Tuesday 19 January 2010

Loving tanking

I've pretty much settled on levelling to 80 with Grulgok, my orc prot warrior, and retiring Shank to the warmth of Booty Bay.

Thanks to the Dungeon Finder and the daily random (I still can't quite believe that I can collect Emblems of Triumph without even being 80 yet) I've been spending a lot of time tanking. In fact I'm barely questing enough to line up my next dungeon quests and do the non-dungeon quests that give good tanking blues.

Currently I'm glad to be an orc, and a warrior rather than a death knight at that. The prot tanking style is very (perhaps too) active in style, compared to that for DKs. While I'm constantly struggling against the global cooldown I do find that it is more proactive, more controlled and more fun.

And being able to charge while in combat - or even charge at all - is as great as ever.

At the moment I'm finding I have nice AoE threat, and most runs go fairly smoothly, although there are still the occasional bad pulls or over-eager DPSers. I'm not sure how much of it is due to my increased confidence, and hence less feeling of stress and inclination to blame myself when things go badly, but that certainly can't hurt.

I need to enjoy it while it lasts though - once I get to 80 I'm expecting that life will suddenly get much harder as the average DPS gear level will step up considerably compared to my own.

Wednesday 13 January 2010

A question of roleplaying

I'm still struggling to decide between my various alts, currently my plan is to concentrate on just two characters, a tank and a healer. I've narrowed the choice down to: shaman and warrior (orc), shaman and warrior (dwarf, once Cataclysm arrives) or priest and warrior (Forsaken).

Dwarves are probably my favourite race in the game, followed closely by orcs. Having recently written the Alliance off as bland I probably won't go down that route, otherwise it'd be very tempting. The main appeal with the undead is that they're human-like, and hence seem to be better catered for by Blizzard. I'm often struggling to work out what my motivation is for some quests as an orc, whereas for a human / dwarf / undead it's more obvious. The drawbacks of this plan are several: I don't like the posture of Shank, my undead warrior; with a priest instead of a shaman I'd really miss reincarnation, water walking, ghost wolf and other flavour spells; and I'm not fond of the embittered outlook of the Forsaken.

So, I'm currently tending towards an orcy future, but I need to get more into the right roleplaying frame of mind. Because even though I'm on a PvE server, I don't want to play a MMOG without the RP.