The Blog From Hell

Hi, and welcome to another edition of Omgpwnies’s diary.
This could be a long one again, seeing as it’s meant to cover the entire (rather busy) weekend during which I levelled all the way to 22. Level 20 was a big thing, I finally got a mount – and it rather left me wondering what the actual purpose of travel-form is ? It’s a nice speed bonus between 16 and 20, but once you get to 20, it’s really not worth much because it’s so much slower.
Perhaps it could be said to have some use for farming if you’re in an area with nodes close together as you don’t need to dismount to collect but other than that I just don’t get it. Frankly Blizzard wanting to reduce the forms for druids in Cata would have done better to drop cheetah than tree. Every druid healer I know uses tree, but cheetah is apparently a complete waste after level 20.

Another thing is that Night-elves were clearly designed by sex-deprived Blizzard code-geeks. Seriously. Until very recently, the best pants I could find were a loincloth which really made me look half naked, when I finally found a decent upgrade in Wailing Caverns… it turned out to be snakeskin pants. Throw in the fact that when a Night Elf dances the only thing missing is a pole… well you get the picture. I swear I don’t get the current fad for walking around towns in underwear in WoW, seriously – a Nelf with full T10 gear STILL looks like a stripper.
Not that I’m comlaining mind you, just observing.

My progress as a tank has been interesting. Saturday at level 20 I got my first run at Deadmines. I can only describe it using the phrase “Epic Fail”. While I had been an okay tank up to that point, I completely blew it in there. I did okay until we entered the goblin room where I managed to get myself tied down on a target I pulled and not notice a bunch of adds had assaulted my group until they were to close to wiping to be saved. Group immediately left with a series of swears at the noob. I didn’t let it get to me much though, seeing as it’s partly true. I’m not a WoW noob but I am a tanking noob, I did think it’s an unfair thing to say though. This was level 20. Nobody becomes a pro-80 tank overnight, you learn by playing – it’s a bit harsh to blame a new tank for trying and failing.
Still I made a point to learn, read up more tanking guides – expanded my add-on set with grid so I can keep a proper eye on my party’s status, levelled a bit, got my first heirloom piece and qeued up for another dungeon. I got Shadowfang Keep – and did okay – we finished the dungeon despite one wipe on the last boss (which was not caused by a tank problem but by the healer disconnecting – that’s just bad luck, next try we rocked it).
I also tanked Wailing Caverns (which took many hours) and did much better. One thing is clear, the classic dungeons were way longer than the new stuff. On RavenJet I can finish the average heroic dungeon in about 15 minutes. In the 20′s there are several dungeons which can take two to three hours to finish – a timeframe that, these days, I would only associate with a raid. The average heroic has 3 bosses. Wailing Caverns for example have 9 – and you can’t skip any because the final boss is only reachable after doing all of them.

I am happy with my proress though. At these early levels I do still get the occasional bad PUG, guys who are complete noobs and pull by themselves – and mostly I’m kind enough to save their asses, the occasional rude guy and a lot of people who demand “go go faster pull moar”… but blame the tank if they wipe.
So message to all of you: the tank takes responsibility for your lives in there, when I pull, I am making the judgement call about how many mobs you can kill at once, how much healing the healers mana pool can do – and how many mobs I can keep aggro’d. Don’t second guess me if you’re DPS. If I mess up, feel free to critisize me afterward, but when I pull a single mob only – it’s because I’ve made a tactical decision to do so. Usually because there is a few together that I can’t split- so I want to clear out the singles nearby because otherwise the fight will be far too big to handle. If I tell you to stand back so I can corner-pull, it’s because that’s just about the only move a bear has for tanking a caster.

I can and have handled a group of 25+ mobs, but it was incredibly hard – I only have so much rage to go round – and we damn nearly wiped on it. A dungeon is not a race, enjoy the experience you’re in.

But above all – accept that there is a reason tanks lead the group: we’re the ones who have to keep the mobs busy while you kill them, keep them off your skinny clothie asses – and that means we get to judge how many, and which ones, when. A good tank works hard to get the skills to make those calls, to learn what to do when we lose one and how to pull him back without losing the others – to learn how to turn a boss so his back is to the raid even if we get stunned and have to power-shift to break it.
Just like you work hard to know your rotations, get your DPS up or ensure your healing is ideal – so we work hard at our job, and the choice of tactics and pulls is that job.
WoW.com had a funny joke in a post on Friday. There are, according to Allison Robert, two types of tank: wonderful human beings – and absolute assholes. The difference is two months on the job. I must say, I can see her point.

And what do you know… it’s not that long after-all.

“Hold on just a second there Omy” I hear you say in shock, “did you not just yesterday complain that druids are squishy and that a lack of survivability makes them hard to play in the early levels ?”
Well yes, I did. The thing is, I was level 12 then, and it’s amazing what happens in 3 levels. With the addition of Enrage to the bears abilities you gain access to your rage based skills with greater ease – and you also gain the wonderful new ability of Bash. Your bear grows armor levels that matter – and he becomes really viable.
The other thing is, I started to get the hang of things I previously wasn’t any good at. Firstly melee combat. Remember my main is a ranged caster, I’ve never learned how melee really works – and the bits I did leveling so far somehow I hadn’t previously connected with how the bear is used. In fact, when you get the hang of it, the bear becomes a powerhouse of survival. While he doesn’t come close to the cat for damage, it’s mana-less. Then comes the real trick – learning what a druid is all about – shapeshifting, to access various abilities from various forms and mix them up (even when you only have two).
My preferred solo’ing approach changed now to Entangle, Moonfire, Bear Form – fight – and suddenly I was surviving tough fights, handling 3 mobs at once and going really quickly through level 14.

Then I hit 15. Level 15 is something of a magic number in WoW these days. If you read any of the leveling guides for druids you’ll see they all recommend that you level as Feral DPS until 80, and then switch to whatever you actually wanted out of your character. In truth, that’s just not true anymore. It is true that Feral DPS is by far the fastest way to do quests because it does high levels of mana-less damage. It’s just that questing is not the best way to level anymore. You do need to quest still – but it should be the least part of your XP per level, maybe 30%, 40 if you are doing a particularly noteworthy chain.
The rest comes from the Dungeon Finder. From level 15 you have the option to qeue up for random dungeoons. Dungeon XP blows quest XP clean out of the water, I got 80% of the XP from 15 to 16 out of doing just one single dungeon (in later times, you’ll need 4 or more to level, but it still beats the hell out of hundred or more quests). Some may complain that this makes it too easy to level, and reduces the value of it, but that is not entirely true. If you do only this you’ll be worthless at level 80 anyway and take ages to gear – so you want to do at least the important quest stuff anyway because you will need the reputation later.
More importantly, it changes one fundamental thing. It removes the “drudgingly doing what I didn’t want for 80 levels so I can get to what I want to be” aspect. In dungeons – you can play the spec you want to play, and expect to do well as the dungeons are geared to your level.
I did my first dungeon yesterday, which was also the first time I tanked and it went really rather well. We didn’t wipe – and we finished it okay. Some guys complained my pulls were too small but hell, let me get used to tanking before I try to tank 20 mobs at once eh ? One annoyance which has not changed at all since I leveled RavenJet (back when dungeon groups were harder to put together) is the prevalence of players who simply don’t follow the tactics. Who run away from healers and DPS’ers who pull.
I had a hard time keeping aggro as a result, and in fact multiple times had to steal aggro because an overeager DPSer had run on in and pulled on his own. I had a temptation to let him die for his stupidity but that slows everyone down and punishes the whole group. So me and the one other non-noob in the group tried to gently explain that “just because you’re a hunter who can kite, you should not be pulling in a dungeon.”
That other person happened to be the healer who complained quite heartily about non-tanks pulling. The noob DPSers apparently just didn’t listen as he tried to explain that the only reason they weren’t dead was because he was working his ass off spamming heals at the entire group – instead of his job, which is to heal the tank and come round to them for damage that cannot be avoided only.
The risk there of course is that you’re sapping the healer’s mana – if he runs out, the group wipes. They got away with it because Ragefire Chasm is an introductory dungeon and is forgiving of bad tactics, but only barely. A less proficient healer would have failed. One who wasn’t the alt of an existing 80 would never have been able to handle this useless stress.
But enough QQing after all, when you play a level 15 dungeon with a random group, some of the players will be casuals who don’t understand the mechanics and tactics yet – would be nice if they showed some desire to learn though. All in all, I was fairly proud of my first tanking job, and I suddenly came to understand a fundamental I had heard but never lived before. The close-knit cooperation of a tank and her healer. The standard tank-and-spank tactic creates a symbiosis between three disparate skills. DPSers can’t take damage but can dish it out, so they rely on the tank to be their shield. Like a nerd who taunts a jock and then hides behind his big brother. The tank in turn relies on them to do the high levels of damage he can’t do (but can take). The DPS’ers rely on the healer mostly to res them if they get dead, and to help them recover from such damage as they simply cannot avoid (a BAD DPSer chooses to stand in a debuff zone to finish his cast so he does more damage – everybody’s DPS drops to zero when you’re dead and it’s not the healers’ job to try and battle avoidable damage on you while ignoring the tank – I speak as somebody who does ICC raids using a pure DPS class). But the healer who does no damage, and can’t take any… is completely dependent on the tank to keep the enemies of him, and she in turn is utterly dependent on him to heal the damage she is taking.
In raiding guilds, tanks and healers develop a close and compassionate symbiosis – which may explain why several of the best Tank/Healer pairs I know are real life couples (I broke the mould apparently with my female tank, females seem to be healers or DPSers rather than tanks usually, a job they leave to their other halfs – some kind of social/evolutionary idea about who fights the battle and who mends the wounds maybe ?).
Female tank characters are very rare, and I believe female tank players are even rarer, which is odd because DPS is just as much a fighting role and that has a neat 50/50 split in characters (and I believe players too). I wonder what we can learn about human society today from the relationships between WoW roles and genders… but I digress.

Either way… even on my very first tank – there was an immediate camaraderie with my healer (I had a male one) a sense of “we are a team – we rely on each other” and he offered me useful and helpful advice after the fight which I took to heart. Since hitting 16 I trained my travel form and water form and then did the defunct water-form questline more for fun than anything else. Druids really score when it comes to movement, Pallys and Lock’s also get free mounts – but Druids get bonusses earlier on. Nobody gets a mount before level 20 but travel form at level 16 is a 40% boost which while not the 100% of your first mount is still a major help in getting around. We swim faster, and we fly earlier and can do things in flight form that other classes have to dismount to do. In short, druid shape-shifting sure pays off outside of combat as much as in.

In the meantime, this weekend I’m going to slow my time on Omg down a bit, because I want to do a bunch of heroics and raids as RavenJet – he needs gear, he needs to farm because twinking Omg has all but wiped out my cashflow, and he needs to earn stonekeeper shards so Omg can get her heirloom items. After all, for having an 80 already, heirlooms on my alt is a deserved reward in my book.

This has been my longest diary entry yet, I doubt most will be this long but I had a lot to write about- it was a busy night