Being casual these days, I've not done that many heroic instances. Having said that, the ones that i have done and completed - Ramparts, Slave Pens, Steamvaults have all been challenging (but fun) and would definitely been a lot more difficult if i weren't prot specced.

Currently working on getting my ass in gear to attempt the trials of Naaru in the next couple of weeks.

This post has been edited by Kidicarus: Apr 6 2007, 03:07 PM

You only get crushing blows from mobs 3 levels above you. From what i can tell, the level cap for heroics is 72, and therefore it's theoretically impossible to get a crushing blow in a heroic instance.

What's a crit? Haven't seen one of those in a while

Honestly though, normal hits from heroic trash (or equally interesting yet non-epic-dropping non-bosses as blizzard likes to call them) are bad enough esp if you end up pulling too many by accident which is what usually gets me killed.

I'm usually lolling when i call for a sap (esp when the rogue doesn't have imp. sap)

hehe it's hard yah.. which is why i'm usually lolling. Usually a simple bloodrage + demoralising should be enough to get the mobs off the rogue, the trouble is having the rogue survive the first few seconds of the pull. PW: Shield before the sap usually helps for this.

Sad to say, nowadays, i'm leaning more towards using a good hunter for CC as opposed to a rogue.

Slave pens heroic only needs 1 good healer.

When Quagmirran does his geyser ability, have the tank taunt and use spell reflect. Totally trivializes the encounter. We don't even kill the last pack for the NR buff.

Apparently with a rogue you can bug those adds by vanishing near them when they come from the tunnel. Never tested though since we don't kill the pack.

I seem to reflect for the full duration of the geyser, even though the taunt duration is only 3 secs and geyser is like closer to 6 seconds?. Dunno, but slave pens is one of the heroic instances that my group has on farm. And it's still one of the easiest heroic bosses around.

OOOOH don't get technical with me!

Only your natural defense affects crushing blows (ie 350@lvl 70). Buffing your defense to 490 will not help you avoid crushing blows. What does affect crushing blows, is the ability of a warrior to shield block which adds +75% to his block chance. As long as parry+dodge+block>100%, you can push crushing blows off the table. See the following link http://www.wowwiki.com/Crushing_Blow

What defense does do is reduce your chance to be critted. 490 is the commonly cited defense number to become crit immune. Crits are similarly affected by a warriors ability to shield block.

Secondly, you're mistaking bosses in raid instances with bosses in standard instances. You can be crushed by those and these are identified by your user interface as Boss ???. You can tell what level normal instance bosses are by looking at your user interface. A quick glance of boss mobs in normal instances has shown that the highest level for these mobs is 72+ and therefore crushing blow mechanics do not apply to these mobs. Their crits in heroics will still hurt.

Edit: There are 2 things to consider when tanking, survivability which you can make up with gear, and threat generation. Threat generation is the tricky bit with non protection tanking. Like a poster above said, the defiance talent is almost a prerequisite for tanking considering the fact that your party member's damage will have scaled at a greater rate than a non prot warriors aggro tools = sunder, heroic strike and revenge.

This post has been edited by Kidicarus: Apr 10 2007, 03:16 PM