On tanking, responsibility, and maturity

On Tanks:
Tanks are a funny breed of player.  You have to be the one to charge in head first and thrust yourself between the bad guys and the rest of your group.  You have to be on top of your game and pay attention to not only what the current group of mobs are doing, but to what COULD happen.  It requires a pretty well developed sence of awareness to anticipate what will happen before it does, and propperly react.  You can see that type of behavior pretty readily when doing dungeons.  A veteran player will recognize "Ok, in the current set of mobs I'm fighting, the dragon has a knockback ability.  The hunter's pet is on the dragon, and the dragon's back is facing towards another group of mobs.  I need to reposition the dragon to avoid the possibilty of getting another group joining the fight"  versus the oh shit, we got another pack... what do I do now blank stare some of the newer tanks get.

Tanking gets repetative.  "hit me, hey you, your mamma's ugly, get back over here, leave the guy in the sissy robe alone."  And tanks don't get to see all the fancy large numbers the DPS players get.  In fact, you want to be focused on SMALL numbers.  I want to see that boss hit me like he's wielding a wet noodle.

To sum it up, tanking is a RESPONSIBILITY.

On responsibility:
Tanks have a large responsiblity to shoulder most times.  When is the most opportune time to blow your cooldowns to avoid the spike damage and stay alive?  How long exactly can you stand in the fire before you become toast at the same time the boss is hitting you?  How well can you coordiate properly executing your regular rotation of spells / abilities while watching for particular fight mechanics and helping to position the boss propperly for your raid?

It gets to be a bit much, and if you don't enjoy that role, the answer is simple.  You won't last.

On maturity:
Say you've decided tanking is not your thing anymore, however the guild currenly relies on you to fulfill that role?  What do you do?

1. Not show up entirely even though you've been online all day, only to log off after you find out you cannot bring your grass is greener over here shiny new character, then log back in after the rest if your raid group cannot do anything for the night?  But hey, at least you didn't have to tank.
2. Post up on the guild forums, realizing you have a responsibility to the group of players you choose to game with and let them know your predicament.  Tell them you're willing to continue fulfilling that role until a suitable replacement can be found and express gratitude to the guild for all of the now wasted loot you received.

The co-tank I've had the mis-fortune of running with for the last month or so chose to go route number 1.  I don't mind so much that he doesn't want to tank anymore, we've already established it's not for everybody.  It's the fact that he was selfish enough to screw the rest of the group over.

And me, being the hard head I am, called him out on it in guild chat last night.  Followed by a slew of emo behavior and threating to not tank again, ever.  Zoh noes....   anything but that!

This culture of instant gratification and self-entitlement needs to die...  In fact, I'll tank that fight for you.

Quintalan the Veteran

I've been running instances on an almost daily basis for a couple of months now, and the long road of questing to get to 80 seems a distant memory. Yes, I'm still doing quests for the Loremaster achievement, but it's not the same. The imminent threat of character death lent a different feel to that questing, and since I did my trip to 80 on a PvP server, there was always the "look over your shoulder, someone might be waiting to gank you" aspect to it.

Even the time I've spent running instances and doing heroics has changed my perception a bit. While I'm not a wily veteran like the long time players or the raiders are, I know my way around enough to know what I need to do to survive the instance and not look like an idiot. Although it may sure seem otherwise at times, I'm not a noob anymore. I was reminded of that last night during a run in The Nexus, and the day before in the Pit of Saron.

When I ported into The Nexus and began blessing people with Kings and Wisdom, the first thing one of the characters said after introductions was "does anyone need food?" Then the healer said that he needed to drink after buffing everybody. It had been ages since anyone had even mentioned those two in a heroic instance that I paused and checked out everyone's gear scores. In a bizarre case of turnabout, I had by far the highest gear score of the group.

I made a few mental adjustments and made a point of dialing back my attacks to keep from pulling threat on the first few trash pulls. The pulls went well, if a bit slower than what I'm now used to. Then the tank posted that he had to split; he'd just gotten paged and had to go into work.

No sweat. Real Life comes ahead of a game, and since I'm on a pager rotation I know what that's like. We put in a request for a new tank, and while we waited we chatted about the Stoutbeard encounter just up ahead. At least one party member hadn't heard of him, so I mentioned he's only in the Heroic mode and has a nasty whirlwind attack. A new tank popped in, we took out Stoutbeard after a couple of minutes, and the mage and priest had to drink. We loitered for a minute, let them get back their mana, and we went on to the next trash pull.

Then the second tank dropped out of the party without a word.

"What did I do wrong?" the healer asked. "I did everything I was supposed to, and nobody died."

"You did fine," I told him, and the others agreed. "He was just being a jerk."

"Well, this is my second Heroic instance. Ever."

"You're doing great; I've only been playing since August myself. Believe me, compared to my experience trying to heal Trial of the Champion at the same gear level you are, you're doing fine." I then explained my disaster trying to heal that instance, when we couldn't even get past Palestra; Souldat as the tank was taking so much damage at a pop that even while spamming Holy Light I couldn't keep up.

The story engendered a bunch of laughs. "That's a helluva place to heal for your first 80 instance," the hunter said.

"Yeah, and believe me, you're doing much better than that, Heals."

A third tank ported in, and we resumed the run. We finished with only one character death -due to the spike damage the boss gives in the elemental area- and before I left I complimented the group on the job. Compared to the times I've been in runs where the entire point is to "gogogo!", this was a pleasant experience.

The Pit of Saron also featured a healer new to the instance, and he had severe misgivings about it. "You'll do fine," the tank assured him.

"This instance is built with AoE heals in mind," I added. "I couldn't do it well as a Holy Spec Pally, but you as a shaman should be okay."

We did well, up until after Ick and Crick, when we started having problems staying alive in the vyrkul trash pulls heading up to Tyrannus. A couple of people in the instance had to go repair their gear, and the warlock dropped and was replaced by a mage. "This is getting to be too much for me to heal," the Shaman said.

"Don't worry about it," I replied. "We'll get through this and you'll see it's not a big deal."

We had one more wipe where we pulled too much trash at once, but once we reached the end of the tunnel things went much better with Tyrannus.

"Good job," I told the healer before I left. "Now that you've gotten this under your belt, you'll be that much better at it."

Perhaps I'm seeing myself in these characters, realizing that not very long ago it was me who was in their shoes. I'm taking the encouragement that Soul, Millalyn, and others have given me and am paying it forward. That's one of the best things that I like about the game: the support and camraderie you get from people you may not even know, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.*

Sure, people can be real jerks -or worse- just like in real life, but that doesn't mean that you have to be. I've seen terrible behavior on numerous occasions, but I take that as a "how not to act" and run with it. It might not help the signal to noise ratio in the long run, but it will have an impact on those you interact with.



*One time, when Quint was questing in Desolace, an 80 Pally came riding by. He stopped, a trade window opened, and he started dumping stuff in it. "What do want for this?" I asked, dumbfounded.

"Nothing," he replied. "I'm going to be suspending my account soon, and I'm giving all my stuff away. Do you have any other characters?"

"I priest," I said.

A few more items appeared in the trade window.

"Are you sure about this?"

"Quite sure. Have fun!"

Guardian of Ancient Kings

This little spell caught my eye in the new stuff in the works for Paladins:

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

Do you know what this sounds to me? A Figurine of the Boar spell for Ret Pallys. Woo hoo!

WTH

The pursuit of Frosties has hit a new low.

I logged in for my lunchtime run, and the LFD tool spat out Utgarde Pinnacle. This should work out, I thought. I'll end up with six Emblems of Triumph, and I'll be that much closer to getting another heirloom piece for my mage.

We did the entire Pinnacle in 10 minutes. Tops.

The tank ported in, began running, and didn't stop. He just skipped right on by the first two bosses and most of the trash, and would have probably avoided Skadi too if he could have managed it. He then hot footed it straight up to Ymrion and, with the rest of us following, we downed him in record time.

Frosties gained, people began splitting even before the loot was divvied up.

And not a word was said. Not a single word. Except for the facepalm that another party member got because he aggroed some extra trash going down the stairs.

Sheesh.

A Tale of Two Pugs

For all of the pugfail I've seen lately (mainly driven by Spring Break, I believe), it's also nice to know that when some bad things happen, some people can step up to the plate and deliver.

Take a Gundrak run a week or so ago. The initial pull started off okay, but then for some unknown reason the Rogue ran ahead of the group and into the snake area and managed to aggro all of the rest of the trash not on the tank. The Rogue, of course, proceeded to die very quickly. The tank was able to get everything else to aggro on him and between he, the Mage and I we were able to take care of the rest of the trash.

The tank then turned on the body of the Rogue and pointed.

"You!" he said. "If you EVER do that again, we're kicking you out."

Properly chastised, the Rogue was rezzed and slunk back into the back of the pack, behaving himself for the rest of the run.

On another run -Halls of Stone, this time- we lost the healer to the second trash mob. One minute he was there, the next we're all saying "Heals? Where'd you go?" Turns out another mob had aggroed on him and he was trying to avoid it. In the process, he ended up aggroing a couple more trash mobs, and he had this pile of Dark Iron dwarves trailing him as he was running away.

Straight. Into. Us.

My, what an ass-kicking that was.

After we all released and ran back into the instance, the healer apologized and for the rest of the run he stuck his tail-end right next to the tank's.

In both cases, we could have easily kicked out the person who screwed up, but after calling him out and giving him another chance, they turned out to be a valuable member of the pug.

No, you can't assume this will happen all the time (or even part of the time, for that matter), but I thought them notable enough that I wanted to mention that yes, it can actually happen.

Putting points in the IRL Subtlety tree

I enjoy playing pranks in real life, and especially at work.  A good prank can really lighten things up once in a while.

For instance, a fellow co-worker and I have been having a mini prank war for about the last 4 months.  He's done things such as steal my staples out of my stapler every day for a week straight, or completely tape up my office chair, or competley rearange my desk drawers.

I, on the other hand, have done things to him like stolen all of his pens every chance I get since the day he started here, applied superglue to a bar of staples every day for three days so a lump of solid glue was on the bottom and watch him get confused why the stapler wasn't working, to even applying glue boards (the kind you use to catch mice) to the underside of his desk and chair (it works GREAT if you put the board right about where you reach natrually to adjust your chair height... just put the glue board there, and lower the chair all the way).

Or adding a command in one of his imaging scripts to just echo a text line that states "dan is a douche."  And also adding a line to his local hosts file that redirects his favorite guitar website (he runs a heavy metal guitar forum) to guitarhero.com (which he HATES).  That one actually got him to call up his buddy and tell him they've been hacked, LOL!
And the more subtle you can get, the better.  For instance, I'm standing in line today buying my lunch and the gentleman ahead of me is acting rather jittery.  He's buying an energy drink, sugar, cigarettes, large bag of chips, and 5 hour energy pills.  The cashier asks him "do those pills really work?  They don't mess with you at all?"  To which jittery guy goes "Yeah, they don't make you jittery at all because there's no sugar."

I coudln't help but actually LOL.

So how does this tie into gaming?

Heroics can be rather boring, and bringing some levity to them can really be a fun change of pace. 

The setting:  Halls of Reflection (Heroic)
The setup:  My DK, A fellow guidee Pally tank, and a Fellow guildee on his DK Alt all que up as tank and dps for a random heroic.  We then proceed to argue who's going to tank through out the whole first half of the dungeon, complete with taunts flying all over the place, Armies of the dead going nuts, and a boss who's too busy ping-ponging everywhere to actually do much of anything.  We really put on a good show.

The truly funny thing though, that was the smoothest run I've ever had of that place.

So this week I'm challenging you to do something unique in a random dungeon.

**Edited in more co-worker pwnage.

Tank Etiquette

Okay, this is a question to the tanks out there. (I guess that means Souldat, but you never know who else might be reading.) When a monster drops an AoE on the floor -like the Reanimators in Drak or the Maiden of Grief in HoL- is it considered proper etiquette to pull the monster away from the middle of the floor? I've seen in several runs this past week where the tank just lets the monster or boss sit there while they wail away, but I have to split and then watch remotely after unloading my distance attacks. I know Soul will pull them out of the center, and I've seen plenty of other tanks that do it too, but the batch I got this week either don't understand that melee DPS can't stand around in the black stuff on the floor or don't care. Or maybe they have tunnel vision and don't notice, which is something I've been guilty of when I've done healing.