Tag Archives: tanking

Needed to Get my Head in to My Role

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Something strange happened yesterday right before logging off Sunday afternoon. The DG/HotDW failed a quest… Yes that is damn strange for us and after a little thought on my 2/5 hour round trip drive that followed I think I figured out what happened, we had not yet gotten our heads into our roles. Let me explain.

Sunday, morning I wanted to cap out Darth (which we did btw) and did so by running the Druid Deep chain. So I was on zerg keep my Master’s Blitz running as long as possible mod. Tobril for example was on his namesake alt so DPS monky goodness (Not a Bowonk because he doesn’t like the name) Will was rocking the DPS on her Monk… Okay almost everyone was on a high DPS alt…. Then we switch to do a quick EE because this will be the last run that the Wife and I will be able to do.

I swap to Samius, Tobril his Tank and Will her Clr. Closer to our normal party but with Tobril and I flipping roles. Now that Samius is capped and ready for EEs again I think Tobril and I have an unspoken agreement that Sam is our epic caster and Tobril normally does our tanky stuff.

First fight of the quest, I zerg ahead and start insita-killing trash, but due to being in an off destiny things don’t happen as well as it should. Swapping tactics I am CCing and dpsing while watching the battle. I start to notice a few things but nothing overly bad, but clearly not the normal plan/style. The next two fights we start to find our footing a little better I CC a little differently waiting for Tobril to do his intim first. A few fights he intimed just before the trash would have hit the CC and prevented the CC from hitting some trash. But we are finding our grove.

We move on a little more when we get to a fight where there are some perched archers/casters. Here we CC and get things going. He intims I web and then start to get the archers CCed up when ½ the part goes to sleep and then I am stunned and people start to go squish…. There was a few things that happened right there vs how I normally handle things.

First of all most of the time I am the defacto “leader” I am constantly squawking out tactics and how I want things handled. Like I am going to pull back here, lets set up CC, etc. But I see that tactics talk as the “tanks” job at least in 6 mans.

6 man tanking is, to me, a lot different then raid tanking. In raids you are there to tank a few given mobs (most of the time) vs having to tank any given number of mobs at any/all the times.

So in my mind there was a commutation issue that happened. I know Tobril also felt is as there was some comments to that effect that you will see after I explain issue two.
Two, fight positioning. We didn’t set things up in the most tactical ways to use the terrain to make life easier. Which is strange as normally we do much better at that…. In the wiping fight we set up in a position where a few ranged mobs had line of effect on us. Which lead to my death and a few others as those ranged mobs took my sleepy/stunned body as a sign to shoot me. But also they shot up everyone else too at that caster/bard up on the ledge CCed us for his DPS to clean us up.

So as we wiped I asked what hit us with sleep? And I got the reply the bard. Oh,.. “Why didn’t we pull around out of those ranged guys anyway? I normally do?”

Tobril replied with something like maybe you could have commutated that before we wiped. Which I replied setting up the fights is the tanks job…

But I felt my anger rising and decided it was best to go ahead and head out as we needed to go in about 30 mins anyway and that wouldn’t be enough time to try again once everyone ran back as the key to Eveningstar has a stupidly long timer.

So maybe my role needs to be one in at the party level? Or maybe we needed a little warm up quest as we had all had our dps hats on for some simple eHs and switching to our eE set ups we need a little more mental focus? Not 100% sure but I will find out soon enough.

<3s

My Foray Into the EDs

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First of all Morn, or at least it is for me so lets try to make it a good one and keep that momentum running all day and make today a good one. But I don’t have high hopes for the day. With that out of the way lets talk about my experience with the Epic Destinies.

I think that two or three of my guys have EDs active, okay four. Butterz my bard, As400 my newest back to 20 wizard, Javabot my FvS and Samyus my tanky fighter and other then Samyus they don’t have more then a few ranks in to their EDs. But even with this little bit of experience I can tell you the EDs is the best thing Turbine as done for ddo in a long time.

Lets look at Samyus’ “plan”. As it stands I will be twisting in Run 30% faster from Master of Flowers. Which needed to be level 4 to cross in to Sentinel anyway… And 2 twists from Juggernaut, +6 to tactical feats and the Super swing attack. Leaving me to take Sentinel full time.

I will say I am in love with the Sentinel ED. So far in normal non-boss tanking questing Vigor of battle stance has been sweet. This stance is a lot of what makes me feel like I am a tank again. It is all thanks to this “Enemies you hit gain healing touch for 3 seconds: grants 10 temporary HP to targets they attack.” So I do one of my many cleave attacks and then all the baddies around me tmp Hp me up (30% of the time) giving me a HP buffer large enough to take them out. And that is just a lowly level 0 autogrant.

I have been using Bane of Undeath I have been soloing Epic Wizking on normal now that I can. Lots of Shield boosting via Shield Prowess (MORE AC) as Legendary Shield Mastery (MORE PRR) also the wiki doesn’t say but this line also gives you more double strike % when using a shield. I also am using Confront any Foe like 4 times a shrine for a nice little extra boost to damage for an attack. But that might not stay long term.. Speaking of things I have been using that was not what I was thinking it would be I took Healing Hands thinking any more self-healing would be good but it is hitting for 15 hp right now. I need to boost that a lot if I am going to make that work. I hope to fit in Intolerant Blow as a get back here if Intimidate is on timer.

Anyway, that is a little but on what I am/have been doing in the EDs. Sometime soon I will feel “done” and I will give a list of everything I am doing and why but not from memory.

Can’t wait until I start to play with the EDs on some of my other alts more. Butterz’ Fatesinger for example looks amazing. Aka songs as damage…

Anyway back to work.

❤

Scatter Shot of a Night

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I started off last night with the wife and Stiner doing elite Acid Wit and being asked to help finish it off as they had been working on it for almost an hour. It is easy to forget how long that quest can be. So I jumped in buff less but ready to go. Luckly for me they had all but the end fight done so it took me 5 mins to get 11k. For them I bet is was not as nice. Then they split up. Stiner needed to go and the wife after the drag on she just had wanted to get her get gear on. She had just greatered her very first alt she created one that has been left forgotten since the level cap was 16 until now.

So abandoned, I sent out the Fopo signal. And waited. Turns out Fopo was out with the wife and would be a while. So I got a jump start on my dual boxing/Wednesday project of leveling both a TRed Wizard and dragging around a new Arty on my son’s account. Level 3 now in about 2 hours of work. Not to bad.

Finally, Fopo logs on and we knock out a few Litany runs before it is time for him to go. Inching towards taking level 18. Must be strong and wait but man I am ready to burn threw the levels.

When he goes the guild decides after some chit chat to do a Vod real fast for xp for the wife. Tobril even gets me a Artificer. And that was a double edge sword. On the good side I got good on my weapons. On the bad he wouldn’t shut up. To the point where I sent tells to Tobril asking him to say something. But he didn’t he just tried to talk over the artificer and did some times. Others not so much. All I have to say is if you think that you can more or less solo everything then stop grouping and do it. Else let the others play too.

After words I was talked in to doing some challenges again for xp. Unlike most challenge runs I stayed on my tank and did some tanky things. Have to say I like playing him out side of raids more then I should.

So there you have it. A night with a little bit of everything. Tonight however had better net me some xp and level 18 or else.

❤

Lots of Hate

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One of the worries I have/had leveling Samyus (if you don’t remember he is now my AC tank) is having enough Dps/hate to keep agro with out having to spam the Intim button. My first attempt to tank once hitting 20 was a normal tod, where I got to play the Sully tank. And it went very well. Think I did a run down a few days back, even. But there was an arty to make my Sword (eFang) good aligned (Slotting it with good is next on my to do list. I swear) and even though I spammed the intim button I didn’t think holding agro was an issue, but of course that was with arty help. However, on Saturday I got to tank Sully in Tod again. Once again lead by Tobril. But this time he didn’t get an arty, I felt a little hosed….

Lets skip to level two of this run down. We all get started on the boss, the kiter takes off and life it good for 30- 40 secs. When the kiter goes down. Tobril yells for the back up kiter to go and to make with the mass cures until the new kiter gets the shadows off us. Not sure what happened with the healing. There were 3 people with divine symbols and a bard. I know that what your icon is doesn’t mean a lot but come on you can heal some, right?

Anyway, half the part wipes. Let alive is the kiter, Tobril, myself and two of the three healers and I think the bard. Shadows are hitting me for about 103 a tick. At this rate I am dead real soon. But I drink a pot and swing, swing swing, pot and repeat. Meanwhile I am telling the healers to get it together, and through a mass or two. I am down to 110 hp when I finally get a heal and then people start getting raised, and a recovery happened. Think the bard was paying attention and ended up saving us. But were close to taking a ride on the fail train.

Mean while I noticed that I had taken agro of the main boss from Tobril. Kinda surprising as I know he is mostly geared out. But I don’t think he was trying to hold agro over trying to stay alive. My hate on the other hand just happens. My efang is fully powered with the dragon marks and being in stance makes a lot of hate, so other then swapping to a smaller sword (and lowering my AC in the process) there is not a lot I can do to lower my hate. And I really didn’t want to lower my AC just then.

Moving on to part three, I was worried that with out a good I would loose agro against some of the barbs and other fighters in the raid. So I kept power attack on with the bard buffs I want to say my AC was again in the 86 range. So I was good with that. This time I watched a lot closer to when I was getting heals and whatnot. Looking for how well my AC is working and instead of hitting the intimidate button for the extra hate, I let it roll waiting until I needed to intim to regain the agro if I lost it.

On the healing, I never had more then 100 points of damage when a heal was cast. Most of the time I was in the 20-30 points of damage range. Never missed the extra 5 ac from combat expertise. So Ac is working well enough for normals well enough.

As for Hate/Agro I never needed to Intim, even with my yellow numbers. Didn’t need to swap into my Swashbuckler for the extra double strike. Don’t remember seeing a Disintegration proc. So all in all hate was working. And am very pleased with how easy someone can build an Ac tank. Yes I gathered a few epic items, the sword and the Cavalry Plate, nothing super hard to get.

Need to do some testing against Tobril soon and I want to finishing slotting a few little things (Good on the sword at least, would like to slot Dex on my slayer ring).But I don’t want to go nuts before the new pack hits. I think there might be some real winners coming with the level cap raise.

❤

Tank at Work

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So Wednesday night between Epic runs Tobril and I ran a ToD. He on his tank and me on mine. And it was a blast. This is how it went down.

Before we start we had one divine, a bard an an arty for heals. So more then enough if everyone has their B or better game on. But that was not how we started. We started with Lolz.

Part One, Tobril took wings and everyone else was on the Jailer. However he was in a throwing mood and for a while it was get to him or have him port to me and then work my way to the angels and get thrown again. We lost one or two squishy people to getting thrown into spikes. But once the Jailer died the judge went down fairly quick as everyone was full on dps at that point.

Part Two, I am not 100% sure what happened as just as we were wrapping up the Judge my battery back up started going full on nuts beeping and squealing to no end. As the modem as well as the wife’s computer both use it, a swap must be handled carefully. So she shutdown her computer and I logged out of game as soon as possible with out hurting the party and after looting my chests. 🙂

As soon as everything is off we swap things and plug things in to different places and get back in game. I get logged in and started running to part two as things started going poorly. People started to die. And then it was me standing outside the door to part two and a room full of shadows and a boss at 8%…. Thats okay. Think we will try again.

This time part one and two go much smoother. No deaths and all fights are a lot more under control.

So I get to play tank for real.

Right before I started to worry a little as I didn’t have another Dex item to swap into when booting up. But I bought some cats grace pots and had the Yugo pots when the AH didn’t have a +6 ring for sell. Thankfully after drinking up, my AC stayed the same.

Tobril took Horoith and I got Sulo. Don’t know how much damage I took from Sulo but it didn’t feel like a lot. I was always full or mostly full in the Hp department. My hate was in good form. Having some of the hardest hitters I know about going full on dps mode vs my AC mode and I was able to keep the agro so that felt good.

Sulo was dead with 30+ sec left on the only haste that was cast. And the Arcane was trying to get a fresh one cast when we defeated Horoth. So there was much Dps. 🙂

As for rings I got a Gnawed ring, not the Cinder’s I am hunting; but a fair swap ring until I pick one up. And a good ring for “I NEED MORE AMP” over Ac ring for later.

❤