Estarriol

You will have to make sushi for me some day!

I had a pretty aggressive monopoly of Golden Lotus while I was there. I didn't think Stormscale was all bad, though I will say I enjoy Stormreaver much more. May have something to do with the company.

I think there were still plans to do some t14 stuff tonight around normal raid time, but I am relatively certain I would be forgiven for hopping out for a few minutes. I will be home about 6:30ish EST at the lastest, so tonight or before raid tomorrow would work well for me. I am essentially unavailable come Friday.

You know me so well. Fisticuffs to the death if you do that. -.-

Greetings Shaffer, I see that, as always, Hip pretty much has you covered, but I'd also like to toss in a few questions and comments of my own. This, honestly, concerns me a bit. You say in your intro that you thoroughly research fights ahead of time, but here it kind of seems like you didn't. Between normal and heroic, there aren't many major changes for tanks, especially in regards to Talon Rakes. I know the timing can be a bit hairy, but when you're on the boss it is basically the same fight as normal, it just hits harder. I feel that it should have been apparent to you that the timing of the major-damage abilities are essentially the same and the dungeon journal should have been able to give you an idea of how to rotate your CDs. You would have had a special advantage in timing your CDs by asking your tanking buddy ahead of time how many Rakes you'll take and if 3min CDs will have time to come back up. I did exclusive 10m tanking until this current tier and one of the largest challenges I faced was learning to not only rotate my own CDs well, but to also be able to be comfortable calling for external CDs. How well-equipped are you to thoughtfully call for external CDs? How does the other tank's survivability factor in? Alright, so there's been a bunch of talk about survivability through CDs and active mitigation, but you also have a wealth of unique utility available to you. How have you utilized your toolkit to aid your raid? When researching fights, how do you try to determine what talents and glyphs would be best? How do you plan the use of your toolkit prior to trying out a new fight? Lastly, a strong connection to my tanking buddy is of the utmost importance to me. How comfortable would you be talking over fights between attempts and before raids with me? Are you familiar with warriors and do you feel you could adapt your playstyle to make optimal use of us both?

Nice deduction, Tiny. =p Yes, he's my friend. He is a really good guy who I've known for a couple of years now, I think.

It kind of answered one question. Using multiple BoPs is really a staple at this point, but BoP is not the only thing paladins can offer you, especially with Clemency. Did you take advantage of the Hands of Sac available to you? What about other CDs in the raid group (pain suppression, Ironbark, Vigilance, etc)?

I can't say for the particular weak aura you use and I've never raided anything particularly difficult on my DK, but I haven't seen the slight lag as a big isuue. It serves to give an indication, but it's generally pretty easy to have an intuitive sense for when you would get sizeable heals. As for runes, have you tried arcHUD? It can be a bit faint, but I am fairly happy with its ability to show runes. I think Hip's got the survivability questions covered, but I've noticed there hasn't been much of a discussion about your unique utility as a DK. How do you, as a tank and as a DK, use your toolkit to assist your team? How do you help to assure the success and survival of your friends? One of the biggest transitions for me going from an exclusive 10m background to 25m was the necesity of not only using my personal cooldowns well, but also making thoughtful use of the cooldowns of others. Any thoughts as to how you could approach this particular challenge?

Best of luck. =)

Fridays are rough for me. I get out of class at 6pm EST, home around 6:30 EST. I'm free all of Saturday and Sunday, though.

I've been wondering about you. Best of luck in whatever you decide to do from here.

I remember my habits as a 10m tank and they make me cringe. Using large amounts of rage for pure damage output instead of mitigation was perfectly viable, especially for farm content, and cooldowns were things to be used only for periods of high damage. During my interview, Ashin and Hip put a substantial amount of effort attempting to describe to me that the difference of damage intake isn't just more, it's punishing and nearly overwhelming at almost all times. It was said to me at one point that one of the largest difference between 10m and 25m is that for 10m, you use your CDs when your life is in immediate danger and that for 25m, your life is in immediate danger whenever you do not have a CD up. Honestly, it sounded a bit silly to me when I first heard it, but through my experience this tier I've seen that it is absolutely the truth. The largest challenge of adapting to this mindset is finding how to keep yourself covered while also having enough cooldowns to deal with the highly damaging mechanics of the fight. If you can't adapt to this method of using cooldowns you will get destroyed, so it's one of the most important questions for a 10m tank to answer.

Hmm. I was wanting flowers and you bring me words. Even so, hello, Heisenberg. It's a bit of nostalgia to see you apply here (I was Fatal Americans' tank if you don't recall). Best of luck with your application and welcome!

Have a good externship!

Welcome.

Keep up, Tiny!

At 2/13H, I can see why you say this. Otherwise, it is quite laughable. Phase 1 is pretty calm, phase 2 hurts substantially, especially that first Triple Puncture after Jalak dies. The 2nd red head and 5+ green head on Megaera hurt more than P1 Horridon, as do aspects of most of the other heroic fights this tier. Other than Jin'rohk, of course. He's a pansy.

Shoulders drive me insane in this game. Half the time I give up on transmog sets because I can't find a set of shoulders that doesn't impale the side of my head every time I swing my axe.

It was fun, too. =)

I think this line makes my day. Healers just need to learn to Heroic Leap better!

You must be swift as the coursing river!

Nice of you to give your group some warning. Welcome to SoH!