RAWR TANK

There was actually a little discussion on Twitter about gender and in game roles and why we just don’t see that many women playing tanks.  I’d rather not touch gender issues with even a 40 foot stick, but it’s an interesting observation none the less.  Oh they’re out there, to be sure.  And some of them are damned fine tanks.  But there’s not many of them, and/or some of them hide very well.   I can’t get onto Vent without wanting to yap, so no hiding for me.

Is it something to do with the pressure?  Tanking pressure is different from healing pressure.  Tanking, especially in a raiding situation, is more lime light-y.  I mean there’s 5 other healers…and 2 other tanks.  They are WATCHING you, man.  WATCHING YOU.  YES THIS FREAKS ME THE FUCK OUT AAAAH.

It amuses me to think that right this moment, in BoO, there are three women who play (healy!) priests who also have tanky paladin alts.  For two of us, these alts were our mains at one point.  What the hell is it with priests and paladins?  

Speaking of alts healers like to have in common: Back in BC, we wanted a hunter for Kara, so we asked who had hunter alts to swap out.  There were a few hunter alts, as it turned out-all of our healers had one.  No one else, of course just…all of the healers.     /facepalm

Anyway.  Last night was supposed to be a Naxx25 badge/lolgear run…and we had…er…12 people?  Maybe?  There were no pugs in site.  Naxx is officially a ghost town…deserted…the red headed step child of raiding instances, what have you.  We dropped it down to a 10, though, and proceeded to lol our way through that.  It was more amusing goofing off with 10 guildies than running many heroics with 5.   :P  That, and I got some more MT experience under my belt (though Loth is boring as ever) and made at least 2 pathetic shows as lolret.  Let me tell you, having someone on Heigan who has never tanked it before…and a ret paladin who has never been melee down there before…results in a dead retadin.  And a dead most everyone else, apparently.  Oh, DDR boss, how we hate you!  I managed to Not Fail Grobb, though.  Er, well, not badly.  Only Josh died…  >.> 

I did get JUST enough badges from it to replace my Naxx10 chest (!) with the badge one.  That should help me out a lot!  I should go pug VoA as a tank for more gear, but it scares me.  I don’t know why, but…it does.  Tanking in general scares me far more than healing or DPSing ever has.  I’m so terrified of screwing up in front of everybody! O noes!  And it’s hard to do a “guild” VoA run first to learn the fight…nope…gotta jump in there cold…ugh!

I am such a pansy.  I do love tanking though.  Of course I also love disc priesting, and shadow priesting, and BM huntering…  I might love retadining if I didn’t SUCK at it.  I can’t tolerate being bad.  :(  You know the kids who thought anything less than an A was a failure?  That’s me.  Being a disc priest is probably healthy for me.  “Oh look, I’m at the bottom of the meters…WHERE I AM SUPPOSED TO BE” vs “OH GOD THE OTHER HOLY PALADINS ARE BEATING ME WHYYYYY”. 

No, this post had no point.  I’m all silly and rambly right now, and distracted by Nano.  I think that, next week, I’ll start ToC Strats.  Woooo, actual content!

Random thought: The funny thing about being a known kidder is that one rare occasions where I’m feeling especially bitter, sometimes the truth comes out and everyone laughs unknowingly.

Random Musings on Paladin Tanking

Our dear Kyr has decided to dabble in paladin tanking.  As it so happens many of the officers are or have been paladin tanks, so it’s not as if he doesn’t have a plethora of opinions to draw from.  I actually transferred to Azgalor as a paladin tank, and I am…reasonably comfortable on that role.  I tend to have several heart attacks the first time I fight anything new and then, blessedly, mellow out after that.

You should have seen me doing Ignis trash-I was cowering in terror, because I’ve seen the adds cause wipes repeatedly when allowed to give healers hugs.  I was quite proud of myself afterwards, too-no one died!  Yay!

I’ve not found-as a Naxx25 and early Ulduar10 tank-that the recent nerfs have not really affected me much.  I’ve even stopped thinking about how, exactly, I do it-I did my research on attack priorities, arranged my bar, and just smack the buttons when they’re shiny (I will so totes be an awesome ret pally).  I keep an eye on defense cap, I try to get some hit, and I like dodge and parry!  Block is okay, I guess.  I think wairrors like block more.  Stam + stuff gems are good!  Yay, stam!

…and that is how I prot pally.

…I should probably leave teaching Ky up to Macharious, huh?

I might toss out a paladin tanking 101 guide though, because simplifying things for those of us who recoil in terror from the EJ forums is only doing some people a favor.  :P 

Non-bleeding edge tanks, ho!

Monday Recap

I did a lot of raiding this week-far more than normal.  I don’t have a single 80 not saved to one or more raid instances, and I didn’t even touch Ony or VoA.  Jamethera went to Ulduar 10 and Naxx25, Ambrosyne went to Ulduar 10, and Lyrandre made her second foray into ToC 10. 

The ToC 10 was a guild run (sans one replacement for our DCing DPS warrior), albeit it an unofficial experiment before we head into it “for reals” later.  We’d done one off night attempt there before but gotten stuck on Beasts.  It resulted in lovely gems such as this one from one of our tanks:

We seemed likely to get stuck on it again, but after we replaced the aforementioned DCing Guy, we did alright.  In fact, we cleared all the way up to the Twins. And you know what?  Seeing the infamous Faction Champions for the first time, and post nerf at that I…I kind of enjoyed them.

Faction Champions: As Experienced by Lyrandre

/heal heal
/get aggro from the hunter pet
/fear
/heal heal
/get aggro from the hunter pet
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/get aggro from the hunter pet and the DK
/panic and say GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/get aggro from the hunter pet and the warrior
/panic and say GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/wonder where the hunter pet is
/heal heal, dispel
/giggle and run into the middle of mobs and fearbomb

And that is how you Faction Champion as a disc priest.  Since the sight of me running laps around the room with a cat following me was highly amusing, it was therefore an awesome fight.  I admit to having an advantage, however: my tank is in the room with me to hear “GETITOFFGETITOFF” when vent is rather, ah, busy.

Come twins in ToC, however, we ran into issues.  The tank kept dying.  As the tank healer, this makes me QQ hard core.  The only reason I can think of for this tank to die on my watch was the fact that I had to move around a lot.  Let’s face it, I’m not an awesome mobile tank healer when my big spell is channeled and I’m primarily a crit/SP whore.  Haste wut?

We were trying the one-tank, everyone-the-same-color strat.  Which works in some respects, but without anyone of the other color around to sop up those orbs, I was doing a lot of orb dancing.  Steve said that he would occasionally eat one for the sake of healing, which is fantastic, but two orbs will kill me.  I don’t want to risk “eating” one orb only to have a second one sneak up on me before I’m healed.  I think I need to drive home the “STEVE I CAN’T MOVE THAT MUCH AND TANK HEAL” aspect with a bat, because he’s got a wicked case of “If I don’t have a problem there is no problem” disease. 

Guild hobbies: Picking on Huntres, calling Phaseroll a loot whore, healers plotting DPS deaths, picking on Lyrandre

Of course it doesn’t help that I make it easy to pick on me.  Last week in Ulduar I just walked straight into a pack of mobs, for example.

My second trip into Ulduar with Ambrosyne as a tank was…not bad.  I didn’t start to suck until Thorim, where I did Arena for the first time.  Lots of DPS died in there.  Mmhmm.  I guess I wasn’t moving around to pick up mobs enough-a fact that Steve didn’t share with me until after.  Thanks, Steve.  You’re supposed to point out my dumb sooner so I can fix it if it isn’t clicking in my brain, mmkay?  :P  Since I spent so much time in the gauntlet (or staring at green bars) I admit I hadn’t actually watched tank behavior in the Arena before.  Now I know! 

She’s not a half bad alt tank if I do say so myself.  She’s got some gear that needs replacing (just bought a badge belt!) but it’s a toss up between gearing her and the hunter.  A lot of who runs what will of course depend on what’s needed, though I did also finally dual-spec Ambrosyne ret.  She is wearing this lovely mix of epics and…greens, where I didn’t have DPS gear already. 

I didn’t have much in the way of threat issues outside of the Arena, so no complaints there.

Dear Pugs:
I don’t want to see that sort of nonsense, okay?  Okay.

And that’s that for my Monday Recap.  I’ll leave you with this little gem, explaining why my ill-fated, dead-every-ten-seconds level 80 wolf is named HarryOtter.

“Let’s go to Ulduar!” they said…

What was normally our Naxx25 night turned into an Ulduar10 night due to lack of sign ups,  which was all fine and dandy until you considered that I was fucking tanking.

Also, why the hell does my alt do FL+1 before my main does?  Eh? Eh?  What the fuck?

We did FL, Razorscale, XT, Crazy Cat Lady, and…Thorim. 

I can’t tell if my heart-stopping drops in health were due to my gear (almost all Naxx25 but not quite), or because we had no standard “tank healers” in the raid (two trees and a shammy). 

As always, I may know the theory behind something but if I have not DONE it yet, I will usually fail.  Thus one wipe on CCL (lrn2pull Amber), and the first two Thorim wipes because fuck if I know how to tank the gauntlet.

We got Thorim the third try and I don’t know how.  See, my camera will sometimes get stuck at a funny angle.  Normally, I can click frantically a bit and it will fix itself, but when this happens while I’m tanking the first mini-boss on Thorim?  Er… 

Somehow we killed the first mini-boss, also killed the second (the hunter’s pet brought it to me), and then I was able to run in a wavering, drunken line to Thorim.   The whole “tank him with his back to the lighting” aspect was pretty lost on me as I was stuck staring at his ass, and turning him correctly that way was a trial and error process costing the warlock his life…again.  Then he keeled over dead and I flailed and whined and fixed my camera and decided that I never wanted to do that ever again.

Then the worlds ugliest tanking mace drops and someone hands it to me.  What?  No, no, let’s give me loot for THINGS THAT NEED REPLACING.  Like, my BELT.  Or my CHEST.  Oooooor my SHIELD.   Not my FUCKING weapon when I have LAST LAUGH hdjashdasdsjhasd.

Last Laugh Mocks Me

I was dragged into our guild’s Naxx 25 wrap up on Sunday, and was lucky enough to get Last Laugh (farewell, Sword of I’m Tired of Running UP).   I cheerfully ran off to throw a weapon chain on it for the time being, and then…

…realized that I was one point under defense cap.

Oh, for fuck’s sake!

In my great laziness I just went ahead and bought the crafted epic shield I should have had already off the AH, thus ensuring that I’ll replace it in the very next Naxx 25 that I run.  Then I looked at my 1h Axe skill and realized it was at…1.

…

So I ducked below Dalaran and beat on a treant for 25 minutes.  I’m not exaggerating, I saw my seal timer tick down.  I spent a lot of time alt tabbed, despite the very real risk that some hordie would come along and go LOL PALLY and stomp me.  I gave up at 370 or some odd skill because I was finally hitting hard enough to kill the silly trees in only a couple of minutes.  I can’t say I like Ambrosyne carrying around such a menacing weapon.  I mean, it’s Ambrosyne!  Her idea of a taunt is probably something along the lines of “Hey, you!  Over here!  Don’t hurt my friends!”

Lyestra also recently picked up an axe to tank with, but it suits her nicely.  She’s always been the sort where a more brutal weapon was right up her alley.   Thankfully the treants were above her in level so there was little risk of her killing them accidentally, so her alt-tabbed weapon skilling was easier.  I think weapon skilling is teh dumb, though.

Project-wise I’m currently working on Uldaur Boss Notes, because I have every intention of not letting Huntres explain another raid fight ever again.

Enrage in 3…2…1

I hold myself to high standards.  These standards bleed over onto the people around me, especially if they are fellow officers in my guild.  Remember-I am the recruitment officer.  I want to polish up the turd delightfully quirky mix of people that is my guild so that I can “sell” it to other people. 

Don’t say the words “it’s just Naxx”.  Just don’t.  It’s not “just Naxx”, it’s several hours of my time.  It’s several hours of 24 other people’s time, and this isn’t a pug-this is a guild run.  With several new guildies we would like to retain, which means, don’t be fucking lazy.  You weren’t listening to vent and had music turned up?  The requests for buffs were put in raid chat, several times.  You were sitting there playing with your dick and hitting the Holy Light button and not reading raid?  You have Pally Power-use it.  Is that box not the right color?  Click on it, and it’ll do the buffs for you!  Don’t laze your way through a class and spec I know and then act surprised when I call you on it.   People are rabid about their paladin buffs.  Rabid.  Don’t want to waste reagents when all of the melee dies on every trash pull in the Military Quarter?  Right click does baby buffs!  Holy shit!

You do realize that they are yelling at me for buffs because I am also a paladin, right?  And that when I have my buffs properly given out I don’t want to be nagged constantly because someone think I’m your fucking mother?

My position in this guild is not “Chief Nag”, here to make the rest of you do your jobs, even when your job is just not being a lazy ass paladin.  And don’t pull the “Well FINE just replace me and I’ll go PvP” bullshit ’cause that’s real fucking mature.

Speaking of maturity: I will not copy and paste this into the officer forums…I will not copy and paste this into the officer forums…I will not copy and paste this into the officer forums…

I will just post calling Randy a douche

Now I must go post a short, polite, reasoned explantion why I was so irritated last night…

Why Tanking Scares Me More Than Healing

I have dabbled in tanking before. Lyestra, my warrior, has spent much of her career as prot, though I’ll admit that her endeavors were mostly lonely ventures.  She was my third 70 and I was a wee bit burned out on heroics by then.  She also had shit for luck gear wise, poor thing.

Ambrosyne went prot in the waning days of BC, after I’d picked up a lot of tanking offset gear and had burned out on healing.  I went from OTing Kara to MTing Kara, and then transferred over to Azgalor…

…where Steve threw me at things like, oh, OTing SSC.

/FLAIL!

After 3.0 hit my carefully balanced tank set was hosed-the talent changes left me below def cap, and I didn’t have the gear to fix it.  We also had a few too many tanks at that point, so I went back to heals.  And that’s really the majority of my tanking experience.

Tanking scares me.  I research it-my spec, my gear, my rotation but…it’s not familiar like healing is.  It’s still strange, and stressful, and more so than all that: it’s high profile.  Oh it’s true that if you fail as a healer people will notice, but not quite the same way that they notice tanking fail.  You can stand in the back as a healer.  The tank is RIGHT THERE.  UP FRONT.  And if you think DPS makes your life hard as a healer by standing in fire, trying dealing with stupid DPS as a tank!  Or not even that, smart but better-geared DPS will give any poor tank a run for their money. 

My warrior is sitting there at level 76 with the VH quest still in her logs, because I’m afraid to tank it.  Oh sure, I did it on Heroic with Ambrosyne-with guildies, who knew what they were doing and didn’t go pulling adds around willy-nilly.   On my warrior, without overgearing the instance, in a pug?  Uh…

“Do it with guildies!”

Yeah.  Two things: one, she’s in a very small RP guild.  Very small RP guilds do not good instance runs make.  Two, my worst tanking experience of Wrath occurred with guildies from there.  When I tell you a boss randomly drops aggro to charge, and you scream at me for not holding aggro, I’m going to Tank Rage on you.  And if you then /gquit because I was “condescending”?  Well, learn to fucking listen, then! 

…okay, so months later I’m still bitter, apparently…

…but yeah, that’s why I’m scared of tanking, however much I enjoy it once I know what the hell I’m doing!

Monday Randomness

Let’s say that you have a small windfall of gold.  Do you buy dual spec for your alts?  Put it towards epic flying for an alt?

Oh hell no, you go buy that gryphon that you’ve lusted after ever since you were a wee 72 and saw it in Wintergarde.  YAY EPIC WHITE BIRDY.  I’m happy now.  :D  I still refuse to dual spec holy for fear that I will end up repeatedly healing on her.  NO.  NO MORE PALLY HEALS. 

Now I’m back to hoarding gold like a miser “just in case”.   Of…what?  I don’t know, but…just in case.

I spent a good bit of time leveling the hunter, because Steve was harassing me to.  I love the Tadpoles quest so…so much.  I will sit there and click on them over and over and over and over!  In fact on Lyr, I have a macro set up to make the baby murloc noise every time she eats mage food.  I will eat magefood for no damned reason. 

Jamethera dinged 72 while out there as well.  8 more to go!  Replacing hard-won epics still makes me sad, by the way.  I’m tempted to put my t4 gloves back on for the sake of matching until someone finally pries the entire set away from me.

After discovering that my devilsaur Omnomnom isn’t always the best choice for elite tanking, I went out and tamed a tanking pet, since everything else in my collection was DPS.

In actuality, I just wanted to tame a tank pet and name it Josh.  The choice of a crab is not entirely without forethought and snickering.  Cranky tank is cranky!  See what I’m reduced to using for a tank when you quit the game, Josh?  Shame on you.

 Dual spec for the hunter is currently being mulled over-for now it would be dual BM spec (one DPS BM and one LOL SOLOING THINGS I SHOULDN’T BE pet tank build) until 80, in which case it’d be…well, BM and Surv.  Which I would use only after complaining bitterly.   BITTERLY I TELL YOU.  I was BM before the first hunter talent review, and I’ll be BM when WoW finally bites the dust.  Deal with it.   Knowing me, I will probably be “considering” dual specs for the hunter until she hits 80 and then never do it.

Holy shit, it’s Kyr’s priest not in shadow form!  I had no idea what Maedchen looked like before.  Ky was trying out the Fail Angel spec for only the second time, I believe.  Add that to my scrub faceroll tanking, and naturally we got a bugged portal in H VH that continued to spit adds at us.  GG, Blizz. 

I did not ignore my warrior over the weekend-in fact, I finally took her through The Epic Questline.  The best part was 1) she’s on an RP server and 2) I had an audience.  For those of you who do have not had the pleasure of meeting Lyestra IC, you’re missing something.  Take the general angry ranty-ness you can find here, and make it dialogue for a temperamental Kaldorei warrior.  She really, really didn’t like being yanked around by “over sized fleshbags.”

And yes, I know I spelled shield wrong.  I do it every.  Single.  Time.  Sigh…

Anyway.  Since our Naxx raid ID was ninja’d, we got the bright idea to go do BWL.  Only in the process of attuning people, we bugged the quest out, so…we decided to go do Molten Core instead. 

 

I don’t recommend pulling Shazz and Baron Geddon at the same time, BTW.  Doing so can still cause you to wipe in MC at 80.   Also, I need to tweak Ambrosyne’s UI…I started to tweak it to match Lyr’s and then never finished.  Nice to see that I was “tanking” without RF there, too.  MC is serious business, yo.

Driving Me to Drink

Last night, we finished off our Naxx25.  Although I missed a boss due to an alarm going off in my apartment, I grabbed new shoulders and a helm.  But god damn it I earned that loot.

Apparently I can’t tank Sapph.  I tried twice and he just went OM NOM NOM NOM LOL I KEEL JOO.   Therefore I stood around tossing prot heals (she’s not dual spec)  and muttering under my breath about how I thought I wasn’t healing on this toon ever again, damn it!  Then came KT.

Oh, KT.

Nothing drives me BATTIER than chain FBs amongst the ranged.  I ended up using Amber’s Thinly Vieled I Am About To Kill You All Voice, which I’ve been told comes off as condescending.  Very well then-I’m condescending when you all waste my time by dying because you can’t download a fucking addon to make up for the fact that you can’t fucking find where to stand.  And when you DO find a place to stand and the people around you aren’t mysteriously having to shift over to get out of the way then STAND THE FUCK STILL.  The only reason you should budge from your safe cozy spot is an Ouchy Red Thing.  No Ouchy Red Thing?  Don’t fucking move.   If we wipe several times over stupid shit and the same mage’s name keeps popping up amongst chained FBs and your OT announces over vent that she’s going to go spike her lemonade now, you’re doing it wrong.

(For the record, Wild Strawberry Liquor + Amarretto + Lemonade does make frustrating wipes a little better). 

Not everyone needs to have eleventy billion addons to raid well-but if you raid with us at all, at least get DBM, for fuck’s sake.  The whole “don’t stand near people” is not a new mechanic, and it’ll crop up again, even if you don’t care for the other alerts (but you should because they’re great).  This is pet peeve dating back from C’thun attempts, where one of our priests refused to get any addons and so was always standing too close to me.  I’d move, he’d move.  I’d move again, he’d move again.  I’d move and aww, fuck, now I’m too close to a couple of people and OMG EYEBEAM BLAM LOL RAID DEAD ELEVENTY BILLION DAMAGE TO YOU.

“Why the fuck did we die?”

“BECAUSE SOME SHITHEAD WON’T STAND FUCKING STILL.”

The two seem to go hand in hand.  The people with their little ranged box?  Find a clear spot and stay.  People without it?  Seem to be twitchy as hell.  I can think of two people offhand that are guildmates of mine who don’t have it, and those two people are ones I spent a good bit of the fight adjusting around.  I mean I wouldn’t CARE so much if they had it and stood still!  Then they could find their spot and we could find our spots and it would be okay!  But nooo.  I will NAIL YOUR FEET TO THE GOD FORSAKEN GROUND, PEOPLE.

…and that is your angry healer tank rant of the day.

Letters from Naxx

Dear tanks,

When half your healers are back rezzing the dead, don’t pull the next group.

Cloth costs gold to repair, too,
-the OTHER tank…who was helping to rez because no one in pugs seems to rez, ever…and also because her addon says funny things and she hasn’t seen them all yet

Dear Pugs,

Going around saying things like, “Sup dawg,” and otherwise acting like a 14 year old boy trying to be cool will get you ignored VERY quickly.   Also, anything you say that can even REMOTELY be thought of as a racial slur, even if it’s a part of talking like a “gangster”?  Yeah I’ll report you for that.  Enjoy!

-The tank who was very sad she could not also /ignore you

PS, the guild name Naggaresses United is not clever.  Nope.  Not in the least bit.

Dear Self,

Why is it that you go into a raid and promptly start faceroll tanking, instead of working on that 6969 rotation you researched?  You just…cooldown spam.  “Oh that’s up!”  /whack  “Now that one is!”  /whack.  Do you miss the healer whack-a-mole so much you play cool down whack-a-mole?

Sigh,
-You!