Grind

Only person i tend to lose agro to is Psykil (zerker). or our necro when he's LB'ing. On single target agro is solid. AE fights get more hectic, but thats typically only trash so /shrug :p


When everyone's online, for contested. Templar, Dirge, Defiler, Warden, assassin/swash(/psyke*). You may rag that I dont need three healers, and i dont disagree. However warden's melee skills buffs increases my personal agro on contested by about 50% i'd say. It lets me stay in defensive stance, cause honestly, our offensive stance is worthless (remember: i was a zerker). I'd personally trade out the templar instead of the warden in most cases. The ability to hit the mob makes more difference to me then a buckler ever will. Our warden (ibbin) group heals the MT group while tossing around patch heals on the raid more often then not. Ultimately, i cant think of a much better setup.

* = Psyke gets his own catagory, cause he transcended swash and is his own class of awesomeness.

Ishbu

I go tower shield and say fuck buckler. Part of that is because my guardian is an alt and doesnt get first choice of any of the prime gear. Although, being in the guild I am, my guardian is still better equipped than many of the MT guardians out there (for example, next avatar of hate BP is a bidding war for alts, thats the kind of loot I do get access to).

Other than that, I dont lose aggro when I have to play my guardian. Its just not that hard. The value in being able to kill something with 2 or 3 healers in the entire raid vs 4 or 5 healers in the raid is far greater than the little bit of DPS the MT is doing.

If you always have 24 people on guarenteed at any time a raid may be called, sure, go buckler. If not, your only going to delay things for yourself.

There are guilds out there that always use bucklers or use a zerker instead of a guardian and they will argue they kill everything just the same. Yeah but they did it 2 weeks later. You cannot truthfully say that shit wouldnt have gone better and you may not have died/wiped if you had been fully defensive set up, so why handicap yourself?

My main is a conjuror, I dont spec for a few crappy heals. I spec for dps. Your a tank, spec for tanking.

__________________
"We are looking into ways to reduce the feeling that you must always be pressing a button to contribute to the group or raid" - Aeralik, aka Chris Kozak.

"So standing around doing nothing makes you a better player and for a more satisfying game experience you dumb fucking idiot?" - Me

Judist

Some have less problems with survival and more problems with aggro control. Others never loose aggro but need better survival.

A guild with amazing healers AND dps would rather have a buckler tank anyday. Theres absolutely no reason not to when you can pull up the Tower whenever you like.

Avek

Grind i changed my aa line from sta/agil to sta/str andi tell you it sucks in comparison. Before you swap back do agil line with 8 points in dragons cyclone and i thinkyou will enjoy it alot more. I find i am takeing more damage this way but i also lose agro on multiple mobs as well.

I 90% of the time only have two healers in my group and they keep me green for the most part. I have full intention to swap out to towershield just to see but i need a worthwhile TS first and i have not had luck with the Hate on in freethinkers cause i let the first three go to other poeple and we have not yet got the recipe off wushi just yet.

__________________
It is not the critic who counts;not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,or where the doer of deeds could've done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust,sweat and blood;who strives valiantly,who knows the great enthusiasms,devotions;who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end of triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

Ishbu

FALSE. My guild has amazing healers and dps. Shit we out dps 95% of the people out there and most of the time we have less than 4 healers online.

Ill take a tank that isnt retarded and can tank over a buckler one. By not retarded I mean, if you cant hold aggro without the buckler line either you completely suck or you need to learn a thing or 2 about raid set ups. Hell, if your not being lazy its not even hard to hold aggro over lifeburn or anything like that.

__________________
"We are looking into ways to reduce the feeling that you must always be pressing a button to contribute to the group or raid" - Aeralik, aka Chris Kozak.

"So standing around doing nothing makes you a better player and for a more satisfying game experience you dumb fucking idiot?" - Me

Malcom

you're within the top 5% of tanks in the game.

Jaraxx

Depends what you mean past two weeks we cleared everything minus contested mayong tonight with 4-5. We had 6 for Contested Mayong.

Here was our parse on Contested Mayong btw from tonight - keep in mind that the wizard died twice, the pull sucked and he got owned by adds once lol. Also the third dirge (Rendaas) just recently betrayed and learning his new class).

Allies: (06:58) 9479232 | 22677.59 [Beeglin-Ice Nova-20775]
Azleya 1340032 | 3205.82
Weva 970923 | 2322.78
Heidegger 969953 | 2320.46
Axumi 853087 | 2040.88
Morb 850635 | 2035.01
Beeglin 666017 | 1593.34
Ociadia 583397 | 1395.69
Crazyeye 531802 | 1272.25
Thrennody 397110 | 950.02
Ivori 386327 | 924.23
Jaraxx 380985 | 911.45
Fantasia 328333 | 785.49
Bagel 290784 | 695.66
Lavitx 270265 | 646.57
Sieryth 222299 | 531.82
Gravedigga 186651 | 446.53
Rendaas 117020 | 279.95
Malacai 75429 | 180.45
Fleip 33672 | 80.56
Kaydien 13794 | 33.00
Phoenixe 8571 | 20.50
Madelinerose 1922 | 4.60
A Bone Devil 224 | 0.54


Ishbu I totally agree that we where seriously behind on Woushi for retarded reasons. Everything else we put ourselves up there for. And when it came down to it had nothing to do with 1.5 Avoidance. - I'm not looking for a argument here either bud - I greatly respect Dissolution and I would generally call people out for posting on other classes forums but I know you are a smart guy.

To go into real quick - not making excuses we killed Gardener like third went to woushi screwed around 2 weeks with it. We heard that people used Amnesia on the bloodbeast, in all honesty we tried it like twice and sort of gave up the idea like idiots. Then found out that was the only way to kill it, eventually doing so and got it for like a ww 7th or 8th?S Something retarded like that. Mayongs was the adds and we killed that for a 5th? Which isn't too bad wasn't that far behind you guys. Regardless we'll do better this next coming expansion, you can bet on that.

It's just finding what works for your guild. For us, the longer we are in the fight is the bigger chance of us fucking up. Hence why more dps is better. Hence why we drop like every avatar in under 8 mins if we have the luxury of having a full raid on. Contested mayong in 5-7 sometimes. It's not much to brag about but our first kill of it was just over 8 mins. When everyone else in the game was well over 10. The time it takes you to kill shit really doesn't matter. - That's not my argument. It's just what works for us.

Personally, there's no way in hell I'd be able to hold agro off half the aoe fights or some single target stuff. I need the dps I need the hategain. If you can hold it - go for it, but in all honesty even if I didn't need the hate gain I would still go buckler spec just because what's the little extra avoidance going to do? Now obviously if I was tower speced and I went down the agi line I could probably up my avoidance by a little more then 1.5 prolly around 5% atleast. That's just not our guilds style.

Bottom line is, if you have decent healers what's it really going to hurt? Wow, you got get hit hard hit tower of stone. 3 hits, take it off. Rinse and repeat as much as needed.

In all honesty I was that way 10 months ago. Then I changed the way my guild did shit. And the Tower shield had to go =p

Now to clarify, this post wans't to justify my guild or whatever or brag or anything. Just trying to give folks a different way to look at it. I have nothing but the up most respect for Disso/CL and their MT's. Rock the Tower Shield Spec if you want. Also now if you want to bash me for this post go for it, I won't defend it. This post was seriously not to offend anyone.


Best wishes to you Guards and whatever spec you tank.

Jaraxx

O and the reason why I posted the parse was to show what a buckler spec tank can do. I would of done alot better too if I didnt' switch into tower of stone twice.

Jaraxx

Yeh I disagree entirely with that Ishbu. You don't have people putting up 3.5k Zonewides, the difference is, we don't have scarce utility, we have a shitload of it. Infact on nearly every raid we have 2 dirges 2 illusionists 1 troub 1 coercer, and about to be 3 dirges 3 illusionists 1 coercer 1 troub. Our zonewides of dps from what I have seen are extremely close, but you don't have people putting up as much dps as my best dps. But on the flip side, you have more people putting up higher numbers. I find this to be true of most guilds. Most guilds either choose to have more dps then utility. I find we put up bigger numbers and kill shit faster because of the gross amount of utility we have. Let me show you our usual raid set up.

Guardian
Dirge
Coercer
Swash
Templar
Defiler

Guardian
Inquisitor
Mystic
Dirge
Ranger
Illusionist

Inquisitor
Dirge
Illusionist
Brigand
Ranger
Wizard

Warlock
Conjuror
Necromancer
Troubador
Illusionist
Fury

Now really we don't get that set up often. But whenever we want it we can. Bottom line is, we don't take many dps classes, we just take enough and we give them stacked groups.

Now once again to my original argument. Saying one is better then other is stupid, Different guilds have different styles and how they run things. There's absolutely nothing wrong with going tower shield spec. There's also absolutely nothing wrong with going stamina spec. The difference is a little extra avoidance for the dps. What Ishbu is saying is not having that extra 500 dps going to kill you? Probably not, but neither is a few % of avoidance.

I hope that clears up some things.

Judist

So wait, you have great healers yet 2% avoidance outweights improving your DPS greatly?

You do realize (for many raid guilds) that raiding is 95% trash, 4% easy named and 1% difficult named right?

Wthell would you NOT wanna increase your DPS when you can always just switch to tower for those 1% fights?

Not to mentionl 30 seconds into ANY fight a mob is debuffed to the point you will never notice the 2% avoidance difference.

Trust me, if your healers are good you will gain loads of DPS with virtually no penality for it.