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Ruby Sanctum’s Halion encounter as well as the mini-bosses that go along with him has proved to be quite an interesting challenge set of challenges. While the actual mechanics of the Halion fight in particular aren’t necessarily amazingly difficult, he certainly hits hard so don’t expect to have too much success tanking Halion if your group isn’t geared enough to progress through ICC. Since I found some of the mini-bosses a tad on the annoying side, I’ll be going over them as well. If you’re just looking for the stuff on the dragon himself, feel free to scroll to the bottom of the page.

Clearly things are going to change as Cataclysm’s Beta progresses, but for the time being, it’s fun to follow along and take our best guesses at what we’ll be playing with in the future.

MMO-Champion.com has been kind enough to supply us with an early Cataclysm calculator to play around with so here goes…

C01: 8/8/60

8/8/60
Major Glyphs: Shield Wall, Enraged Regeneration, Blocking
Minor Glyphs: Command, Thunder Clap, Charge

This spec focuses on survival with a slight emphasis on aoe threat.

3/3 in Blood Craze!?

Blood Craze’s tooltip currently states the following:

The healers feel it…
The other tanks feel it…
You feel it.

You’re all wrong.

You don’t take “too much” damage

The reality is that when it comes to the damage you take (or should I say the damage you don’t?) there is positioning, there are a few debuffs and there is the timeliness of cooldown usage.

And that’s it.

The difference in gear and/or class is rarely significant. Execution is everything and yet, is so often ignored and shunned.

Unless you’re one of those people that doesn’t enjoy following along with the hype of a new expansion, you’ve probably already read Wowhead’s coverage on new Cataclysm information. The highlight for me was Downshifting. The ability to take a 25 man raid and break it into multiple 10 man raids. I’m not only excited about this because it gives casual guilds that raid like mine more options, but also because it’s pretty big news for hybrid tanking.

After 3 years, I’ve covered and rehashed an uncountable number of topics. It’s truly a testament to the art of tanking and this game in general that I can still click these keys. It’s especially surprising to me that I’ve never took the time to pay tribute to the camera man. Sure, we’ve hinted at the help he offers, but we’ve never really stopped to say thank you.

No one asks about him.

The Taken for Granted

Hold down your left mouse button and start moving.