I tanked

That’s right, I tanked. And a raid at that, VoA 10. It was hectic, I could hear my heart pounding but in the end we got the kill. Oh, not on my shaman, on my Death Knight. I sucked.

Well, if you consider that we killed Toravon and that it was my first time tanking anything for more than other 4 people (and I’m jittery about that too) I did great. Just that I didn’t, I plain out sucked. The only thing worse than how the fight happened was if I had wiped the group and I really wasn’t far from it.

When I’m on my shaman in VoA all I care about are the adds, when up, dodging while pew-pewing them and afterwards I just watch my cast bar intensively so I queue the next spell just at the right time. I had no idea about how the debuff looks like, the one you have to taunt off the other tank, I just knew that it had to go to 3 and then I step in.
Let’s move 4 minutes back, for some background information. The group is imba, and I mean that wholeheartedly. It’s almost a class run, we just have two pallies, tank and dps, we lack a druid. Healing team is holy priest + resto shaman, both healers whom I trust after grouping with them before and seeing them pull of some impressive stunts. It was 30 minutes before WG started and we’d been waiting for about 20 minutes to find a warrior/druid tank. Not prime game time, it was early in the afternoon when you only see a handful of people in Dalaran. Knowing that I would have to leave in about 20 minutes, I suggest that I might be able to give tanking a go, I’m defcapped but I’m a bit low on health, with only 32 k HP unbuffed. The RL meets the idea with enthusiasm, he grabs the first warr dps he sees and a-buffing we will go. I am clearly the OT here, the MT is sitting on some 40 k HP self buffed so he proceeds to pull the first Stonewarder or whachamacallit. I give him a good two seconds to establish aggro before I step in and thought that I’d just do my blood dps rotation , replacing HS with something else that is off CD at the time.
The moment I throw in IT I grab aggro and I clearly wasn’t ready for this. I’m a dedicated panicker so when I see AGGRO in red and I hear that annoying booming sound I tend to stop what I’m doing and crawl in a sort of upright fetal position and hope for the best. Ok, i don’t, but I did stop and wonder what had just happened there. The pally taunts off of me and then i just auto-attack with the odd PS refresh (because I’m not a completely incompetent tank I know that there’s a talent there somewhere that makes my frost attacks cause 80% more threat. Or something along these lines).

Before the target is dead I see the second whatchamacallit approach so I valiantly tackle it and get to run my tanking rotation => target dead. We, and by we I mean the other tank and I decide that we can pull as soon as we reach Toravon so as the two adds up to him are killed we get the all so common ‘gogogogogogogogo’ line that everybody loves to hate. He taunts, I auto-attack and when I see 3 stacks of something white I brace myself for the hit(s) and taunt. Yay, I did it, I iz big shot tank nao! The pally taunts when I have 3 stacks and then all hell breaks loose in my mind.

He has two something white stacks up on him! One is at two and the other is at three. What do I do, do I taunt or not? ‘To taunt, or not to taunt, that is the question’ ran through my panicky mind. Better to do than not to I decide in a heartbeat and I hit the button. Crap, it was the wrong thingamajig at 3, he had only two stacks and before I know it I have 5. He taunts back and he’s on 5 in what seems to be a heartbeat. Mine drop off and I taunt, ready to pop my CDs (because holly crap, I might need them if I want his buffs to wear off). He taunts back and when my turn comes round I have a very strong deja-vu feeling: he has two white thingies, one is at 2 and one is at 3. Like a hamster, trying to eat over and over again from the electrified corncob, I bite and taunt. Too early again. And so on and so forth until the bugger is dead, in what seemed to be an eon or two. Skada said it was almost 2 minutes.
Tanking seems to be a lot more difficult than what I’ve seen in 5 mans. It’s more than endlessly spamming the AoE aggro attacks I have and keeping diseases up. Learning to play with another tank will get easier with practice I guess but still… it was not pretty the first time. I had heard that the first time it hurts but damn, it was almost spirit-breaking.

Oh, and the saddest part is that the DK tanking pants dropped -.- Now that I got an upgrade I feel obligated to keep on tanking.

Blood Death Knight Changes for Cataclysm

MMO-Champion brings to light the new ideas that Blizzard has for Death Knights come Cataclysm. And I’m not liking it at all, Blood the dedicated tanking talent tree? Why, oh, why? I luv my Blood DPS SPec! Here’s the full blue post by Ghostcrawler:

“We’re doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we’d go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.”

Stories of failing. Chapter 1/153246

Definitely not a new concept and one of the oldest and best implemented thoughts in the mind of WoW players and not only. There is a big amount of Fail out there and you have to try to not be a part of it. It’s impossible, lemme tell you that. It might not be your fault or it might not have anything to do with you personally but everybody fails at one point or another. I’m’a start you off with an example of my own failing and then move on to the really bad part: others’.

My latest FAIL moment on my shaman was a couple of nights ago, and, of course, by night I mean 6 AM. Random HC pops up and it’s ToC. I was actually relieved that it’s not HoR which can drive you bananaz if you get that one tank that is gearing up, or the healer with lag or the dps that can’t tie his shoelaces alone (I have nothing against you, guys, but I think I wiped in Halls of Reflection more than I did in ICC. And it was your fault! /sob). An instance that is not HoL or HoS or any other instance where half the mobs resist my spells? Gief! OK, so the loading screen does its thing, we mount, kill faction champs both horse, or rather wolfback and after dismounting and then comes the part where you loot the chest, watch everybody else roll on the item Disenchant and then talk to the Belf. Side note: this was always a point of high suspense for me. I wanted Eadric and I wanted him to Drop Aledar’s Battlestar for my Enhancement offspec. Farmed for 2 of them for 1 month and then the first ToC 10 I ran I got upgrades. Meh. Still, it was one of my “oh, GOD, let it be him, let it be him!” moments in the game. Surely enough, he comes and the 3×3 mobs assume position.

The tank goes to the usual starting point, left as you look at Eadric, and does his thing (seriously, are there groups that start on the right? Anywhere?). I cast my totems and start LvB and CL-ing away. The priestess goes down and I’m half asleep at this point. Getting a heroic I like is nice but it’s not going to race my pulse. I then TAB to the next target which just so happens to be the priestess from the second group of mobs and paying no attention I start my rotation of OMFGIMBADPS. In two or three seconds I have all 3 on me and while the tank and melee dps are slowed down by the stupid bubbly Argent Monk that had just died and can’t intervene, the healer is getting omnomnommed for trying to heal me. Wipe. Plain and simple. The group was cool, though and we laughed through it and then went on to get our two frosties each. After that I logged my DK which I am insanely trying to gear up right now, to the point where I no longer care if an item has STR or AGI on it, if it has a better GS than what I have I’ll take it! Not really, but the principle stands. I want to have the GS to be able to PuG ToC 25 and I have to carefully plan this as I do not have “Achie” and need to find the Tuesday night group that is desperately in need of people. It wasn’t meant to be this week. Maybe the next. Short inner pep talk.

A surprisingly short queue has me standing in HoL. The warrior tank looks really good with his 47k HP unbuffed and the healer is a 40K mana paladin. Good short run, says I, and then I go on to greet everybody with my baby blue writing. I always queue as Dungeon Guide. Don’t really know why, tho, I guess I like the color. Or maybe it’s the closest that I’ll ever be to leading a raid, despite not having any actual powah. Where was I? Oh, yeah. The tank says Hi and then turns around, runs through the swirly instance entrance and vanishes, not dropping group. “Erm… tank?” I say in a squeaky pigtailed Belf voice. I hate it when somebody calls me by the function but that never stooped me from doing it. Do unto others? Nonsense! “You’re all on your own,” the tank replied. “Come back or drop group,” the pally healer stepped up. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you lol” And we were all flabergasted. He did not drop group, but the healer and a rogue did, immediately. The balance drood and I waited out the 5 (?) minutes and then kicked the tank, I switched specs and tanked for the new group. I really hate tanking. With fervour, especially tanking trash. Bosses I can handle, the taunt button is hit off CD and I manage to pull it off but invariably I have one DPS in the group that keeps dying when I tank. Statistically it’s the 3rd one down, dunno why. The new group consists of me, DK tank, Boomkin, Resto Shaman, Ret Pally and Hunter. The hunter apparently did not agree to the slow pace I had in mind and kept pulling. And pulling. And pulling. Without any Misdirect. He just pulled 2 packs at a time and after that let me and the healer deal with it. The shaman was awesome and did a bang up job but we were both growling. As we had kicked the previous tank we were all out and had to deal with it.

At one point I tell the hunter, in a very polite manner, that if he is going to pull for me he can at least MD. He does not. I tell him again to MD, explain while auto-attacking, inbetween taunts and casting D&D and Howling Winds, so in extremely short sentences, that I haz 2 taunts, Dark Command and Death Grip and that he is pulling to many at once and my gear doesn’t allow massive threat generation. Heck, the best item I’ve got is the Onyxia Head quest trinket reward! Nothing. He was from Hakkar and that might explain it. It’s better if you’re not in the know but if you’re curious go Google the stories about them. They’re all true, I swear!

After a short talk with the Shaman we decide to let the hunter die the next pull. Which we promptly execute, in outstanding fashion. He was dead within 2 seconds and I did nothing. NOTHING, you hear that? After he died I D&D’d and did my thing and we moved on.

“Rez plx”

…

“REZ PLS”

…

Hunter drops group.

Damn, that felt good. Tomorrow I think I’ll ride a bus without a ticket!