar between pulls. Most healers have their own level of comfort, some it's 60%, some 75%... my wife likes 100%... each healer is different. You will get a feel for it.

I took a huge confidence hit in my early 70s, running PUGs with better geared DPSers. I chose to concentrate on questing to get better gear. In hindsight, I may have been better off to persevere. My advice would be to tank instances unless you feel enjoyment wavering. If you can afford to dual spec, you could build up a ret set and continue questing and DPS through the dungeons so you learn them (watching videos hasn't helped me one iota!) while you continue questing. I couldn't afford dual spec until level 76 myself but I kept buying gear to try and keep ahead or at least with the DPSers.

Main thing is, have fun.

i also use tm and i believe it is awesome!!!!! i do have one question tho, anybody using bartender 4? i downloaded spartanui which comes with bt4, and i have figured out pretty much everything i need atm but i cannot unlock the tm frame and move it to where i want so ...

I used Spartan UI for nearly an hour once. I didn't like how small all the icons were. But if you like it, power to you. As for moving TM, just left click on the icons and drag it to where you want it. I have it a little to the right of my line of vision when tanking for a quick cursor response. I think I made the boxes a little larger than default too so I can easily find the target.

i also use tm and i believe it is awesome!!!!! i do have one question tho, anybody using bartender 4? i downloaded spartanui which comes with bt4, and i have figured out pretty much everything i need atm but i cannot unlock the tm frame and move it to where i want so currently when in 25 man raids one toon is all the way down at the bottom semi transparent and covered by action bars. another problem i am having is when i mouse over something the tooltip pops up over even more of the frames making it difficult to throw taunt or rd or hop on those specific toons, i hate to say it but ive had to just allow them to become casualtys of war, but every now and then the mt/ot is that bottom toon so i cant do that to my brada, ive found things in interface that limits how much info is in the popups but i have yet to find anything to eliminate them completely. any help would b awesome.

Hey Blood,

Just to concur with the jist of the thread and add my commiserations and prayers and best wishes for the future.

I see the tendancy towards addiction in myself and I'm trying my best to keep it in check. I have been hooked on other games / hobbies before (including things as mundane as Farmville) but the difference (and danger) with WoW is the shear scale of things... it takes a lot longer to get bored and the multiplayer aspect encourages you to try advance at an artificial pace to keep ahead of others. I am trying to force myself to go at a sedate pace, and remind myself that a couple of emblems of frost are really not important... but the temptation is huge.

Anyway all the best!

PS on behalf of the WoW community, don't worry about virtual friend's feelings about not seeing you at a time this. Any reasonable person would definitely understand that you have more important things to deal with!

Thanks for that link. I figured there was something like that out there.

I am distraught, to say the least. I have always been the kind of person who imagines the worst. And that's not a good person to be. Since I have not heard from Paula yet (well, she said she would call Sunday and Sunday is 2 days away... and maybe that's just the timeline she gave herself, and is sticking to it...) I'm going crazy imagining all the worst scenarios.

I have to go to work this morning... no, I shouldn't say "have to" because I did not go yesterday and I was covered. (Substitute teachers are a dime a dozen, lol... or not-so-lol...)  But I will make the attempt today. I just can't shake my thought processes and the fact that my guts are twisting and turning.

You know that opening sequence of Trash in ICC, where if ya don't get all the party in thru the door, the mobs keep coming? That's kinda how I feel. And that's the first 'Wow thought' I've even came close to having since getting home Tuesday. Once again I did not log in last night, sorry to anyone who may have been looking for me. At this point I just don't think I can handle it.

I just want my life back. The real life I should have been giving Paula all along. I've cried my eyes, my mind, my heart out until my face is a swollen red blob, eyes and all. I'm trying not to cry this morning.

Well, I'm just going in circles. I've been given so many wakeup calls that I did not heed... I just hope that me waking up NOW! has helped. I'll check in this evening, or earlier... You guys comments do indeed help.  Thanks.   

I for one love reading these long posts, probably 'cause I'm wab'ing (Work Avoidance Behavior) at the office, but still.

I ran UK last night and the first time I've really just chain pulled everything, I'm really OP'ed for it now and it was great fun. On Ingvar, you do know to hide straight after the res right? It's a 10% increased shadow damage debuff.

The spider kingdom runs are very twisty turny, I'm only just getting comfortable with the route now after a lot of runs through there. But they DO have a map, which most instances don't.

One thing to watch out for is the last boss on Azjol (i think) the one on the platform at the bottom of the stairs. Don't engage until everyone is ON the platform. I've had a few DPS locked out even after I asked them to step on.

Otherwise, always go at your pace, (I haven't waited for an instance in absolute ages where as DPS are easy to replace) pand level appropriate dungeons are designed to be tricky at you level, so don't let a DPS'er gogogo you into a wipe.

All you can do to help healer mana is judge light (heal yourself effectively) and hold that aggro (only one person to heal). Also make sure you keep an eye on the healer mana and slow down if she's battling so she can drink occasionally. Before I went addon nuts I used to set my healer as my focus so I could easily see of they had aggro and how they were doing for mana. Remember your healer is your number 1 priority!

Keep at it and enjoy yourself.

Well what a difference a day makes

I typed the above yesterday (while it was still fresh in my mind) but delayed posting it – after reading Bloodniron’s post –

But for completion’s sake I have decided to post it now. I have left it as was but as you can see we had a much better night last night

Last night, with some trepidation, we entered the Dungeon Finder queue again, and as last time the random dungeon came up instantly.

Utgarde Keep this time.

Again I have DPS’d it before so I knew the layout at least! The group was a similar group to previously

Me 72 Pally
Healer 72 Priest
71 DK
70 ‘lock
71 Mage

I had made a trip to the AH before entering the instance and bought any +def items that I could find that were reasonably close to my level, we also invested some hard earned gold in upgrading priest’s gear with some nice BoE blues. Not sure if it was that, a better PUG group, the extra level or that Utgarde Keep is WAY easier than the nexus to tank, but whatever it was, it went very smoothly.

We pulled group after group of trash and smashed them down, on the rare occasions that a mob broke free (normally onto the mage) I was able to drag it back before it got to him.

Prince Keleseth was downed with very little fuss. A little scrappy when all the skeletons appeared! But nothing that couldn’t be handled

Skarvald and Dalronn again we rattled through without any trouble at all. No mana problems for the priest and aggro under control.

Now some where between Skarvald and Dalronn and Ingvar the Plunderer the ‘lock went AWOL, I noticed she was ‘following’ the mage! LoL I suppose there has to be something in every PUG. We carried on with 4 up until Ingvar then had to decide whether to kick or go for it with 4!

We would have taken him down as well no problem if I hadn’t made another tanking error – I suppose its good to get these out of the way early and I am sure I will remember in future! – After Ingvar was rez’d by Annhylde the Caller he rushed me and did his whirlwind attack thingy, unfortunately I was too close to the healer and <<<SQUISH>>> without a healer and already being 1 dps down we wiped.

We went straight back in –kicked the ‘lock- and this time I ensured Ingvar kept well away from the rest of the party and it worked like a dream!

Still no decent plate drops mind –the plate chest dropped from Skarvald and Dalronn but again I am wearing heirloom - although the quest rewards were nice, not to mention the XP!

Next time I want to get through a whole instance without a wipe, that’s not asking too much surely! So any advice from you old hands would be appreciated.

Side Note: Call to arms AV started last night, already got another level from it although I must admit it is a little daunting being lvl72 (73 now) with all those 79s running about! We will do 1 dungeon finder a night to get our badges, hopefully, but I expect our weekend will be full of battlegrounds!

So question:

Now that we (Priest an I) are lvl73 I presume that means Dungeon Finder can give us Azjol-Nerub and Ahn'kahet as well. No doubt there will be some little surprises here for me as well – any gems I should be expected to know?

Thanks again for enduring a second wall of text – I will give you a run down of the weekend on Monday

Az

Thanks for the welcome everybody – feels like I am amongst friends already

Long post to follow – skip to the end to avoid boredom, or get coffee and cheesecake and (hopefully) enjoy the read! (and what for some of you level 80’s might be a trip down memory lane!)

Well I did it – After basically levelling through the second half of the 60’s during last weekends Call to Arms [crazy XP in there and I was sooooo sad to do that last Eye of the Storm as a lvl 69 prot pally lol >:-) got honor capped and spent it on the wrathful bracers] – I got some quest rewards from Borean Tundra/Howling Fjord and a few bits and pieces from the AH and queued as a tank using Dungeon Finder!

The queue didn’t last long (especially considering my wife is levelling a holy priest along side my pally!)

So before you know it we are in the nexus, I have DPS’d all the 5mans as a lvl80 feral druid (didn’t go in while I was levelling) so I knew the instance but never as a tank (apart from popping bear VERY occasionally on the odd occasion when the tank has died, which doesn’t really count!)

Fortunately someone else had the leader flag so that took a little of the pressure off and I had read a little about tanking the bosses. But it was still more than a little nerve wracking. Fortunately we had no insane suicidal DPS, once the obligatory mage had ‘left raid’ because we weren’t going fast enough :p and things progressed relatively well through the trash once the boomkin had realised that I was meant to pull and not him!

Me 71 pally,
Healer 71 holy priest
69 rogue
71 boomkin
70 mage (after 72 left!)

On the first boss fight, Grand Magus Telesta, we wiped All was going great holding aggro and my mana bar full, the heals were landing health bar was fine.

Then…….

Healer is oom at about the point she splits and as you can imagine things go downhill pretty rapidly from there!

We head straight back in and this time we take her down, again priest runs out of mana but right at the end of the fight (last couple of % so no worries.)

On we go cutting a path through the trash up to the next boss, Anomalus, raid leader instructs DPS to concentrate on the Chaotic rifts as they form, and for me to hold any Crazed Mana Wraiths that escape before it is destroyed. DPS pretty much ignores these instructions and again we wipe don’t you just love PUGS!

Give them their due though we are straight back in and this time it all goes smoothly, druid innervates Priest towards end of the fight but we would probably have been just OK anyhow.

Ormorok is defeated with no difficuties, pretty much everyone keeps off the spikes

Then we headed back for Keristrasza. I’m going to tank a dragon

Again we go through the tactics, how to avoid the debuff and so on. I found the moving and tanking quite difficult here and I may have contributed to the wipe that followed I didn’t keep the boss still enough, in my defense however I was doing what I was told (how many times have we heard that used as an excuse before!) Again the priest goes oom and we are sooooooo close to downing Keristrasza but I die and the group wipes.

First time to avoid the debuff I was told to move, the raid leader modified the information to jump on the spot and second time was much easier! However the healer still ran out of mana right at the end of the fight, but my bars were full so we comfortably finished the fight off.

And by the way the only thing that dropped for me were the shoulders from Ormorok, which although nice I didn’t want to trade for the heirloom shoulders that I am wearing (and I lost the greed roll, lol.)

Well done for reading this far, or alternatively cheater for skipping to the end!

So on to the questions :p

How big a mana pool would you expect a lvl71 priest to have?

(I know this is a tanking forum but I am sure you all have at least a passing interest in what healers get up to!)

Is it normal for the healer to end a boss fight oom?

(I am presuming that as we were all about the right level for the instance and not way over powered that we found it difficult but ‘doable’ as was intended – it certainly was fun – am I right in this assumption?)

Is there anything that I can do to make the healer’s mana last longer?

(Apart from ensuring that I hold all the aggro of course!)

Do you recommend that I quest a little longer, my gear is still shocking in a couple of slots, before going into any more instances?

(I will of course trawl the AH regularly for improvements. What libram should I have at this level, because I am pretty sure it shouldn’t be the one I have and that’s the only one I’ve got!)

Should I respect immediately due to any terrible errors or omissions?

(I was planning on a respect at 80 to sort out all the little faux pas that I have committed along the way with my spec! Same goes for sorting my glyphs out!)

I would be really grateful if someone would take a quick look at my toon and maybe give me a couple of pointers on where to start at least with moulding him into an indestructible machine (or at the very least stop 3 wipes occurring in every instance that I try to tank :p lol )

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Jaedenar&cn=Azra%C3%A9l

I think the link works but I can’t check it from work

Thanks in advance for your help, sorry this post is so long, and I can’t wait to see your replies.

Az

Hi,

I also know where you're coming from. I was heavily addicted and so was my wife. Only difference is that I left my wife (now-ex) because she found a new online "boyfriend" in another country in WoW. Truth be told, I am thankful that she did, because it was a big eye-opener for me. We had 2 kids, so it was really unfair to them, but they weren't really getting any attention from us anyway.... Now I have new girlfriend who isn't a gamer at all (and thats a good thing). My order of priority now is very simple EVERYTHING ELSE>WoW. Only time I play WoW is when there is nothing else to do. So basically only time that I play is when I am home alone - and that is rare. Cannot fit raiding in the schedule and that is fine with me...done my share already. If you dont know how addictive wow is, check out www.wowdetox.com and you will see the destruction in its wake. Not the game's fault - true, but the game certainly helps

Velkaer - mostly logged off