Most of my experience with other tanks has been on my healer, and I’ve seen quite the variety. And I’d imagine that in my own time as a tank I’ve qualified as one or two of these types myself. Just note that this is by no means a comprehensive list. Also, more than likely the tank you are with is an amalgamation of many of these types.
Here are some of the different types of tanks I’ve run with:
It’s been quite a while since I started playing WoW. In that time the way that I interface with the game has undergone some significant changes. I started out, as most everyone does, just having the default settings on the game enabled. Over time I discovered there were a number of options I could change. The day I found out I could have all my action bars displayed at the same time was almost as exciting as killing Kael’thas for the first time. And when I figured out I could re-size the chat window? Man, it was like I had lead the Gnomes to victory in retaking Gnomeregan!
Eventually I learned about the glory of addons. I had started out very skeptical of addons because my roommate was seriously opposed to them. But I finally got over my initial doubts and took the plunge. My very first addon was Auctioneer. It was totally awesome. I won’t go in to why now, but it got me hooked. From there I got Questhelper, and Cartographer, and many more. It really enhanced my game play, and made my game-time much more productive and enjoyable.
However.
Recently everything has become so darn cluttered that it’s been difficult to keep track of which addon is doing what; not to mention all the Lua errors I’m getting. And I’m tired of seeing this message in the chat log: “Interface Failed Because of an Addon.” So I have decided to strip out every addon I have ever installed, delete my WTF, Interface, and Cache folders and start rebuilding my UI/addons from scratch. Well, sort of. I’m not going to be programming any of these addons, but you get what I mean. And if I’m really feeling adventurous I might get rid of, and re-do all my key-bindings. But that’s a separate topic altogether.
Along the way, I thought it might be interesting to chronicle the process and share what I learn about the addons I try. Cause we learn when we share right? Sometimes I may review one addon and delve deeply into all its settings and how you can get the most out of it. Sometimes I may compare a bunch of addons that I’m trying out and talk about their pros and cons. And if anyone has comments, advice, critiques, other addons to suggest, better ways of configuring, etc, then by all means share them. Even if you come across these posts months down the road.
But before I do that, I think I’m gonna do a bit of a pre-post. You know, talk about addons in general, act like I have some sort of knowledge. I shall wax philosophic in a verbose and pontificating affectation upon the thesis of the variegated methods of managing and customizing the user interface. (I’m gonna talk about addons & U/I’s.)
In my last post I talked about a very unfortunate Culling of Stratholme run that went south because Arthas bugged out. But I got to thinking and I realized something.
Arthas is the worst tank ever.
Well, ok, maybe not the worst ever, but he’s not exactly going to be front running any top-rated guilds any time soon. He does lack some serious skills as a tank. He runs off all wily nilly, giving no thought or heed to his group mates, pulling mob after mob without waiting for anything. And even when he does give a ‘moment to clear your lungs’ he doesn’t actually give you all that much time, and half the time he doesn’t actually stop–he pulls the closest zombies, often keeping you in combat so you can’t eat or drink
It got me thinking, what exactly makes a bad tank? I’m sure everyone has run across a few doosies, each tied to unique and often very entertaining stories. But in each story there was something specific the tank did or didn’t do that caused the disaster. So I asked my guild mates to see if they had any insight on what tanks do that make them ‘bad’.
So last night I was running Heroic Culling of Stratholme with my guild. As luck would have it CoS was both the regular and heroic daily. We had a solid group together, although one of the dps had never been in there before. I suggested that we try for the timed achievement as I still haven’t managed to get that darn drake on my main. Our healer was a little nervous about it, but she’s way to hard on herself. She’s actually a freaking fantastic healer. But, I didn’t want to add extra stress to her life, so I suggested that we just give it a shot, as a practice effort, but not as our primary goal.
For the benefit of the dps who hadn’t been in I made a very thorough run down of what would happen (maybe it was a little too thorough, I have a tendency to go into a little too much detail). Everyone knew what was going on, and I was fairly confident we could do it.
I started the first pull and everything was great! We flew through the instance. I don’t think I’ve ever gone through it that fast. We also got really lucky in that all the mobs spawned right there in that first area, so we just bounced back and forth between them. We got the 2nd boss down and still had 10 whole minutes to get to the boss. Well we headed for the inn and waited for Arthas to show up. And waited. And waited. After about 3 minutes I was about to go find him when I saw him running down the road. Well, 7 minutes..it’s gonna be tight, but we can still do it.
We get to the 3rd set of dragonkin when, Arthas decided he was going to tank theses mobs and I could go to hell. I don’t know if it was a bug, or if I was just getting really unlucky taunt resists, but I could not pull the mobs off him. So of course, he gets himself killed. And then he just refuses to respawn. By the time he does, the time is down to 4 minutes. And despite our best efforts, we just didn’t make it in time.
So in the end, what should have been a flawless and easily accomplished drake run ended up being a disaster because Arthas is a jackass.
Oh well. There’s always tomorrow.
But as a side note to my complaining about Arthas, I want to compliment my guild mates on doing a fantastic job. Especially our healer. She rocked the hell out of that instance.
“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]“
~Fizz
I ran out of time last night before I could finish this post due to my weekly raid schedule. I knew it was coming, but I got distracted by that ‘new blog smell’ and kept tweaking this theme or that format.
Anyway, to continue my story from yesterday…ah yes, fate having other plans and all that.
I had been so determined to become the most annoying Gnome in all of Azeroth. But I quickly discovered that I couldn’t even whisper people with a trial account. To be honest, I’m still not really sure what ultimately made me decide that it would be totally fine to buy a regular account just to annoy people. I’d like to think though that by that point the annoyance factor was really just more of a justification. In truth, I was already completely hooked.
My initial foray into Azeroth was not exactly what you would call typical. It was a dreary February day, I had been out of work for a long time, and I was very bored. My roommate had been playing WoW for quite a long time (since it’s release I believe) and was playing his paladin. I had played Warcraft 2 and loved it–although I had no idea there was anything after it. So I began asking him questions about what he was doing, where he was going, what the game was like and so on. He was in Ironforge at the time and as I was asking him about the game, he was accosted by a gold beggar. He was so annoyed by it that I couldn’t help but laugh at his frustration as he yelled at what pretty much amounted to pixels on a screen. Read more »
