Transformations

My transition from primary DPS to a tank within World of Warcraft has been an interesting one for me, and as the year draws to a close I would like to share some little tidbits that have come to mind as I've made this choice to change.

The first part is the whole leadership thing. I really don't know how this whole thing started, but it's probably simply due to my personality. This isn't the first time I've displayed the qualities of a leader, or in some sense an organizer, so that really came as no surprise to me whatsoever.

This is apart from the RL status. While the tank playing the part of the Raid Leader is pretty common, the RL *not* being the tank is not UNcommon either. In 5-man instances, however, it seems quite prevalent that the tank is always the one marking the targets and performing the pulls. I've actually received shocked reactions from other players when I would be the one doing this in an instance. It never occurred to me why this was strange to them until I started tanking.

The idea of leading instances wasn't particularly my own, it's just something that started happening way back in the early days of being level 60. While I will admit that I have a horrible sense of direction, this is countered by my ability to memorize things. Once I run through an instance once, I'm pretty good at memorizing all its quirks and all the little things you need to know to either succeed or to make your life much easier. This, coupled with the fact that I appear to be quite good at it, started the trend of people automatically turning group lead over to me when we'd run an instance.

I've noticed, however, that doing the same job as the tank is a lot smoother. While I was always conscious of the tank's need for rage, I'm not always certain that I was courteous with the speed in which I would do the pulls. While tanking, naturally, I pull when I'm ready. Though I feel that playing a DPS class, especially that of a mana-based one, has given me an insight that most tanks might lack. I make sure that everyone has sufficient mana before any pull, and I look behind me to make sure my party is there.

That leads me to my next thought. As a mage, I rarely felt I was doing anything vitally important. Mostly, playing the mage is fun, as I'm sure most DPS classes are. I was blowing stuff up, laughing at my crits, and just having a good time. I suspect that my desire to be a more vital part of the group was one of my main reasons for so willingly changing characters. The idea of standing in front of your group and being solely responsible for keeping them all alive is very appealing to me. It's probably the reason why I treated crowd-control as an art form while playing the mage, and why healers would always stand close to me because they knew I would frost nova a mob to keep it off of them. Heroic, I guess you could say, but realistically it's just my desire to do something more than "do damage to the skull target".

So if asked about my decision to switch after basically over-gearing my mage, the answer is that no, I don't regret doing so; for a number of reasons:

1. As I said above, I find tanking more fulfilling than DPSing. At the same time, I'm still having fun, and I still get to play with my friends (except my fellow tanks, but that's what raiding is for).

2. I'm invited to more 5-man instances than I was on the mage. Typically, as a DPS it would be me forming the group. Otherwise, I would be out doing something and notice that everyone else was running an instance. As a tank, sometimes I don't even get to check my mail before I'm getting invited to something.

3. I'm a visuals kind of guy -- I like graphics, details, etc. Playing an undead mage wasn't all that great to look at, because of the size of an undead. As a tauren, I can actually see what my gear looks like now. And, warrior gear just looks cooler, for the most part.

4. Being extremely hard to kill is quite entertaining. One such case where I was laughing to myself was a certain night in heroic Underbog. We had just started, and we took down a 3 pull without incident. I then looked and noticed our healer had disconnected, and had been disconnected through the entire pull. I hadn't gotten one heal the entire time, and it didn't even matter.

5. My damage output on the mage was superior to others for two reasons: my gear, and my study and exploitation of the mage's arcane tree. On a long boss fight, my damage output was on-par with everyone else. Warlocks would surpass me because they are the gods of the 15 minute long fight due to their abilities. However, I was utterly unrivaled in short, burst damage fights. This did not come without a cost, however, and I constantly felt that I was slowing down my groups because of my need to mana up. On the warrior, I'm making a group wait, at most, 15-20 seconds while my Bloodrage becomes available again. That's much better.

6. There is no tanking gear in PvP. I will never, ever, ever, ever have to PvP as a tank to get an upgrade. And that is fucking beautiful.

7. I actually have to compare gear and do math before accepting an upgrade.

Next, here are a few of my observations about tanking, from a warrior point of view:

-- If your healer keeps dying first from only healing you, you are a bad tank.
-- If you can tank 2 things without having to taunt, you are a tank.
-- If you can tank 3 things without having to taunt, you are a good tank.
-- If you can tank 4 things without having to taunt, you are a very good tank.
-- If you can tank 5 or more things without having to taunt, you obviously have 6 arms.
-- If you can keep an AOE pull off of the mage without having to taunt, you are cheating.

I particularly like the DPS people who enjoy testing their tank. I've noticed that warlocks are the most common people who do this. "Let's see how long it takes me to pull aggro!" My solution to this problem is simple. Stop taunting and tell the healer not to heal the dumbass.

Conversely, there are the DPS classes that feel they can tank if necessary. These are mostly the people that wear PvP gear for PvE instances and raids. For these people, I taunt the mob they pulled off of me and hold it, and then later I yell at them for doing sub-par DPS that would be much higher had they been wearing PvE gear.

Given that a tanking warrior's only weakness is tanking multiple things at once, I find it humorous that crowd controlling seems to be a lost art these days. The DPS world has been overrun with druids, shamans, and DPS warriors. None of which can CC. Warlocks are also a common commodity, and unless it's a demon or elemental, their CC sucks. Mages are scarce. Hunters are noobs and don't know how to trap. Rogues forgot how to be sneaky. I blame PvP (as I do for most things).

But I guess it's one way of tackling the biggest obstacle with my class head-on. And as long as the DPS is intelligent, tanking 4-5 things at once really isn't a problem. At that point, it becomes a game of how fast I can switch between targets.

With the new year coming up, I'm looking forward to taking my warrior as far as I can in the next 16-odd months before the next expansion comes out. But mostly, I just want to continue having fun with it and learning as much as I can to get even better at it.