Wednesday, June 16, 2010

What do tanks do again?

For a while now, I have been more likely to not do my daily heroic than do it. I just can't get myself to do those same heroics day after day. Especially when they are so easy sauce now. Now I think I've read about others doing their daily with fishing gear on or half nekkid or something to make it at least a bit of a challenge. But last week I was involved in an interesting daily run that could be another way for us to keep these daily heroics somewhat interesting.

We ran the daily without a tank. Shat, an elemental shammy served as our tank with two mages and a ret pally as dps. It was quite amusing, and a nice change of pace to be kept on my toes as the healer in this group. Huh? I actually have to pay attention in this daily? I can't just throw a hot and watch TV? It probably helped that with an ele shammy and two mages, we were super bursty. Well, we went through heroic Halls of Lightning just fine. When we were done, I asked:

"What the heck do we need tanks for again?"

Jess got his white ponytail in a little bit of a tizzy at this comment.

Anyways, last week was a slow week in raiding. We had some absences, including Jess. So when we were going through the lower spire, folks wanted to swap in some other toons. With the alts and the absences, it required yours truly to tank. Now here's the issue whenever I have to tank. I kind of know on a high level what goes on and what I'm supposed to do, but not really at the detailed level. I think what I asked before Deathwhisper was something to the effect of:

"So there's like adherents and other things, right? And when they like come back, its like really bad right? What are the other things called again?"

I also totally wiped a Blood Princes attempt because I was supposed to be on the blue balls and I wasn't very proactive at running around the room to gather all of them up. Lazy bear is lazy.

Going from healing encounters to tanking them makes them almost completely new encounters. I'm just so very used to staying out of the bad stuff and focusing on my grid boxes. I tend not to pay any attention to Jess' lectures that specify specific mobs or kill order or anything of that sort. It's different feeling so confident in healing something vs not knowing what the heck I'm doing tanking it.

All of this means that when I have to tank or quasi lead a raid, its gets sort of comical. I think we were on Sindragosa and during the middle of the encounter, I call out for someone to help take care of the orbs. Folks were like orbs? There are orbs here? I think some smart ass also called for more dps on the green ooze and the blazing skeleton. Har har guys, har har. :p

4 comments:

  1. I got myself a lovely Robe of the Triumvirate (aka the Princess Leia outfit) in AQ40 and it's become my new dungeon healing outfit. I take off everything that makes it look bad (chest ofc, shoulders, pants, gloves, maybe belt), which gives me 2 things: hawtness (tree form? who needs it!) and about 2k spellpower, so I have to actually almost work :D It's fun! (and it makes my friends go 'Eww Jen, put some clothes on!')

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  2. I was trying to explain the difference between normal and HM saurfang a few days ago while our raid leader dealt with kids, it went something like, "So the thing, that you know, you kill, they uh, do this thing, and you go slow, and then you get hit maybe, and you die, and, um, like you go slow so you can't not get hit." or on LK, the exact strat is, "first you stand here, then you move, then you move back, then you stand somewhere else, then he kills us, then we win."

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  3. That's funny, we did this exact same thing yesterday! Zoned into Oculus, tank dropped, so our elemental shaman shrugged and ran off, tanking his way to the first boss. We downed him, and then another tank joined us, but it was funny seeing the shaman fill in without any real difficulty. And had we used CC of any kind it would have been even easier.

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  4. @Jen: Hmmm, I should also put together an outfit and save it in the equipment manager thing for the rare dailys that I do...

    @Aituair: The thing is... everyone else understands what you're trying to say. Isn't that the point? But you still get made fun of. :)

    @Rades: Elemental shammys do make for good tanks! I want to try with a mage next time.

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