Picking a Tank
Dec
2007
Amazing! Another day, another post… I’d better be careful, or I might actually become a daily (or more!) poster…
Today’s rant will be about odd spec/playstyle choices… Specifically, Arms/fury warriors who think they’re tanks, and lessons learned…
Yesterday Twailight and I ran mana tombs with a mostly-guild PUG; we started with me tanking, Twai healing, a dps warrior that knew what he was, and two mages (one ended up on my friends list [I'm rather picky with who I put on there...] because he was just Excellent. Took charge with the CC; made sure the other mage handled the second sheep, controlled his initial DPS and letting me get my threat up, so on and so forth.)
We did quite well, especially considering that the second mage was AFK- he would come back whenever we got far enough ahead that he wasn’t getting Kills/exp., but wasn’t contributing. We ended up kicking him and LFM, when this 70 Arms/Fury warrior in the guild volunteered to come. When asked if he was a tank or DPS, he said “My DPS is my tank.” That really should have set alarms off in my head, but my computer (5 year old video card, 1GB of RAM) was NOT handling Mana Tombs very well, and I was more than happy to hand tanking off to someone else. When he arrived, we were very pleased to see he was completely epiced out… although, oddly enough, it was ALL “Gladiator’s” gear. Once again, alarms should have sounded.
Once we started things went well, although Twai would turn to me occasionally and say that she was not pleased- he was NOT waiting for her mana, even when she’d specifically say something. He was also very difficult to keep up with, because he either had very little health, or very little damage mitigation, so his health would drop very quickly, and he’d lose what healing she was able to get on him.
To make a very long story short, he thought he was a tank because he had heavy DPS- but he generated very little actual threat other than straight-up damage, and had very little damage mitigation, so we would wipe regularly. He, being so very used to PVP, didn’t think that was odd at all; he’d laugh it off and start again. We ended up finishing the instance, but failing the escort quest, because he either couldn’t keep all the mobs on him, or, when he could, he’d lose health so fast that Twai, our 70 Resto druid, couldn’t keep up. Several times, I had to drop into bear to try and take over tanking mid-fight, but the way my computer was working, combined with his habit of pulling several groups at once, made it so that I’d never be able to get all the mobs onto me, Twai would be out of mana, and my machine would be lagging horribly. (Hmm… new topic idea; “Why the hell are all the outland instances so HARD on older video cards?” I didn’t have these issues in Azeroth…)
What have I learned? Folks like this warrior need to learn that high DPS?Threat generation, and Great PVP ability?great tanking ability. I need to learn that if someone wants to tank, I need to know their spec. If they’re not Prot warriors or Pallies, or Feral druids, they aren’t tanking, even if they think they can. Of course, I’ll have to be careful about how I tell them that- otherwise, I’m likely to end up with a DPSer who is trying desperately to waggle his e-peen and show how awesome he is… by deliberately pulling aggro off the MT. /sigh
