Loading ...Specing for the Fight: Taking on the King
Easily the most popular spec this expansion has been the Deep Wounds spec (15/3/53 being the current iteration I’d recommend) offering Warriors a strong boost to our damage and AOE threat. That doesn’t make it the only option though and certainly not the correct one in all cases. The Lich King himself being a perfect example of this.
The Safeguard Spec
Safeguard is one of those highly situational protection talents that rarely is worth having in our arsenal. Lich King’s Soul Reaper (10, 25) ability that shows up during phase 2 & 3 is one of those few mechanics that actually makes picking up Safeguard worth it. It should come as no surprise that Safeguard is especially useful on the 25 man version with Soul Reaper doing 60,000 damage instead of “only” 50,000 on 10 man. (It should be noted though that hard mode 10 man Lich King does do 60,000 damage as well)
Fitting Safeguard into our spec isn’t as difficult as you may think. Notoriously, we’ve always had 2 points at least to juggle around with in the protection tree. There’s a lot of options out there, so here’s just a few different “Safeguard specs” that I recommend.
15/3/53
This Safeguard spec is basically a standard Deep Wounds build forgoing 2 points in Damaging Shield in order to pick up Safeguard. This spec makes a lot sense for the Lich King encounter since you won’t be AOE tanking anyway as the Offtank.
5/15/51
Shifting priorities from Deep Wounds to Commanding Presence among other things, clearly this Safeguard spec is intended to be much more defensive. We lose out on a lot of the additional damage talents that come with the Deep Wounds build, but we gain extra health for our entire raid, higher Attack Power reduction and easier/longer application for shouts. Basically, this spec includes everything we can possibly offer to help the healers keep us, the Main tank and everyone else in the raid alive.
5/10/56
Very similar to the above, this spec should only be used if you’ve got another Warrior in the raid with 5/5 Commanding Presence to apply Commanding Shout instead. The extra 5 points we inherit in this build gain us 2/2 Improved Revenge and 3/3 Focused Rage making for a higher damage, more rage efficient build. To reiterate though, this build should only be used if you’re certain that another Warrior has 5/5 Commanding Presence covered.
Finishing Touches
You’ll notice that all 3 specs feature the Taunt and Shield Wall glyphs. These 2 glyphs ensure that your role in Phase 1 and beyond goes as smoothly and safely as possible. The 3rd glyph is almost more to taste than anything else. You could potentially get an additional Last Stand in that could save your life with Glyph of Last Stand, you could max Sunders on a target quicker via the Devastate glyph (which may be worth it on the Val’kyrs) or you could reduce the damage you take by a bit more by going the Glyph of Blocking route. Each path has it’s benefits.
Overall, I highly recommend one of the specs featured in this article if you’re tackling the Lich King even if it’s just on 10 man regular. You may be having zero issues with keeping your Main tank alive in Phase 2 & 3 most of the time, but all it takes is a single time when your Main tank is forced to use a cooldown to save their life for Safeguard to pay for itself. Your choice of spec easily could be the difference between failing and succeeding if a healer accidentally goes down in Phase 3.
Best of luck in your final battle!
April 22nd, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Dear Horde Swine,
Your tanking knowledge continues to impress me even if you wallow in your own filth, thank you and please die soon.
xoxox
…SilveR
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Traxex reply on April 22, 2010 7:35 pm:
Troll
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Dewie reply on May 1, 2010 6:37 pm:
No, he’s right. Amazing a hordie of all people would know so much! Keep it up your filthy pile of filth you!
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April 22nd, 2010 at 8:25 pm
I notice you went with 5/15/51. Any particular reason for your choice? My raid team has yet to advance this far, so I am taking note on what you and others have to say.
Thanks,
BigMu
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Veneretio reply on April 22, 2010 9:01 pm:
Our dps is good and we don’t have a Warrior to cover Commanding Shout so it’s a pretty natural fit for my raid group.
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Kavtor reply on April 23, 2010 5:01 pm:
The extra stam on the MT (and the raid) and being able to demo shout your shamblers helps out a lot when they enrage.
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April 22nd, 2010 at 10:29 pm
In 5/15/51 spec,
Will you think that take out 2 points from Incite to Imp revenge is a better choice? The threat from the Imp revenge seems to be more than the Heroic strike.
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Veneretio reply on April 23, 2010 12:03 am:
You maybe could justify that trade, but personally, I prefer the Incite route since it makes an impact on Val’kyr killing whereas Revenge does not.
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Kavtor reply on April 23, 2010 5:03 pm:
If you’re safeguard botting, you don’t do a lot of threat sensitive stuff. Raging spirits are a big deal, but misdirects and tricks are going to help you more there than revenge.
Although, if you’re dual warrior tanking, trading around for CD’s and still safeguarding each other, you’re probably going to have threat issues just from intervening so much.
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April 22nd, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Great post on tweaking specs for fights, just one minor error… you have the original deep wounds spec as a 15/5/53, giving it 2 “phantom” points into the fury tree for a total of 73 points.
Not that I’d mind an extra 2 points to play with
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Veneretio reply on April 23, 2010 12:03 am:
Haha, nice catch! Fixed.
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April 22nd, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Good post!
It might be worth mentioning the threat reducing effect of intervene. I’ve seen unvoluntary tank swaps because of it. Also, do you use a tactic where you taunt after intervene, or let the same tank tank LK all the time?
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Veneretio reply on April 23, 2010 12:04 am:
Nope, we just have our DK solo tank it.
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Drae reply on April 23, 2010 4:19 am:
We counter this in a couple of ways for our LK kills, in P1 we use our 2 hunters to deal with the shambling horrors, while our rogue pumps TotT into our MT. In P2 & 3 all three of them pump threat to the MT.
In 25m your looking at like 15 intercepts over the course of the fight, if you compound the threat issue by vigilancing the MT in p1&3 (unlimited taunts for spirits and ghouls) your MT could be running with 1/2 his normal threat without those MD’s.
I personally run with SW, Dev, Taunt glyphs, taunt’s on spirits are key, Shieldwall at 2m is a godsend for transitions and P3. We found our OT died often when forced to carry a raging spirit past past the transition and then safeguard the MT… the damage burst can really be intense, so I pop my SW from transition to P3, and of course in P3 when sucking up spirits.
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Silmarien reply on April 23, 2010 6:01 am:
2 hunters with MD is more than enough threat that ph2 and 3 there will not be threat issues even with safeguarding. DPS spends such an absurd amount of time on valks or moving from defile in 2 and then your ranged is pretty busy in 3 with vile spirits. As a rogue its pretty important that I tricks a DPS as often as possible (transitions being threat sensitive times where I ToTT the tanks) because the onus is on the melee in ph 3 to get him down.
I think its a little risky to be safeguarding with raging spirits up as well not just because of the damage on the OT but the dps loss on the spirits and the possible movement causing soul shrieks on dps. Probably better to have LK tank blow a CD on that reaper until ragings are down. Especially when he harvests a healer (as he always seems to do with us at the ph 3 start!). Just my 2c from rogue perspective. I’m a fan of this fight and its interesting to see how other comps handle it (we run druid/dk tanks).
Btw my alt is a warrior tank and this is my go-to resource. Keep it up =)
Drae reply on April 24, 2010 4:47 am:
Silmarien I would say it depends on your raid dps, we definitely have problems with threat; and it’s not our tanks TPS. We intervene every soul repaer except for 2 during p3. Intervene + charge means the vile spirit barely moves and we lose very little if no dps on the raging spirirt. Valks don’t live long for us. I’ve found the risk when intervening when the ragin spirit is up is the shriek hitting the raid if the intervene is mis-timed. I usually wait for the shriek to go off then intervene.
Every raids different; so I’m sure your opinion is very valid, I’m just explaining what works for us and what our challenges were.
Drae reply on April 24, 2010 4:48 am:
Also I have the MT vigilanced in P1 and 3. That may be were the difference lies.
Seph reply on May 3, 2010 11:08 am:
That is so weird because I tank Arthas as a warrior and we have our DK get the shamblers and ghouls because he can just lay D&D down to gather ghouls and he grips the shamblers over to him. I just tank Arthas the whole time and that was before the buff (maybe we had 5%) Funny how it is the opposite for you guys.
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April 22nd, 2010 at 11:49 pm
Our guild’s currently on LK, 6 or so attempts in. Sadly I’m not tanking him yet but will be in our second group. I’ll pass this on to our maintank though, we love theorycrafting between ourselves.
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April 23rd, 2010 at 5:58 am
I’m confused about what you are suggesting here Vene, although it looks really interesting.
Are you suggesting that every time the MT gets hit by soul reaper, the OT should intervene onto him? Would that not destroy his threat?
Or are you suggesting that maybe you only use intervene when (for example in the case of a pally MT) AD has maybe already procced and he has no other cooldowns available?
How often does LK cast soul reaper?
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Zeratul reply on April 23, 2010 6:09 am:
He’s saying yes every time the MT gets Soul Reapered, the warrior needs to Intervene him to prevent him from dying to the 50-60k dmg proc after 5 seconds on top of the 100% attack speed increase right after. Doing this every time allows the tank to save his big CDs for those times when you cant intervene him or healers are trying to handle infest, run from defile, picked up by valks, harvested or what have you.
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Cartz reply on April 23, 2010 7:32 am:
If your MT isn’t terrible at threat and you have a few folks redirecting threat onto him, you shouldn’t have a problem with the constant intervenes.
On our 25M kill, I interevened every single soul reaper, it really takes the pressure off the healers. It’s essentially a shield wall for every single soul reaper plus one fully absorbed hit (from the MTs perspective).
Since your entire raid will have been focused on dpsing valks in P2, and your range is on the viles in P3, there is time for the tank to build up a nice threat lead. I vigi’d our tank in P1/P3 on top of the intervenes, and we just had people ready to drop threat / salv a target when the MT called for it. It wasn’t required, by the end of P2 our MT had a ridiculous lead, and tricks and MDs kept it up to the end.
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Bihn reply on April 27, 2010 10:18 am:
Soul Reaper happens every ~30 seconds. If Arthas is moving, casting or otherwise unable to land a melee swing when it is supposed to go out, it won’t hit until he can melee again.
This is one strategy, and it might work for your guild, but it is not The Way you MUST handle Soul Reaper for normal 10 or 25. Safeguard can be very helpful, and I don’t want to seem like I think otherwise, but I feel like this article and these responses aren’t recognizing the alternatives.
Particularly, I feel like this point hasn’t been mentioned, or at the least has failed to be clarified fully: The potential advantages of choosing a warrior as your off tank for this encounter are much larger than 40% damage reduction every 30 seconds. Especially on 25 man, a warrior tank being able to focus on the Valkyrs is a very potent source of debuffs, snares and stuns, which will translate to a significant boost in raid DPS.
To clarify a little, having Glyph of Sunder Armor and Glyph of Devastate will get Valkyrs down much more quickly. And as for snares and stuns, shifting some of this responsibility to the tank will add several extra GCD’s for your raids DPS.
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April 23rd, 2010 at 6:51 am
In order to make my life a ton easier when doing this, I set the Main tank as my focus, then have a macro “/cast [@focus, help] intervene; intervene”. I also have power auras setup to show Soul Reaper on my focus big and in the middle of my screen with a timer. I usually wait until it has been up for a couple of seconds before I intervene to make sure safeguard covers the damage explosion portion.
Vene, what do you think about Glyph of intervene for this fight? Think absorbing an extra hit is worth it since the Attack speed is boosted too?
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Veneretio reply on April 23, 2010 2:43 pm:
I don’t think it’s worth it because then you run the risk of killing yourself.
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Kavtor reply on April 23, 2010 5:06 pm:
I run the intervene glyph. You tend to scare people when you take two back to back hits with out any hot / shield / AF cover that the MT has, but I’ve never, ever been at a real risk of death.
If you’re changing spec / glyphs anyway, there’s really no reason not to use the intervene glyph imo.
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Drae reply on April 24, 2010 4:49 am:
I concur that this power aura’s trick + focus intervene macro is golden.
The glyph of intervene got me kiled the 2 or 3 times i tried it.
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April 23rd, 2010 at 8:19 am
With the aoe tanking going on in the beginning of the fight I opted to drop 2 pts out of focused rage to keep damage shield maxxed.
We have the phase 1 down pat and the transition… but phase 2 is killing us every time. Keep trying different positioning strategies to help handle the defile but so far nothing is working out.
As far as the threat issue… its 10% of the current maximum threat at the time you intervene. So it isn’t 10, 20, 30, 40 because its just always 10% of the current max. So say the tank has 100k threat. First intervene drops him to 90k if he doesn’t build any more threat during that time the second intervene would drop him to 81k. The third would bring him to 73k so after 3 it would be a total drop of 27% instead of 30%. All this is assuming he builds no threat in the process which obviously won’t be the case.
Also I hot swap my vig right after the transition to a high threat dps. Really I could go without it during phase 1 since I have a hunter MD the horrors and you don’t really need every ghoul beating on you.
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Bihn reply on April 27, 2010 9:28 am:
>>Keep trying different positioning strategies to help handle the Defile but so far nothing is working out.
You’ll probably find that Defile will become easier once everyone fully understands it’s impact, and it’s role in P2. I’m sure everyone in your group knows the baseline “Don’t stand in the Defile” at this point, so here’s a more in-depth approach:
-Basic knowledge that is not necessarily obvious, but should be reiterated to make sure everyone is thinking about and handling Defile in a similar way: Defile requires your group to be spread out, but Valkyrs require your group to be stacked up. Very simply put, you want to tell people to spread out for Defile to minimize the chance of mistakes and to collapse for Valkyrs to encourage them to fly out predictably. You should have someone calling out a position (and the easiest thing to do is call it out relative to the Ice Tomb) for the raid to stack, depending on where existing Defiles are (you don’t want the Valks to fly over a Defile if you can avoid it).
-Defiles dissipate about 5 to 10 seconds after a new one goes down.
-Two Specific Problem Waves: During phase 2, there are two instances of Defile and Valks coming nearly at the same time. You may see more if you’re still learning it, but on a kill you will probably only see these two. These occur on the second and third Vallkyr waves.
On the second wave, Defile *should* happen right after the Valks. Because of the way Arthas’ abilities work (they are sort of “queued up” and go in order of what came off CD first), he will never cast a new ability until an old one has finished casting. So, to deal with the second Valkyr wave, make sure everyone scatters as the last Valkyr is swooping in to grab someone.
On the third, Defile is going to happen just before Valks. This can be tricky to handle, assuming your raid has spread out to drop the defiles away from the center (which is basically what I’m suggesting, if that’s not clear). You may run into a situation where people are not collapsed or otherwise in a bad position when the Valkyrs come down, and just because RNG is cool, they will probably get grabbed.
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April 23rd, 2010 at 9:55 am
Interesting.
another small tip: I used glyph of shockwave for our 25 kill (we’re starting our heroic 25 modes) - and still do. It very handy as offtank, too
The reduced CD allows for self preservation tanking adds by being able to interrupt most of the berserked shockwaves; sometimes all.
If the cooldown is there anyway, you have several options: shield block, concussion blow… And if all else fails, there are still trinket cooldows, last stand or shieldwall.
But 1 tank being protected of soulreaper for the whole fight by safeguard is somehting to look into! We just switched between tanks.
/ww out
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April 23rd, 2010 at 5:32 pm
We recently made our first LK25 kill using this tactic and Safeguard. There is something rather satisfying about being able to handle all the cooldowns for Soul Reaper and still retain all the raid cooldowns for emergencies.
As an aside, though, on our kill the MT died. A 2m shield wall and the T10 4pt meant I could take over and tank LK until the end of the fight with only a few ‘unprotected’ Soul Reapers.
One thing that is worth mentioning in terms of survivability as a tank is that your tank on the LK will have some fairly prolongued periods of tanking where ret pallies / dps warriors won’t be on his target. You can’t guarantee that an -AP buff will be on his target all the time by relying on DPS to do it (unless they’re particularly vigilant about it).
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April 24th, 2010 at 9:26 am
When you’re running this config which tanks are doing what in which phases?
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April 25th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
so… you don’t even consider it an option for a warrior to be main tanking it? or you just don’t think it requires a new spec to do so?
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Veneretio reply on April 25, 2010 6:15 pm:
Oh, you definitely can have a Warrior MT for this fight, but I think we’re far better suited being the OT for it.
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cidninja reply on April 25, 2010 11:50 pm:
so far i’ve been main tanking, but we haven’t downed it yet. i think this week i’ll try the OT role and see how it goes. as long as our other tank can keep his threat up it seems pretty solid.
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cidninja reply on May 1, 2010 3:26 pm:
well, tried it out this week and we got him down (10m at least). thanks for the advice!
Coolade reply on April 26, 2010 8:10 am:
I couldn’t agree more. I am MT and RL of my guild, and I set myself as the off tank on Lich King. We’ve killed him on 10’s, up to him on 25’s now.
Warriors are most definitely suited as an OT on Lich King (I can handle the shambling horrors, and between all of my stuns, I only get hit for one enraged melee swing once in a blue moon, and never cop an enraged shockwave to the face.)
The one thing that plagued me was taunt misses on the Soul Reap. (Taunt miss on a Soul Reap causes the MT to go down more often than not). Use some hit food or Glyph of Taunt if you’re sitting a bit low (Anything under 170 imo)
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Bihn reply on April 27, 2010 9:33 am:
Glyph of Taunt is better than any other glyph for a Taunt-sensitive fight. Wiping because Taunt missed is one of the worst reasons to wipe d-(^.^)z
marklar reply on April 30, 2010 2:15 pm:
with safeguard, you don’t ever need to taunt LK…
i still use the glyph for phase 1 ghoul taunts.
April 25th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
The best way to work intervene and safeguard into the LK fight is to taunt AFTER the MT has taken soulreaper(from range), intervene him (while you have threat), and then he just taunts off of you after it goes off. Thus, no overall threat is lost, and your tank just got a mini shieldwall.
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April 26th, 2010 at 10:21 am
This is awesome…. we’re working on him in 25’s and I think I’m going to work the strat this week by practicing during our LK10 fight tonight.
Also, as a warrior OT, in the last phase we can Vig the MT and just chain tab-taunt all the spirits to us for soakage.
Although some may see it as a “demotion”, I think this once again shows our utility and also gives us MT’s a chance to help the raid succeed.
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April 26th, 2010 at 10:49 am
I think you are wasting a glyph slot with the glyph of taunt. If you’ve been following the EoF pick order you should have no difficulty getting hit capped by the time you get to LK. I will likely be the OT and another warrior with the the 4 item T10 bonus will be MT. I will definity work on this strategy - thanks for the suggestion!
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Whats my main again? reply on April 26, 2010 12:59 pm:
Taunt works off the spell hit table… so unless you have at least 13% (alliance + 3% buff) you have a chance for your taunt to miss. I know I don’t have enough hit for that wearing my tier 10 or even my threat set. Taunt glyph gives you security.
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April 26th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Taunt is not on the spell hit table. If it were you’d still be short with the 8% from the glyph since I assume you are not running around with 9% hit. There was a blue post or a patch note earlier this year (I can’t remember which) that addressed this issue because many of the boss fights in ICC require taunts to land or you wipe.
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Kavtor reply on April 26, 2010 3:16 pm:
Taunt does use the spell hit table. What they changed is to allow melee hit to apply to taunt. So, taunt has a default miss rate of 17%, modified by glyph of taunt (8%) shadowpriest / moonkin buffs (3%) and your hit rating.
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Drae reply on April 27, 2010 4:36 am:
Correct, Taunt is off the spell miss table (17%). Anecdotal evidence however tells me that the glyph and as little as 1-2% hit is “enough”.
Many of us choose to use the taunt glyph and heroic strikes to negate hit rating requirements as much as possible, and stack other stats.
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April 27th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Thanks for the clarification. I spent several hours looking for the blue post last night. I think they should have done the glyph of taunt like the glyph of mind control and made it the full amount (17%). It would be much easier knowing that you don’t have to glyph and still get hit rating or a hit buff above the melee hit cap.
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April 30th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Would you make a post about your expectations for cataclysm?
(and maybe an overview about the raiding changes)
Great blog, keep it up !
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May 3rd, 2010 at 6:06 pm
I understand why you are saying go the safeguard route, but the 10% threat reduction on Intervene will eventually cause problems if you are running with a group of guildmates that are used to your threat being higher than it would using Intervene multiple times in a relatively short period of time.
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May 18th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
I actually tried out a modified spec of #3 for a few LK attempts but we were still doing it the old fashion 2 Tank Swap. I actually got myself killed cause it won’t work with that strategy, 36k Soul Reaper + Melee Swing = Dead OT =D
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June 1st, 2010 at 11:23 am
Zaitochi, you should not be taking the Soul Reaper but Safeguard should reduce the damage the MT takes. You only take the hasted attacks.
I used the 5/15/ build and we did not switch tanks. The warrior MT used cooldowns (Shield Wall, Last Stand, 4pc Bonus ability) which covered 3 of 4. I used Intervene and the priest used Guardian Spirit on the 4th. I worked great. I spent the last phase soaking Vile Spirit damage.
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Zaitochi reply on June 8, 2010 5:42 pm:
That was the thing though, I somehow took the Soul Reaper damage then ate the Hasted Attacks in the next second and died lol
My guild is having me look into the Vile Spirit soaking which is interesting, but I think a DK is almost better for that due to AMS but a warrior can do it too so long as I can managed my CDs properly.
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