Sometimes there is fire…

There’s an interesting argument going on over at Tobolds’ in his latest post: Assymetric Challenge.  What the commenters are arguing over boils down to which is easiest, tanking, DPSing or healing.  Tobolds’ position, along with several of the commenters, is that tanking is by far the hardest job in dungeons and raids.  If a DPS screws up the worst that can happen is that they die.  Big deal, plenty more where they came from.  A tank bears the responsibility for the whole group, they screw up and there’s a very good chance that the entire raid or group is going to die.

All seems so obvious when you put it like that, doesn’t it.  Case closed.  DPS and healing is for facerollers, Tanks got it the hardest.

Or not.

Leaving aside the responsibility of the healers for a moment, the thing is, there’s a world of difference between difficulty and responsibility.  Just because something carries the burden of responsibility doesn’t mean it’s hard to do.  You may not like doing it, but that doesn’t make it technically difficult.  Tanking is not intrinsically hard to do.  Tanking for a group of idiots is hard.  Doing anything in a group of idiots is hard, tanks aren’t special.  You just tend to notice more when the tank’s an idiot because you all end up dead.  But again I must stress, you end up dead not because the tanks’ job was hard, but because he was an idiot and he was an idiot with a very responsible role.

“But” you all cry, “marking targets for crowd control and setting kill orders and doing interrupts and controlling the pace is hard work!”  Well maybe.  It’s tedious, sure. Responsible, definitely.  Tanking?  No.  That’s not tanking, that’s leading.  Tanks complain that if they don’t do it, nobody will.  This argument can go any way you like.  I’ve seen plenty of tanks not leading too.  Unless you call charging into packs of unmarked mobs with a healer on 50% mana after rezzing a dead dps fifty yards away as leading.  I don’t.  I call it Natural Selection.  As for interrupts, any clown can do that, and when you’re doing Nefarian, Halfus Wyrmbreaker, Omnitron Defence System or Maloriak I can guarantee you it won’t be the tanks ahead on the Interrupt count.  Or if it is, you’re all going to be dead pretty soon, and not just because none of the tanks are hit capped.

But yes, tanks certainly have a responsible role.  But do tanks have the most responsible role?  Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce our special guest, the healers.

Healing is like playing whack-a-mole, except instead of one hammer, you have a choice of eight.  And you have to use exactly the right hammer for whichever mole pops up at any split second because if you use too many of the wrong hammers, your hammers start to get taken away from you.  And then you have no hammers, but the moles are still popping up.  And then you’re all dead. And sometimes, the moles like to dodge, or pop up out of the wrong hole, or run out of range of your hammers.  Sometimes, these dumbass moles even stay in the hole after you hit them with the right hammer, so you have to keep hitting them despite the fact that other moles are popping up all the time and you can only use one hammer at once and will that stupid bastard mole get the fuck out of that hole or do you have to hit him with this hammer all friggin’ day? But you still have to deal with it, even though you’re playing with a group of idiot moles it’s still your problem.  And if you can’t deal with it, moles are going to die.  Now that’s difficult and responsible, all in one package.  Is tanking harder than this?  Not sure I’m ever going to have the confidence to say “Yes”.  I’d be comfortable settling for a “perhaps”.

Now let’s look at the dps.  Is tanking harder than dpsing?  It certainly can be.  If your dps won’t follow the marked target, constantly breaks crowd control, pulls aggro, won’t silence the healers or casters or won’t even apply crowd control in the first place, then yes, unquestionably, tanking is bloody hard, thankless work.  But once again, that cuts both ways.  If your tank won’t follow the marked target, constantly breaks crowd control, loses aggro and won’t silence the healers or casters or won’t wait for crowd control to be applied in the first place, then doing dps is a job with a high mortality rate.  And whichever of the two holds true, it’s the healer, not the tank, who has to pick up the slack.  Careful placement of traps, intelligent use of Polymorph, Hex and Glyphed Fear, kiting loose adds, interrupting tank-killing or mob-healing abilities…  these are not tanking jobs.  But the thing about all of these activities is that they operate on a sliding scale.  If they’re being done correctly and intelligently, and if the tank’s sufficiently intelligent to not interfere with and take advantage of them, then the tanks’ job is a cakewalk.  In a park.  With flowers and shit.  The healer can even remember to breathe, too.  But the less these jobs are done the more difficult the tank and healers’ job becomes.  See how that works?  Tanks and healers jobs get easier the harder the dps works and the smarter the tank is.

So no.  The tank categorically does NOT have the hardest job in a group.  Not by default.  He may end up with a hard job if his dps are mouth-breathing window-lickers, but I wouldn’t call it the hardest unless he was prepared to strip to the waist and fight the healer for the title.

But you’re not convinced.  I’m sure there are many of you who are quite capable of pointing to a given boss and saying “But look at this fight, it’s an utter nightmare for a tank.”  And you’d be right.  But for every Ozruk and Foe Reaper 5000 there’s a Baron Ashbury.  Or Ascendant Lord Obsidius.  Or Drahga Shadowburner.  Come to think of it, Foe Reaper 5000’s no laughing matter for the DPS either.

I guess where I’m going with this is that saying tanking is the hardest job in a dungeon is nonsense.  Any part of the holy trinity can be a nightmare if one of the three corners is being an asshat, whether that be tank, dps or healer.  Tanking, in and of itself, is not hard.  DPS and Crowd Control are not hard.  Healing is not hard.  They’re harder than in Wrath, certainly, and all three are utter nightmares if your group isn’t being led effectively.  Leading IS hard.  Especially in PuGs, and herein lies the crux of the argument.  The role of leader has traditionally always fallen to the tank, because let’s face facts here, if the tank’s not ready for the pull, the pull ain’t happening (or at least it shouldn’t happen).  So since the tank’s in the lead, the tank may as well Lead, right?  This is nonsense.  Any clown can lead, it doesn’t have to be the tank, but the thing is, people are lazy.  People like to follow the path of least resistance, and that usually means following the tank since they’re the one in front anyway.  And if you’re being followed, you must be the Leader.  THIS is why tanking is hard, not because there’s anything hard about tanking, but because Tanks either accept the burden of leadership or all too often, no-one bothers to lead.  And then you have a fail pug, and everything becomes hard.

I’ll tell you what else is hard.  Very damn hard.  Trying to Lead when the tank’s not interested.  “Just mark whatever you want sheeped with an X and I’ll take care of…  oh you just charged in and we’re in combat.  Never mind”

“Okay, I marked X, I’ll sheep it then you grab the mobs when they aggro on me.  Casting…..  now.  Oh, your Death and Decay appears to have broken the sheep, and now it seems to be diseased.  Great.”

“Anyone not know this boss?  Three of you including the tank?  Okay, he’s actually pretty simple.  He has two abilities you watch for.  The first is Static Cling, when he’s casting this, you all need to be off the ground when it finishes casting or you get rooted, and this is bad news when he does his second ability, which is…  why are we in combat?”

All three genuine examples from a Heroic Vortex Pinnacle two days ago.  The tanks’ job was not hard.  It was piss easy.  All he had to do was listen.  My job was an utter nightmare, and not because I had to dps.  It was because I had to lead the unleadable.

That’s hard.

Sad Tank Is Sad

In current raid content if your tanks are out of cooldowns, drop below 50% health and don’t get a heal landing in the next two seconds, they’re roadkill.  Healers are conditioned to panic if they see tanks drop low on health for even a fraction of a second.  As for low health dps, if the tanks are in trouble, you’re on your own.  Stand in a boss’ cleave, you are dead dps.  Stay in Fire for more than one tick, you are dead dps.  Fail to move out of the way of Bad Shit, you are dead dps.  Worse, you’ll probably take someone else with you.  Right now, fully raid buffed, Calli is rocking 37k health.  Calli is a Mage.  She wears a dress.  I’ve seen tanks in VoA with less health than that.  And yet, Calli is still seriously fragile in heroic 25 man raids.  She can survive one hit from the likes of Malleable Goo if she’s on full health, and she’ll be dead seconds later if there’s not a heal on its way.  In Cataclysm, things are seriously different and tanks and healers are having a hard time adjusting to it.

There was a quote I heard from a healer doing beta testing on Cataclysm a while back which perfectly illustrated the differences between healing raids on live and healing in the next expansion. It went something like this:

“I struggled to heal even a 5 man until I realised that I didn’t actually need to keep the tank and dps on 100% health all the time.  Once I realised that a tank or even a dps on 30% health was in no immediate danger of dying from anything I started to relax and enjoy healing again.”

I’ve seen green level 305 dps plate armour with a third again as much stamina on it as the current best in slot epic tanking plate.  The gear reset coming when the expansion hits is to going to send a lot of folks into deep shock.  All that gucci gear you’re struggling to get in Icecrown right now?  It’s going to be vendor junk real soon, homeys.  With the stat inflation on Cataclysm gear, no-one’s going to be dying anytime soon if they take a 20k hit.  You will not be one-shotted by a Lava Burst crit even in pve gear.

All of which leads me in a fairly roundabout way onto the real point of this post, which is about a couple of tanking experiences I’ve had recently in current content.  I get asked to log a tank for guild groups doing random dungeons fairly regularly.  Now you’d expect a guild random dungeon to be smooth sailing, and in most peoples’ experience you’d be absolutely right.  Gorn and Sithica both have 50% avoidance and Sithica, the “squishiest” of my two tanks, has over 42k health unbuffed.  Gorn tanks Heroic ICC10 with ease and Sithica could too.  Niether of them have anything to fear from 5 man heroic dungeon content, except when you’re doing a 5 man with certain players from my guild, you cannot keep aggro for a second.

I join a guild group and see certain 25 man heroic-geared names in the party and I just get a sinking feeling.  I know that the dps are going to be pulling for me, often grabbing the next pack while I’m still dealing with the last one.  There is no single target dps.  They pull the next pack with aoe and don’t care if I’m ready or not.  It’s not that I’m slow, I know the healer likes a fast pace and I know she can handle it, it’s just that 5 man content is so utterly boring for these guys that the only way to make it mildly interesting is to see how far they can push themselves.  I know you’re all thinking “Let the dumb pricks die if they won’t let the tank dictate the pace and hold aggro” but it’s not like that, they’re not being malicious, they’re just enjoying the game.  And in any case, it’s not that easy to “let them die”.  Not that I have any pangs of conscience about it or anything, but the little buggers just won’t die!

Last week we were doing Old Stratholme and by the time we’d cleared the gauntlet with me desperately running after the dps who were having the time of their lives blowing shit up, I just quit and switched to Fury spec and gear for Mal’ganis and the Twilight Corruptor.  It didn’t make any difference at all, except stuff died a little faster.  Last night we cleared Utgarde Pinnacle in about seven minutes.  At one point the healer whispered me to not panic if I suddely lost all aggro from Blessing of Protection on the next trash pack, then proceeded to BoP me while the Hunter misdirected to the Warlock.  And the little bugger lived!  They were actually making a game out of trying to get the Warlock killed from trash aggro (not that he needed their help) and couldn’t kill him! He even took it as a challenge and happily played along.

It gets worse.  On Hellscream this weeks’ weekly raid quest is Instructor Razuvious.  just to refresh your memory, he’s a boss who hits so hard that he cannot be tanked by a player and has to be tanked by a Mind Controlled npc.  Even that npc will die if he doesn’t have his Bone Shield up, so you have to switch tanks between the npcs regularly.  Or at least, that’s how it used to work when Razuvious was current raid content.  Yesterday, one of the Laser Chickens actually managed to pull aggro off the tanking npc, an npc whose taunt is on something like a 20 second cooldown.  Dead chicken?  Nope.  Guess what, fact fans?  With ICC25 Heroic dps and healers, you don’t even need tanks for raid bosses anymore.  I’ve never felt so completely and utterly useless.

All of which leads me back to that quote from the healer in the beta test.  The realisation finally sunk in last night that I am that beta tester, except I’m playing on Live.  Once I realised that not only do I not have to keep aggro on everything all of the time, that in fact it doesn’t matter if dps are pulling aggro, I started to relax and have fun again.  When you’re this far ahead of the content, roles cease to mean anything.  Anyone can tank, because anyone can tank.  All you need is to be the one with aggro.  Survivability is a non-issue.

I can recall back in vanilla WoW that my Rogue couldn’t solo Deadmines until he was level 40.  I recall being very pleased, relatively early in The Burning Crusade, when my level 70 druid was sufficiently epic geared to be able to farm Scholomance alone for drops that Calli could disenchant for profit.  That’s a 20 level gear difference in vanilla and a 15 level gear difference in TBC before you were sufficiently overgeared to be able to completely trivialise the content.  Right now in Wrath we’re trivialising current content.

Cataclysm, we’re ready for you now!

Angry Priest Is Angry

Caution – This Post starts off all fine and dandy, but rapidly turns into a rant of epic proportions. There is swearing. There is lots of swearing. If that offends you, unlucky, I’m a sailor. I’ll summarise the post for you here: People suck. There. Move on, read something else now. Take care.

You know, you have to take your hat off to Blizzard.  If there’s a glaring problem in their game design they don’t mess around.  You have to realise I came to WoW from Star Wars Galaxies and after suffering under Sony’s horrific mismanagement of that title I tend to lean back in my chair and laugh so hard I cough up a lung when I hear people moaning that Blizzard don’t respond to players’ concerns.  Seriously, you have no clue how well looked after you are.  Take one small example.  I have a friend who came to WoW from Lord of the Rings Online. Apparently over there they have quest items sorted into their own bag so you never have to mess around finding them when you need them.  Why, he asked, can’t Blizzard do something similar?  I had to admit he had a point, as I scoured my bag for that damn Tualik Prayer Book I needed to get my current quest underway.  Less than a month later Blizzard have the relevant quest item pop up ON SCREEN when you need it.  You don’t even need to OPEN a bag, much less look in it.  Quest item bag? Pfft, that’s so 2008 darlings!  When Blizzard fix something it stays fixed.

The Dungeon Finder tool and badge reward system is a similar innovation, but this doesn’t just fix the one obvious problem (finding a group for an instance), it fixes problems you didn’t even know you had.

Blizzard’s current raid design is two-tier.  The normal mode boss fights are simple enough that any cack-handed monkey can muddle their way through them with enough determination.  The Heroic modes are where people go when they want an actual challenge.  No seriously, they are.  Put your ego aside, stop the bullshit hardcore vs casual argument for half a minute, take a step back and look at it again.  Ulduar had some challenging normal mode fights with the Keepers and Yogg-Saron but Blizzard’s design philosophy was slightly different back then.  Move on to Crusaders’ Coliseum and even a room full of monkeys could down The Twin Val’kyr if they stayed at it long enough.  Try Coliseum on Hard Mode and things are slightly different.  Normal mode is for everyone, Heroic Modes are for the top raiding guilds on your servers.  Doesn’t mean only the top raiders are allowed to do them, but they’ll be the only ones completing them.  You can probably count on the fingers of one hand the guilds on your server who’ve done Anub-arak in 25 man heroic mode and still have enough left over to order a round of beers.  But who hasn’t done him on 10 man normal?

This isn’t one of those hardcore/social posts by the way, I couldn’t care less if you raid in 10 man or 25 man flavours.  10 man Anub’arak on heroic was tough, I’ve done it so trust me, I know.  25 man heroic Anub’Arak is an order of magnitude harder, and no, I’ve not killed him yet.  It’s just the way Blizzard design their content after past experience taught them that it’s not good business sense to spend millions of dollars developing level 60 Naxxrammas when less than 2% of your player base have the gear necessary to step inside without getting brutally slaughtered on the first trash pack.   They don’t spend vast sums of money developing content for the sole enjoyment of the raiding elite anymore.  Now everyone can at least get to see where their subscription money went, raid it, beat it, have fun and come away with some loot.  For the so-called raiding elite, there are the heroic versions, both in 10 and 25 man flavour.

But the core of this post is really about how you get the gear to compete at whatever level the current 10 and 25 man bar is set.  Thankfully, Blizzard have finally realised the dream of ditching the old model of raid x, gear up, move on to y, gear up, move on to z, etc… This linear progression does still apply if you’re at the leading edge of raid content on your server because that’s what leading edge raiding is about.  But let’s say you’re not. Let’s say you started playing three months ago and just got to level 80.  Back in vanilla WoW there was a long, hard slog ahead of you before you could get to the level where you were in a position to be able to make a valid contribution to a 40 man raid.  Despite their sworn aim to fix this, they actually made it harder in The Burning Crusade with the absurd attunement requirements to the various raid instances.  Let’s say you’re raiding Black Temple and your top Resto Druid healer suddenly gets pregnant and decides to quit playing (yes Phaelia, I mean you).  Or your Main Tank has a heart attack, or whatever.  You lost a key member of your raid team and you need to find a replacement, pronto.

You can either poach someone from a competing raiding guild or scout some up and coming talent and get them geared up. But getting people geared up was as far from simple as common sense and decency are from the average page on the official forums.  Let’s say a long-term guildmate who hadn’t played since Karazhan returns to the fold and would be a great asset to your raid with the benefit of some better gear.  First, they couldn’t even step into Black Temple to raid with you and get the gear they needed to contribute without being attuned.  And that meant they had to start a pain in the ass quest chain from Akama in Shadowmoon Valley that consisted of 10 quests, some of them group quests.  Then you had to sacrifice multiple raid nights going back to Serpentshrine Cavern to kill Fathom-Lord Karathress to open up the next part of the attunement chain, followed by killing A’lar in Tempest Keep, then back to Serpentshrine Cavern again, then a swift jaunt to Mount Hyjal to slay Rage Winterchill, followed by a raid battle outside Black Temple itself before your new raider could even set foot in the place, and THEN they had to take their chances with the loot lottery to get to the level of gear necessary to not be a burden to the raid.

Blizzard took the first steps to fix this utter stupidity by slowly removing the attunement requirements, one step at a time until eventually any idiot could form a raid and waltz into Black Temple, and believe me, any idiot did.  Sadly (or happily, depending on your point of view), any idiot didn’t usually have the gear required to survive the first trash pull.  So Blizzard got around this by introducing the badge reward system, and it did fix the problem.  You could get decent gear in the most critical slots purely by farming heroics and Karazahn for badges, and so that’s what people did.  But it introduced its own problems in that as each new tier of content was released there was no corresponding tier of badge that came with it, you just needed greater and greater amounts of the same badges that always dropped in heroics.  Remember those 40 badge offhands that every man and their tennis partners bought in early Wrath?  Imagine that the tier 10 versions still cost badges of heroism, except they now cost 160 badges each and you’ve got some idea of what it meant. It meant doing Karazhan for about two months just to get a pair of pants.

Put all of that experience together and we end up where we are today, with last seasons’ badges dropping from regular heroics, allowing us to gear up in the kit required to start this seasons’ raid content.  The hardcore are all wearing heroic versions of last seasons’ gear anyway, so they get a head start in the new content, and they’re happy.  Everyone else not only gets a fast track to last seasons gear without having to do last seasons raids, but they get a reason to go back to clear all that old dungeon content they never got round to or could never get a group for.  Everyone’s a winner.  Well, almost everyone.

There’s still one glaring problem with the way things are, but it’s not something Blizzard are ever going to fix unless they start mailing full epic class sets to people as soon as they hit level 80 and despite what the retards in trade chat would have us believe, that hasn’t actually happened yet. The other solution would be to ban the accounts of all the whiny little failures at life who plague this game and leave our servers populated with only those who might concievably be able to pass themselves off as civilised human beings, but this would write off at least 40% of Blizzards subscription revenue so that’s not going to happen anytime soon either.

Yes, something got me pissed off, and I’m having trouble finding adequate words to describe just exactly how pissed off I am. I’m not sure even swearing would begin to cover it.

Last week I was doing a random daily heroic on my priest, Aluriel. 9% of these dungeon runs are the three new Icecrown 5 mans which are always interesting to tank or heal.  50% are swift, efficient, and utterly, utterly boring old dungeon runs.  You throw a Shield on the 40K+ health tank, toss him a Renew every now and then and only stop to hit the Disenchant button when the loot window pops up.  40% of them are the old heroics but mildly entertaining as you do all of the above as well as decide whether or not to throw a Flash heal on the moron dps who think that their inability to control their own threat is somehow the tanks’ fault, or let them die in the vain hope that they might actually learn something from it.  And this brings me swiftly on to the last 1%.

1% of the time, you end up zoning into a heroic with a tank who has 24k health unbuffed. And it’s here where you often meet the most repellent scum the human race has to offer. Nine times out of ten the healer will immediately drop the group, because… you know, healing someone at the appropriate level of gear for an instance is hard isn’t it?  If that doesn’t happen, the dps will either leave or someone will initiate a vote to kick the tank from the group.

Let me just put this into some kind of perspective here. People would rather spend 15 minutes with the deserter debuff, then a further 20 minutes queuing as dps, then a further 30 minutes clearing the instance again for a grand total of at least an hour spent dicking around waiting for a tank you like (who you never met before and never will again) than spend 45 minutes going with the tank they currently have, simply because he or she isn’t covered in purples from head to foot, but is instead, and let’s be absolutely clear about this because it’s 100% fucking true, perfectly well geared for the level of content in which they find themselves.

How the fuck is this poor bastard supposed to get to the level where dps and healers are going to condescend to allow him to tank for them if everyone runs a mile rather than spend an extra fifteen fucking minutes taking things at the pace they were intended?  “Oh noes, I want my badges without any effort at all!”

Fuck. You.

Quite aside from the whole “not being a failure at humanity” thing, you think there are so many tanks around in LFG you can afford to be choosy?  You want to ensure this one never makes it into the tank pool after having her enthusiasm crushed by your being a selfish prick more concerned about shaving fifteen minutes off the next soulless badge farming session than being a decent fucking human being?  It’s only Heroic Violet Hold for fucks’ sake!  I tanked this with 24k health buffed when Gorn hit level 80!  This tank’s got 24k unbuffed! She’s actually overgeared for the instance and you’re going to leave or have her kicked because she’s not overgeared enough?  Fuck you.  Not when I’m the fucking healer you don’t.

This Deathknight tank already got brownie points in my book simply by virtue of being a lolknight who was willing to tank.  Her gear was fine, it was all gemmed and enchanted sensibly.  She’d actually put a lot of gold, effort and research into gear that, with the speed of upgrading these days, she was going to tank with for maybe three days, and she was proud of her gear, as she had every damn right to be because she was putting in an effort!  Can you remember ever doing that you soulless pricks who turn up in my heroics with 5/5 unenchanted, ungemmed Tier 9?  Can any of you mouth-breathing window-lickers actually remember making an effort?  Fine, drop the group and take your deserter buff, pieces of shit like you are along every five seconds when you already have a tank and healer.

At the rate of acquisition of Emblems of Triumph you can go through these days, this tank is going to take away an average of 5 badges per instance, at maybe an hour per instance taking into account breaks for toilet/refreshments between dungeons.  6 runs gets the first piece of tier 9 gear, and they’ll be picking up incremental upgrades in almost every instance they run, too.  I know a friend who hit 80 on his paladin on Friday and by Sunday he had all five pieces of Turalyon’s Battleset.  In two or three days time this tank is going to be just as faceless as all the other anonymous tanks you bump hips with.

And you know what the first thing she said was, when she zoned in to see us all standing there, in her broken English, right before the dps started a vote to kick her?

“Sorry for my bad english, I try to be good tank, we have fun, yes?”

And right there the hunter started the vote.  Whoever you are, if you’re reading this, I sincerely and honestly hope you die in a fire before you get the chance to teach your life values to children.  Two of the dps left the group when I refused to kick.  That’s fine, I told them both “The tank stays or I leave” and they made their choice.  Fuck them both, enjoy your deserter buff and queue time, pricks.  You know something else?  Healing was a challenge, but no more a challenge than trying to keep some fuckwit dps alive with no concept of personal threat control, and I do that on every other dungeon so what’s the difference?  The tank maintained aggro on multiple mobs, never once let the healer come under threat, taunted off when the dps opened up too early with AoE, didn’t die and cleared the instance in the regular time.  Then at the end, actually apologised again for her poor English and lousy tanking gear.  Skilled, competent, talented, multilingual AND humble?  I’m just sorry she wasn’t on my server.

Seriously folks, wake up and smell the coffee, and stop being such utter self-absorbed shits.  And if you’re ever in a group with one of these cockmongers, don’t let them get away with it.  Call them out for the complete shitbags they are.  Do the decent thing.  Please.