I’ve fallen in love …
... with tanking!
My baby paladin isn't a baby anymore. Thanks to a whirlwind heroic spree and some insanely good luck (including an Essence of Gossamer and Ancient Aligned Girdle out of her very first heroic!), "little" Larissyn went from stumbling through regular Halls of Lightning to off-tanking Ulduar 10 in a little less than two weeks.
It started on Wednesday, when I joined an alt-friendly "guild PuG" of VoA 25. Several of our real tanks were there, but they opted to DPS and let me MT (mostly because of the strangled noises I made on Vent, I'm sure >.<). After I stopped /flailing — at this point, I had yet to tank anything harder that Heroic Trial of the Champion — I buckled down and ...
Hey, no deaths!
On Thursday evening, Jef's baby retadin — the oh-so creatively named "Retnewb" /cough — and I joined a (mostly) alt run of Naxx 10. I off-tanked for my guild's main tankadin ... which means that I ended up perfecting my prot-DPS rotation, because holding aggro against a full T8.5 tank with BiS everything was near impossible. Still, Eanin let me MT a few bosses, including Maexxana but excluding Thaddius (because they still don't trust me to make that jump).
It was at this point that my luck turned slightly sour: only one tank drop — a defense trinket I didn't need with my current set, but pocketed for future use) — but a ton of spellpower plate that Retnewb wouldn't touch with a 10-foot polearm (if he happened to have one, that is; the RNG has not smiled upon He Of The Porcupine Hair).
Dear Naxx,
You're about as subtle as a wolvar in the Venture Bay Aquarium.
No, I do not want to heal. Thankyouverymuch. If I found clicking brightly colored boxes in no particular order fun and stimulating, I would be a shaman.
Oh, wait ...
No Love,
Larissyn
Nonetheless, I threw on my new Holy gear and hastily assembled dual-spec for Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad, to help our druid healer in the event of an untimely iceblock. (I feel compelled to mention that the sapling in question is the alt — the alt! — of one of our core hunters. He solo-healed all four wings with no wipes and only the occasional clothie death. Seriously: nerf druids.)
I was feeling a little better about my fledgling tanking skills after that Naxx 10, so when a few of the guild's better geared alts decided to run a late night Uld 10, I said "screw you" to sleep and volunteered to off-tank.
Naturally, they PuG'd a Death Knight. Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys!
The Death Knight ended up /afking out while the group was still in the (seemingly interminable) forming stages, so I was pulled in it at the eleventh hour and in an act of what I'm sure was sheer desperation.
And, lo and behold, it went well. Shockingly well, given that both tanks were alts, both healers were alts and DPS ranged from our guild's powerhouse of a ret paladin, to an enhancement shaman who dies so often he really should consider training Spirit of Redemption, to my fiance's woefully undergeared altadin (who nonetheless pulled third damage on a few fights).
Here's (more or less) how it went ...
Divine Hammer of the Righteous Guardian … blah.
After earning all of 2,418 honor on my level 79 paladin "twink," I decided I'd had quite enough of that thankyouverymuch ... and ding'd 80. Now I'm fulfilling a long-held but (frankly) terrifying goal, and <cringe> learning to tank.
You know, all of those cute, paladin-flavored buzzwords ("holy," "divine," "righteous", "shield," hammer") were, well, cute before I actually needed them to mean something.
Hammer of the Righteous and Shield of Righteousness. I know one of them does single-target damage (I guess this would translate into "generates single-target threat" in more tanky terms?), and the other is basically a cleave. I also know — courtesy of my guild's other paladin tank, who follows me around Northrend laughing at my spec, my glyphs and my feeble attempts at maintaining a 969 "rotation" — that I can't just macro my 6 abilities to one key and my 9 abilities to another; I have to actually be smart about them. So if I'm pulling multiple mobs, I want my cleave to be the first 6 ability I use.
Okay, that makes sense.
... But which of these stupidly named abilities is my cleave? Ugh. To my uninitiated (but lovely!; I do play a Blood Elf) ears, they sound exactly the same.
After a quick poke around Maintankadin, I picked up a neat trick, and am now learning to translate everything from Paladin into Warrior so it makes sense again. Warrior abilities don't have cute, clever little names that follow some kind of bizarre, escaped-from-a-reality-TV-wedding theme. No, warrior abilities are wonderfully descriptive! Shield Bash. Cleave. Intercept. Heroic Strike. You can totally tell — from the name alone! — what the ability actually does.
I should've rolled a warrior.
Of course, then I wouldn't have had this sexy red-headed Tinkerbell look going on. It's a trade-off.
I specced jerk.
Over the weekend, my mini pally finally managed to ding 79.
Immediately after training her new skills in the Undercity, she hopped on the first bat to Hammerfall, intercepted my baby shadow priest on the long road to Stromgarde and — with a single swing of her De-raged Waraxe — netted herself an heirloom mace (and two and a half Forsaken fingertips, which she promises to return to their rightful owner. Someday.)
Yes, that's right. I am now a healing paladin — not a holy paladin, mind, because my spec is a mix-matched jumble of points that made my guild's paladin tank (not that one; the other one) cry.
True story. A whole five minutes had transpired since the aforementioned transfer of macely ownership when my tankadin friend ran into me in Dalaran.
He paused. Inspected me. /Boggled.
"That doesn't look like tanking gear," he /said for all to see. "But that doesn't look like a healing spec, either."
He's since taken to calling it SillySpec, and no matter how many times I protest that I FOUND IT ON THE INTERNETS, he won't stop giggling.
It's disconcerting, really.
In my defense, I was looking for a deep holy build. Since several all three of my guild's dedicated PvPers were online at the time — including our powerhouse of an arena-flavored ret — I asked in guild chat for advice.
"WTB holy spec, PST."
The shadow priest-turned-warlock responded: "Put all of your points in prot."
I thought he was joking until the the frost mage-turned restokin chimed in: "Yeah, prot paladins are jerks in battlegrounds. You should totally spec jerk."
And so ... I did.
Eventually, my BG partner — the raiding rogue and warrior twink who inspired this craziness in the first place — logged on, and we decided to put our Saronite-clad duo through their paces in Warsong Gulch.
I'll let you know how that turns out. We're still trying to master the "queuing for the same battleground at the same time" achievement. Who knew that WSG had attunements?
/cough
Alts! I haz them.
Nerd Points!
Recent Comments
- Wesley Kwok on Immersion.
- suszarka do rąk on Not it!
- Bob2 on An Update, In Pictures.
- thisisyourdeal.com on I might have to race change for this.
- best linux vps on Immersion.
Recent Ramblings
- An Update, In Pictures.
- Hey, remember that warlock pet bug?
- A long over-due and rather jumbled update
- You know it’s time to end the blogging hiatus …
- So.
Less Recent Ramblings
- November 2011
- November 2010
- April 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
Surreality Blogs!
- Anea.nu
- Confessions of a Feral Druid
- My Name is Forrest…
- Shaman On Ramen
- Tahas, Not Tatas
- Tank'n'Tree
- The Argent Champion