Doomguard - Get it while its hot

If you're a warlock, and you haven't done this quest line, go out and do it. Right now.

Especially if you're a raiding warlock and you have a pesky mage and hunter you want to beat on the DPS meters.

Why? Because a buffed Doomguard does over 1000 DPS. ONE THOUSAND! Thats about 750 more than your average fel hunter (if you're affliction spec'd like me).

And in case people freak out, they should know that Doomguard no longer kills party members. He just does a bit of damage when he's summoned.

The quest line, for a level 80, is really very easy. I only died once, and that was my own doing.

Here's my brief guide:
First, go to Stormwind.
Second, fly out to Nethergarde Keep in the Blasted Lands.

I suppose you could also go to Shattrath, and then fly to the Portal and just go through backwards. Might even be quicker.

So, then you run out to the Tainted Scar, and head north, and go find Daio the Decrepit and get the two quests from him.

One which sends you to Winterspring, and one which sends you to Dire Maul.

Now, Winterspring is straight forward, so I won't go over that beyond, fly there, run south, kill mobs.

Since Dire Maul can be a bit tricky, here's Abs's guide:
You see, what you might not know is that there's a back door to DM, that's due north of Camp Mojache.

You don't have your key, you say? No problem.

Lifetap down as far as you can, and self-suicide with hellfire. Run past the door, and rez on the other side of it.

Walk right in, and you'll find the demon mobs you need to kill right by that door.

Once those two quests are done, you can head back to Tainted Scar, where the same fellow will give you one more follow up quest -- still pretty easy if you're careful, don't go pulling 8 mobs at once.

Then, all you gotta do is be very careful, find one of the guys you need to trap, and do a 10 second channel on him.

Why careful? Because you really don't want to aggro the other mobs around there, they have a ton of HPs and they'll still smoosh ya good.

Anyway, once you get your Doomguard, get some friends to summon it, it lets you do things like this:

Malygos, how I loathe thee

We spent nearly two full hours wiping on Malygos-10 tonight. Our biggest issue being, lack of DPS in Phase 1.

Deaths were not a problem, aside from stupid tank deaths when I moved too far away from the healers a couple times ;)

All I can say, is this fight was the most intense fight I've had to do as a tank. Spacial and raid awareness is at its peak, as instead of worrying just about mob placement, I'm worrying about Sparks, gigantic dragon placement, raid placement, strafing, and threat.

We only managed phase 3 once, but its a big long learning experience, and I think we're getting closer and closer to getting that all-important phase 1 down.

Our biggest issue was stacking the sparks right on top of one another, so if anyone out there has input on Maly, and spark stacking in ten man (that doesn't involve "bring more Deathknights") please, share.

Also, we run a melee heavy raid (had 2 hunters, and 4 melee dps and me tanking along with 3 healers), is that going to be a problem for us in phase 2?

I don't know.

All these questions, yet, after a night of personal frustration, after thinking about it... we did pretty well to get as far as we did.

Each attempt we improved. Each time the sparks got smoother and smoother, and my kiting the big dragon in circles got better and better.

Maybe our overall DPS was a bit low. Maybe it was because I still haven't upgraded my titansteel boots. STILL.

Revamping the UI

I've taken to revamping my UI, right now still playing around with a few things, but here's the current setup:

Addons I'm currently using:

PitBull: Portraits, party, group bars
Quartz: Cast bars and swing timer
Elk's Buff Bars: Buffs and Debuffs
Omen
Recount
CT Viewport: Gives the nice black background on the bottom
Simple Minimap: Minimap addons
Dominoes: Buttons, bars, etc.
Minimap Button Frame: Pulls all my minimap buttons into the frame on the bottom right

And I use Addon Control Panel to manage all of them.

Now, to put all my tanking buttons in the right spots...

Being a better tank

So, while I'm standing in one spot, speakers turned up, waiting for tiny hearts to fly over a Night Elf's head I thought I'd write a blog post.

Since I'm going to be revamping my UI tomorrow (when I finally have time), I wanted to blather on and try to make sense of all my buttons.

I've been tanking bigger and badder things lately, and I've really been trying to "use all my buttons" as a warrior. The problem is, there's 12 of them.

Yes.

12.

Shield Slam
Shield Block
Revenge
Shield Bash
Devastate
Heroic Strike
Taunt
Thunder Clap
Demo Shout
Shockwave
Concussion Blow
Cleave

Now, this does not include, Charge, Intervene, Heroic Throw, Berserker Rage, Shield Wall, Last Stand, Enraged Regeneration, Healing Pots, Healthstones, Trinkets, "Shoot"....

What does this mean? Why do you care?

Warriors have a TON of buttons to press. I can't speak for the other tanking classes, but sometimes, it gets a little overwhelming.

So, here I go trying to reduce things down a little bit:
Heroic Strike is for (single target) boss fights. Cleave is for trash. So I swap those on my hot bar.

I want to improve. I want to do more DPS while I'm tanking these bosses. My threat is plenty high for the DPS I run with, but I still want to jack it up even more.

Ways I can improve:
-Use Concussion Blow. I basically use it as a stun on trash now. Never on boss fights. This will change.
-More Heroic Strikes. I try to hit it for every melee swing, but I miss quite a bit. I can get better at this
-Less devastates, more other threat moves. I should use shockwave every time its off cooldown.
-Keep Commanding shout up more. I'm terrible at this.
-Keep Demo shout up. Why do I keep Thunderclap up no problem, but always forget Demo?

If anyone has suggestions on keyboard layout, macros, etc that they use for tanking for all these buttons, please, feel free to share.

KT. Down. Dead. Kaputz.

Yeah, its 10 man, yeah, it took us 4 wipes to get him down. Yeah, it sucked having 5 melee in the raid on that fight.

But, we did it.

Once again, as raid leader, I'm immensely proud and sold on our group's success. We're not a hard core guild. We don't raid for 4 hours at a time. We just plug along, we have fun, we banter -- but raid time is raid time.

People concentrate, bunker down, ask questions, remind me when I forget stuff (like - stay out of the red swirling circles of doom)

When we downed Sapp (with no bugged Raid ID like last week... srsly!), my guildies overwhelmingly wanted me to have the first Maly key. It surprised me. I'm just glad it didn't go to Boon.

He's evil.

I've got a bunch of posts in my head, that I need to write. Including some tanking insights, and some raid leading insights.

Hopefully I'll post more regularly with the coming days.

Right now, I'm thinking I need to revamp my UI. Fun times!