I'm the Tank! Or Am I?

My druid got her swift flight form this weekend, and originally I meant to make this a post about the awesomeness of the quest chain required to unlock it. However, after a quick search of the blog archives, I found that I already made a post to that effect almost twelve years ago. This was during Wrath, when you could already get the skill directly from the trainer if you wanted, but the quest chain was still in game as a piece of optional content.

My druid has been getting all my love lately as she's my most recent character to 70, and as my paladin is approaching the point of being as kitted out as she's going to get outside of progression raids, focusing on the druid seemed like the next logical step. She's also still a tank, so I've been doing a fair amount of bear tanking (though there've also been some dungeons where I got to tag along as cat).

On Saturday I took her to our weekly community Gruul/Mag run for the first time and it was pretty fun, even if I didn't get any loot. I was the least geared of the three tanks, so it made sense that I was given the easy jobs... but on High King Maulgar the main tank died and it was up to me to taunt him and save the raid!

To top it off, something similar happened on Magtheridon afterwards: One of the much better geared paladins in attendance was supposed to tank him, and I was told to only build some threat "just in case" (as sudden tank death is not uncommon on this boss due to how hard he hits). I did as I was told, happily mangling away at one of his legs and trying to stay ahead of the dps on threat but not really expecting it to be important, when suddenly the tank went squish here as well, and I found myself yelling for people to heal me on voice while I was trying to manoeuvrer Mags away from the cube I'd stood next to. I then proceeded to tank him for the rest of the fight and felt very proud.

Of course, in case that got my ego too inflated, I tanked heroic Sethekk Halls for my flight form quest right after and I must have died five or six times in that (and only about half of those were wipes). That put things into perspective for sure.

As a result of all this, I've found myself thinking about tanking a lot. In WoW at least, it's something that's been tied to a lot of anxiety for as long as I can remember... both for the people actually playing the role and those complaining that they can never find a tank. It's never been my main focus, but I did do a fair amount of it over the years... yet I could remember little of how I felt about it.

Consulting the blog archives for past me's thoughts was certainly enlightening... and not just because it was like slowly watching a frog boil, as my standards for what I expected of my group mates declined over time. It's funny to look at posts like this one from 2010 for example, titled "An exemplary UP pug", in which I excitedly recount the tale of wiping twice in heroic Utgarde Pinnacle without anyone rage-quitting and only one guy insulting me a bit! The height of positive social interactions in an MMO, everyone!

On the subject of tanking in specific, I found this quote from a post about tanking in early Cata enlightening: "I was a pretty decent tank in late Burning Crusade, but two years of racing through Wrath heroics while AoEing everything and calling that tanking has left its mark on me." So I was a decent tank in late BC, eh? I do remember kind of liking tanking on my feral druid, though I seem to have little evidence of it other than old screenshots demonstrating how hard it can be to see anything while tanking certain bosses...

Exhibit A, dated October 2008.

My feeling right now is that I do like tanking in BC in a similar way to the way I like healing. With the lack of AoE aggro generating abilities, it's not dissimilar to the whack-a-mole of healing in dungeons. Use mangle on this mob, taunt a second, stun a third... whatever's needed to keep them all off the squishy people. What makes it more demanding is mainly that it's not a direct UI interaction, but that you have to actually operate in three-dimensional space, making sure you're in range for a taunt, at just the right distance for a charge, and so on and so forth. Plus there's a general expectation for the tank to take the lead and do the marking and kill order/CC assignments - which again, I don't really mind, but it does require additional mental effort that results in me feeling tired more quickly after spending some time tanking dungeons.

Oddly though, the thing that bothers me the most about tanking right now is that I'm always at the mercy of people who might not care. For me, both tanking and healing are caring roles in the sense that they are about helping and protecting the rest of your party, and the more I care about them and they care about me, the more satisfying it is. (I know it's kind of a cliché that healers are more caring and therefore favoured by women and blah de blah... I'm not speaking for anyone else, just how it works for me.)

The thing is, in our little group of "dungeon regulars", almost everyone has a tanking alt, but I'm the only person who's willing to heal. This means that whenever I'm tanking, the healer will have to come from the outside. Sometimes it's a guildie and it's generally okay (though it can still be a bit anxiety-inducing if I don't know the person that well and they behave in - to me - erratic ways, such as the priest who absent-mindedly decided to wander ahead of me into the last room in heroic Slave Pens, body-pulling both groups of crabs and nearly wiping us), but pugs can be completely hit and miss.

The priest healing us through heroic Sethekk Halls for example was a pug and clearly not impressed. He died on the first pull when a big heal got him aggro on a mob and it hit him before I could taunt it back, something for which I immediately apologised, because even though he was a stranger, I cared and felt bad. But all the subsequent times I died (and I mean when it happened to only me, and the rest of the group survived just fine), he seemed more annoyed with me than anything. I mean, I may well be projecting - I know it's a tough dungeon to heal, and didn't want to complain. But I certainly didn't feel the love when I slowly watched my health bar deplete sometimes with no incoming heals for what felt like ages, just to go splat yet again and then see the rest of the group finish off the pull or boss without me.

So I'm kind of torn about staying a bear on my druid... I like having a tanking alt available when needed, and I do quite enjoy tanking in some ways, but there's also a big part of me that's considering simply going tree so that I can focus on healing people I like, and not having to entrust my (virtual) life to strangers all the time. Plus in one of those "that's just typical" situations, my attempts at gearing my druid have coincided with several other people suddenly deciding that they want to work on their tanking alts now, so that we'll have e.g. four tank sign-ups for Kara and no healers. It's just awkward all around.

Tier Four Cleared

Well, that was faster than expected. I mean, I always knew that tier four wasn't going to keep even my casual guild progressing for too long, considering that it only consists of Karazhan and three 25-man bosses, but the sheer speed with which we cleared it has still been a surprise to me.

Karazhan was fully clearable for us from day one; a wipe here or there just meant that it initially took too long to clear in a single night, meaning that people had to come back for the last two or three bosses another evening. Still, for the last two weeks, the groups I was in were already pulling off full one-night clears, including Netherspite and Nightbane.

Our first official 25-man raid was two weeks ago. We had a few quick wipes on High King Maulgar (mostly from early mage tank deaths) but once we got that down he was a relatively easy kill. Gruul himself was a somewhat tougher nut to crack, with his combo of RNG and personal responsibility to not wipe the raid during Shatter, but we still managed to kill him that same night as well. We then had a brief look at Magtheridon but didn't get very far. There was supposed to be a follow-up raid dedicated purely to Mag's Lair that same week, but we had to cancel it as we had zero warlocks available that night and the fight just seemed too daunting to progress without one.

This week we returned to clear Gruul's Lair on Wednesday, though the big gronn still required a lot of wipes until we got him down again. Tonight was then dedicated to Magtheridon. I chugged a flask and settled in for a long night, as I still remembered the endless wipes due to people messing up the cube-clicking back in the day... and as far as I recall that was when the fight had already been nerfed to only require ten clickers instead of twenty. BC Classic still has the twenty-clicker version right now.

We had one instant wipe when someone accidentally triggered the fight before we were ready, and then two more where things went wrong early on while killing the channellers. Then Mag himself was finally free and we could start practising our cube-clicking! And believe it or not, all twenty clickers aced their job on the first try and we killed him that very attempt. The overall mood after he died was more one of slight bafflement than joyous victory I think.

At this point I reckon that many people spent a lot more time collecting their pre-raid best-in-slot gear than actually clearing the raids. What now, spend one night a week farming these while slowly working on the Eye attunement chain in preparation for the next phase?

If only there were other things to do in this game than just chasing your BiS gear...

Interlude: Duoing Old Raids

It's not all about levelling.

Unlike me, my pet tank was never a raider when he played WoW previously, so he expressed interest in going back to look at some old raids once we were of a high enough level to do them with just the two of us. It's been a pretty interesting experience so far, with him getting to see many zones for the first time and me getting to indulge in nostalgia by boring him with stories of just how much of a pain in the arse this or that boss used to be back in the day. Here's a list of which raids we've done so far in order of raid progression, which is not necessarily the order in which we actually completed them:

Molten Bore Core: Okay, this was one was pretty boring as it was "before my time" so to speak (as I didn't start raiding until Burning Crusade) and I didn't have a lot of stories to tell beyond some vague memories of the Hydraxian Waterlords and needing special water to douse the flaming runes. We did have some fun failing at killing Core Hound packs simultaneously for a while, but other than that it was a pretty boring-looking instance with fairly boring bosses.

Blackwing Lair: The transition from Molten Core to Blackwing Lair always fascinates me because it's just such a complete change of pace in terms of how complicated the mechanics are; I can only imagine how much of a pain that must have been for raiders back in the day. Razorgore is pretty much the perfect boss to duo these days though, with one person using the orb and the other killing everything. He also gave us our first pet drop, an Unscathed Egg, which was won by me.

Vaelastrasz was the first boss to give us trouble, as we first tried him at level eighty-one or so and found that we couldn't get him down before he cast Burning Adrenaline twice, thus killing both of us. With proper cooldown usage we eventually managed to down him anyway, as I cast a quick battle res on my tank after he died, so that he was still alive when the boss finally keeled over. When we came back a second time at eighty-six, Vael didn't even get a single Adrenaline cast off before going down.

During our first visit we were also stopped dead by Ebonroc, as we couldn't outdamage his self-healing and my pet tank wasn't keen on trying a possibly long and drawn-out tank swapping strategy with me in bear form. Again, once we came back at eighty-six he gave us no problems whatsoever, and all the bosses after him also fell in quick succession.

Karazhan: Not much to say about this one other than that it was very easy. After all the trouble I remembered having trying to solo the chess event, I was grateful to have another person to help with keeping the king out of the fire though. Pet Tank also commented that the trash looked like it must have been a nightmare back in the day.

Gruul's & Magtheridon's Lair: These were also fairly boring once we sufficiently overpowered them, though it was interesting to note that High King Maulgar and his posse, as well as Mag's trash could still rack up a significant amount of damage due to the sheer amount of effects and debuffs they've got going on.

Serpentshrine Cavern: Ahh, a raid that was much beloved by me in Burning Crusade, and not just because of the mad end fight! The first five bosses gave us no real trouble, except for Karathress' minions being a bit of a pain when they were all piled up on top of each other with all their different effects and abilities (similar to the Maulgar fight). Vashj on the other hand was going to be a different kettle of fish (pun intended). I had a hunch that they had removed the tainted core's ability to root you, but other than that I wasn't sure whether the fight had been nerfed significantly in terms of mechanics, and the answer seemed to be no. Our first attempt went hilariously badly as I was atrocious at killing the regular elementals and chasing down the tainted ones before they despawned, so by the time we finally freed Vashj herself she was up to eighty stacks of empowerment. I was impressed that it still took us a little while to die! On our second attempt things went much more smoothly, but we then wiped in phase three as Pet Tank kept getting stunned in puddles of green goo and I couldn't provide him with enough healing as feral. After I went resto for our third try, we managed to overcome that obstacle too (and incidentally, Moonfire spam is actually not a bad way of killing the elementals either).

The Eye: After the trouble we had with Vashj, I knew that Kael wasn't going to be a slouch either, and I was right. The other three bosses were once again easy enough, and Solarian even dropped a little voidwalker pet that was won by my pet tank. Just like back in the day, Kael started off easy enough as well, but the phase with all the advisors up at once was just a giant mess. With only two people to eat all the various debuffs, we were basically in a state of constantly being punted around the room while stunned, disoriented, feared and on fire all at the same time, which soon led to our demise. For our next attempt I respecced resto once again and made sure to loot and equip the Staff of Disintegration to at least save us from some of all the disruptive effects - which was fine until phase four, when Kael started mind-controlling me over and over again to heal him and made me get up to all kinds of shenanigans, which once again led to a wipe. I wasn't sure whether there was any way of getting around that other than going in solo, but fortunately I found a video online that showed that simple line of sight prevents the mind control, so I just spent most of that phase standing behind a pillar, which eventually led us to victory.

Anyone got an idea up to what level old raids will be solo-/duoable once we are ninety? I'm guessing that some Cata bosses will be manageable, but probably not all of them...