Heroics no longer fun

Disclaimer - yes, I've installed Gearscore. But only for these reasons -

• When I'm tanking, I'll have a quick idea of how badly the DPS outgear me
• I'm curious to know what my own gearscores are (for Grulnak and Grulgok), so that I have some reference point for the numbers that are bandied about in chat.

I've never voted to kick anyone because their gear wasn't up to scratch, only ever based on their attitude.

Anyway, onto the real point of this post.

The other day I signed up to tank a random heroic, and as is often the case all of the other players significantly outgeared me. I'm not badly geared, having unbuffed 556 defense, 22.9k armour, 26.9k health and a combined dodge and parry of 37.8%. Along with 23 expertise and 156 hit rating I'd once have been considered pretty well geared for a heroic tank.

Because (I assume) of my gear level, the random was an "old" heroic - Utgarde Pinnacle - which we proceeded to faceroll through. There was a slight moment of tension when only myself and one other wanted to kill the first boss - the remainder wanted to get on and get their Frost emblems - but presumably because I was the tank they hung around for an extra few seconds and killed her too.

The sad thing is, this wasn't challenging, or even particularly fun. The run was messy and displayed all sorts of bad habits - but it didn't matter because of the gear levels involved. I wondered at times if a tank was even needed - perhaps just a plate geared DPS on the boss fights, perhaps not even that.

I usually enjoy - and occasionally get wiped - when healing the ICC heroics, but the "old" Wrath heroics are just pointless for overgeared players. I'm almost pining for the original WoW days, when raiders simply didn't run heroics.

Treading water

My wife and I have a new baby (now 3½ weeks old) so my raiding has come to a sudden halt, and WoW is very much on the back burner.

When I have had the chance to play it's been the occasional daily heroic to gather up those non-raid healing upgrades available to Grulnak, some heroic tanking and my ongoing alt angst.

In the last couple of days I've got the Arcane Loops of Anger and the Drape of the Violet Tower. A couple more emblems will net me the Band of the Invoker, which is my last clear Emblem of Triumph upgrade, and then time will tell whether I continue to gather Emblems of Frost for further upgrades, or when / if I can get back into raiding.

Having satisfied myself that Grulgok can competantly tank heroics (although definitely with room for improvement) my question is how much I want to tank heroics for PUGs, and how much effort I want to spend gearing up a second character to ICC 5-man levels.

And then of course there's the eternal alt question, which really boils down to whether I want / need a character who's more human / "generic fantasy" in motivation and appearance.

Why chose a shaman?

Alterac Volley did a piece giving a thumbnail description of the classes. I'm not quite sure who the audience were for this - experienced players probably have a pretty good idea of what the classes are about, and new players will get more value out of the Blizzard descriptions (whatever their well-publicised shortcomings) and are more likely to find them. Two things did strike me though about these descriptions:

• they are applicable to levelling and PvP (where good players exploit the full abilities of their class) but not really to end-game raiding where players are far more pigeon-holed. In fact, very little prepares a new WoW player for what the end game has in store.
• the shaman description is way off. Are shamans really this little understood?

So, with a view to my audience (primarily me, and my constant alt indecision, with a view to who my main should be for Cataclysm), here's my view of what makes a shaman.

We're a damage / healing hybrid, with the emphasis on the damage. Sort of a reverse priest.

We have a strong healing spec, especially in small groups - we're better group healers than a paladin, better tank / burst healers than a druid.

We have good damage specs, and no aggro dump... so we probably cause tanks more problems than any class other than dps warriors! Elemental is a bit boring, and doesn't scale that well at high gear levels, enhancement is melee and therefore Blizzard (and raid leaders to a lesser extent) hate them. Still, we can do good damage, in distinctive and flavourful ways.

But what keeps me coming back to my shaman?

Reincarnation - with credit to Babasyzygy the "method school of acting feign death". The single thing that I miss most when not on my shaman.

Wolves - Ghost Wolf, especially instant GW, is my second favourite shaman ability. It's odd that I don't really have much interest in druid and their forms, but Ghost Wolf always cheers me up. Spirit Wolves are also deeply cool.

Water Walking - especially now that we can ride on water too. I have fond memories of walking across Darrowmere Lake as a shortcut to Scholomance, and since then it's never got old.

Totems - I wouldn't say that I "like a class that uses totems to support your attack", and their lack of mobility is a bit of a pain, but I'm rather fond of my cleansing and tremour totems. It's just nice to be able to drop these and forget about poisons, disease and fear (to some extent). If dispelling becomes less spammy in Cataclysm their advantages may become less clear cut, but they're invaluable at the moment.

To me those are the highlights, and the first two especially means I'll struggle to ever demote Grulnak from being my main.

Heroic tank

Grulgok tanked his first heroic last night, in the company of a guild healer and ret paladin, and two hunters from the Dungeon Finder. Thankfully the dps were fairly well disciplined and so the run went fairly smoothly, but it will be a while before I'm ready to throw myself into random heroics with confidence.

I'm hoping that the Dungeon Finder will soon let us add cross-realm friends, as a counterpoint to the existing ignore functionality, as I'm starting to appreciate the level to which it's the dps who make a run good or bad - as long as the tank is up to a certain minimum standard of compentance and gear. And as a corollary feeling slightly guilty of some of the instances I've run as an elemental shaman with more of an eye on my dps output than on my threat.

Level 80 (in plate)

I dinged 80 on Grulgok just after midnight last night, and have spent the day trying to get to 535 defence to be uncrittable in heroics. Despite having items such as Hellscream's Handguards of Conquest which were just not available to those who first hit 80, it's no easy feet.

A big part of my trouble is that, not having tanked at 70, the trinklet scene is looking very sparse. I am cheating a bit of course, relying almost exclusively on Polar's Easy Pre-Naxx Tank Gear List and some AH and crafted items, so I am trying to shortcut a lot of the grinding of the level 80 normal instances.

Overall I'm rather enjoying the tanking experience, although I'm not sure Grulgok will ever become my raiding main as my low attendance would be too problematic. It's good to be out ahead of the group, planning the pulls and so on, rather than just following behind and throwing heals. And bizarrely the frenetic nature of warrior tanking (compared to what I understand to be the more measured, rhythmic pace of paladins or death knights), which in turn leads to a feeling of better control (or at least lots of options) is a big plus of the class contrary to my initial expectations.

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.

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.