I tanked a raid!

Over the last week our guild has organised four runs of Zul'Gurub and across those runs only two of our regular raid tanks have signed up. As a result my signup for last night's raid, where I was expecting more of an off-tank role, turned out to be a proper tanking role.

There were not-so-good moments including a terrible pull of mine in the spider boss's area and a rather grumbly wipe on Hakkar's pyramid due to some poor raid positioning and communication but also some good experiences on some of the bosses where my challenge was to see exactly how much threat I could put out.

I imagine I'll be back again, probably not next week as the constant respecs are draining my gold, but perhaps the week after. The frustration is that there are several healing drops I'd like from Zul'Gurub but only one possible tanking upgrade, however if we continue to have plenty of healer signups but a shortage of tanks then duty will presumably call.

Seal of Ascension

I spent a chunk of the weekend tanking in Scholomance and Lower Blackrock Spire, the first for some Skin of Shadow to get my Zulian Headdress enchanted and the latter to finally get the one key I didn't yet have in the game. It's well past the stage where owning a Seal of Ascension is a rarity but it was still an achievement I wanted to complete.

I'm naturally quite cautious as a tank, probably more so than many groups would like, but there's been a step change in the quality of my gear since I last was hunting for the seal's gems. I now have two items from Molten Core (Medallion of Steadfast Might and Heavy Dark Iron Ring), three from Blackwing Lair (Taut Dragonhide Shoulderpads, Elementium Threaded Cloak and Interlaced Shadow Jerkin) and a number of quest, crafted or dropped items from Zul'Gurub taking me up to 7% hit rating.

In short I'm now significantly out-gearing all of the dungeons in the game and, once I got a feel for the groups I was in, could take a much more aggressive approach than I was used to. It seems odd in a way as a lot of the challenge is gone, but it's also nice to enjoy the benefits of gearing up.

I then had the less fun experience of healing in Molten Core as full feral bear spec but still managed to give a decent account of myself - 8th of 12 healers according to the logs...

I (off) tanked a raid!

Outside of main raids the tank shortage in Classic seems to be becoming more pronounced - it's been there for a long while for dungeon groups and now seems to be the case for a good number of my guild's Zul'Gurub runs as well. As a result a couple of times in the last week or so I've had the opportunity to off-tank a raid, fulfilling one of my remaining goals for the game.

The first of these last week seemed to go well but I'm less pleased with last night's raid. In both raids the set-piece boss fights were fine but things weren't always so good with random patrols or some of the large packs that need to be dealt with. On reflection I don't think there was necessarily more of a problem last night but instead a couple of other factors - one that the first raid contained more of our first team damage dealers with a gung-ho attitude that aggro was a price to be paid for enthusiastic DPS, and secondly that I'm becoming more aware and critical of my mistakes.

One reaction is that my current respeccing, as well as being expensive, means that I'm not getting properly settled into the tank role and that I need to be careful of not letting my healing slip. The other, opposite, reaction is that I need to find more opportunities to tank and improve!

Another thought is again that I'm lucky in my choice of a druid main character. My rogue alt has struggled up to level 25 but really my alt is my bear spec. While I do sometimes see loot that I want drop while in the wrong role to legitimately roll on it, I never see it drop while on the wrong character and often I do get the chance to pick up off-spec gear. Not least are the Elementium Threaded Cloak and Taut Dragonhide Shoulderpads from Blackwing Lair and a couple of upgrades from Zul'Gurub in my first two runs as a healer. Along with some recent focus on my bear gear now that nearly all of my possible healing upgrades can only come from one weekly raid I'm feeling happy with where I am gear-wise. So now what I need is experience and skill, which could be trickier!

Fast mount and some interesting tanking

I've been focused for a while on getting my fast mount - mainly through herbing and keeping respecs in check - and last night finally got my Swift Stormsaber. Only to find I could have got it somewhat earlier if I'd realised that PvP rank 3 gives a 100g discount!

When I played originally I didn't bother with a fast mount except as a step towards my flying mount in Burning Crusade but I'm really pleased I've made the effort this time. The difference is night and day, and I feel I get whiplash when starting from a standing start being so used to the slower speed of my old Striped Nightsaber.

My main activity for the evening though was tanking living Stratholme - using my Moonglow restoration spec... A mostly guild group had been looking for a tank for a while and eventually persuaded me to take the opportunity, and not bothering to respec since it's BWL raid night in a couple of days. Despite my advice that this wasn't a good idea they seemed confident, and in fact we managed a fairly smooth, if slightly slow and messy, run. This was largely down to a good, well geared group and them compensating for a non-optimal tank, but it worked far better than I'd expected.

I'm not keen to repeat the experience - missing Feral Charge, feral Faerie Fire and Furor in particular, and being constantly rage starved - but it did illustrate the gap between what players prefer for an easier run versus what's possible.

It also illustrated a key problem with Classic's dungeon versus raid design, and hence the lack of tanks, that such a good group could have been in the position of having a wasted evening as a result.

No-meregan and subsequent adventures

World of Warcraft is odd, because it has so many different parts.

As a solo game I'm currently enjoying it a lot because it has a decent level of difficulty, as I mentioned in my last post. For example, questing for Skullsplitter tusks in the Ruins of Zul'Mamwe (which I've just finished doing) is decently challenging due to the patrols and groups which can punish mistakes or carelessness. It doesn't have the story focus of the modern game (which is much helped by phasing but which also has weird effects when you step back a bit) but the difficulty is its own strength.

The open world multiplayer game is also nice - as a buffing, healing, DPS-ish class you can help out other players in distress either by healing or peeling mobs off them, which gives a shallow social element.

Instances have a deeper social element - you want the right players not just the right roles - but also there's an interaction between the instance design and the player's classes and personalities. I've done a fair few instance runs over the last week or so and they varied a lot:

• Gnomeregan wasn't much fun. Partly this was the instance theme and design - that much Warcraft steampunk is too much for me, and from a tanking point of view there are lots of large, non-elite packs which are a pain as a druid tank. In part it was down to the group personalities - it was far the least social of the groups I've been in recently, seeming almost like a modern, shallow LFG party.
• Having tanked Scarlet Monastery Library plus Armoury for one group I then tried healing for an odd group of four warriors, all with two-handers. As a healing experience it was thirsty and challenging (but not in a good way) and didn't have much going for it socially. At some point I need to do some druid healing in case I end up doing that in the end game, but as an introduction it wasn't what I needed.
• Shortly after hitting 40 I then tanked Cathedral for a competent and pleasant group, by far my best recent instance experience. It's at this point that the grouping aspect of the game really shines, at least for me.
• Finally last night I tanked Razorfen Downs for a slightly odd group - there was loot drama from the quillboars that you meet before starting the instance, and during the instance there were odd moments of the players pulling sometimes in different directions and sometimes in unison. RFD is another instance with groups of non-elites which are fiddly at times, but I was more on my game than with the Gnomeregan run and with the group being more pleasant it overall scored an "OK".

Classic is an interesting experience - some of the "hard mode" design choices, like instance keys and quest design, are enjoyable, but other aspects such as loot drama remind you why Blizzard have changed some of those choices in the modern game.

Finally to note that new Duillnar is now level 41, higher than I got a druid in the original game and nearly as high as old Duillnar after the XP squishes and some experimentation. But even having ignored a chunk of skill training (especially in balance spells) he barely has more than 20g to his name and certainly isn't in a position to buy a mount.

I'd rather be tanking (at least in Classic)

In the last week or so I've had the chance to run some dungeons in Classic - Wailing Caverns (twice), Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Depths (twice). On all but one of the BFD runs I was tanking, and overall these experiences have convinced me that that's the way I prefer it.

I consider myself a reasonable tank though I still have plenty I could do better - I have a tendency to forget about some of my longer, emergency cooldowns but also should improve with things like marking secondary kill targets and reorganising after messy pulls. But generally things go OK and my healers are happy.

Things are also helped by players generally understanding that this isn't the modern game, going at a sensible pace and remembering to use crowd control where necessary.

I spent the second half of my DPS run of Blackfathom trying to work out how to suggest to the tank that we swap roles. He wasn't the worst sort of tank (those ones who have taken the role to get into the group but thinks it's just DPSing with a shield - or even on one occasion I remember with a two-hander!) but didn't seem to know how the theory translates into practice. If you're a healer or squishy DPS in that situation you just try to make the best of it, but instead I found myself in a sort of halfway house - going to fetch untanked casters who were attacking the healer, or swapping to my shield to interrupt (no Pummel yet!). We exchanged a few whispers and he was clearly trying, but not really succeeding.

One thing I didn't ask, but will do next time in the same situation, is ask "would you rather be DPSing?".

In Battle for Azeroth I've also now run the three dungeons initially available to the Horde and I was struck by how raid boss design has bled over into dungeons, with things like the Tainted Blood debuff being needed to beat Transfusion on Priestess Alun'za. On one hand this is unsurprising as the great majority of players must have raid experience now, but it also means that really before entering a dungeon you should read up on it. At this stage in the expansion it's reasonable to expect this awareness, but I wonder how Looking For Group went in the early stages.

As an aside Grulnak is currently two bubbles off level 112, and while I'm enjoying the single player story of BfA it's Classic that has me gripped.

Alliance experiments

I have a level 85 dwarf warrior (formerly Shank) and a now level 86 dwarf shaman ("newly" created with the help of the Mists of Panderia level boost) which I thought would be interesting to try as a somewhat higher level view of the Alliance side than my druid Duillnar could give me. After the usual actionbar pondering and some quick experimentation out in the world I queued them as tank and healer respectively and coincidentally ended up in the Siege of Niuzao Temple both times.

My main observation is that when dungeoneering it's surprisingly non-obvious which faction you're on. Between the pace of the game and the various spell effects and so on you don't really see the other characters like you did in the original dungeons or do at a higher level for example in pauses during a raid.

Otherwise -

• I love Ghost Wolf. I'll use it when there's even half of an excuse, and often it's actually handy!
• Tanking as a warrior is quite enjoyable. Heroic Leap is fun and useful and combined with Intercept gives good mobility. As with my druid, my warrior has good AoE threat abilities and with groups who are still levelling gear imbalance isn't an issue.
• It's become more obviously a computer game than an RPG. While this was always to some degree the case, abilities such as Heroic Leap to me are suspension of disbelief-breaking - while it may be appropriate with the ever-increasing level cap it also highlights the (relative) consistency of the Classic game.

So if dungeoneering isn't an issue, at least as far as my view of my own character impacts me, and given that I find the Alliance side levelling rather mundane compared to my Horde experience, I can mostly see myself sticking to Oswyn and Grulnak. I might visit my dwarf shaman Grumgar occasionally for Alliance tourism, taking advantage of the button familiarity given to me by Grulnak, rather than trying to get my head around any of my former array of characters.

I'm still fundamentally me

Which I think means I can't make my mind up about characters...

Oswyn was chugging along nicely at level 23 - he's a levelling Fury build with a nice new Wingblade from a couple of Wailing Caverns runs, grinding and questing in Hillsbrad with very little downtime thanks to bandaging and Cannibalize. I then get to the Elixir of Suffering quest and having poisoned the toad I'm suddenly not sure whether I want to be Horde anymore. Thinking that if I'm going to swap characters (again) I'm best off doing it as soon as possible I started a tour of my retail game Alliance characters.

My druid Duillnar constantly draws me back due to his versatility, although I also need to remember why I've only got him to level 42 - in the old days they really seemed to have got the jack of all trades, master of none thing right (for example the lack of interrupts made fighting casters a pain). Blimey are they complicated nowadays - with the way specialisations work they're effectively become four different classes.

To limit the number of new spells and action bars I needed to work out I thought to try queuing as a healer until I saw that the demand was for tanks. After some more head scratching and spell book leafing I added tanking as an option, and immediately popped into Maraudon - with the Lord Vyletongue fight already in progress!

Given one fight didn't teach me very much I queued again and found myself in a different group, this time at Earth Song Falls. The group leader was a Go Go Go warrior who seemed to think he should leap ahead and start the pull and have me pick up the pieces. With the tools in the modern tanking box this didn't go as horribly as it could have and after Landslide and the Princess that was another dungeon done.

I'm not quite sure what this has taught me except for the difference between the original and the modern game. My two tanking runs of Wailing Caverns seemed to me chaotic at times, and at the start of the first there was pressure to pick up the pace, but everyone played their roles well, we had no deaths and the healers were happy. To me this says that a lot of the chaos was probably just my perception, although some will have been that everything is the tank's responsibility while for the others - even DPS who have also got crowd control in mind - the focus is much narrower.

I've a couple more Alliance tests planned but probably I'll go back to Oswyn and just not do the quests I'm not comfortable with!