I dinged 80 last weekend, I apologize for the lack of updates, I’ve been busy gearing and questing.

I’ve run a few heroics, none are two hard, although there are a few gear checks. The main one I ran into was a DPS gear check in Halls of Stone (heroic). The Brann Bronzebeard event is tough if your DPS can’t keep up. The waves spawn much much faster on heroic.

As far as raid content goes, I’ve only run one, Archavon in Wintergrasp. It was a fun fight, especially when the boss picked me up and hit my offtank with me. Speaking of OT’s, our DK was suprisingly squishy to the melée damage. I know Blizzard doesn’t want DK’s to HAVE to use their mitigation cooldowns (Icebound Fortitude and similar) just to stay on equal terms with other tanks, but I feel that may be the case.

One of the original posts I wanted to write for this blog was a discussion about the different kinds of people that make up particular classes.

I think the two most prevalent cases are tanks and dps. In general, dps accepts damage meters such as recount, are the end all of who’s doing the best, but tanks are a little harder to sort out. This leads to tanks boasting about gear, stats, avoidances, and all other things they might be able to bring to the table.

In a world that is as unquantified as tanking, its often very difficult to match up exact tanks against other tanks, especially when the 3 (soon to be 4) classes have varying degrees of differences. Additionally, most of the fights that blizzard designs, have 1 target to tank, and if there are more, they are often clearly designated as “off tank” style mobs. Trash usually requires more than one tank, but when you get to the boss (read: important) fight the other tanks are sidelined. This causes a bit of an inferiority complex in the additional tanks.

This will be alleviated a bit when Blizzard implements the “dual-spec” system, as dps/tanks will be able to switch back and forth, and the tanks won’t feel like such a lame duck when they are attempting to dps for boss fights.

There are many different reasons people tank. Any group is going to have some form of a tank, so obviously necessity is one, but as a prelude to my upcoming analysis of tank-behavior, I’ll go over the other reasons people tank.

In my WoW career, I’ve played every class and every role, some more than others. With two out of three of my level-capped characters being hybrids this isn’t a big surprise. My shaman was leveled mostly out of necessity for healers. I’ve played caster dps, melee dps, healing, and tanking, but in the end, tanking fits me the best.

I enjoy tanking for many reasons. When you are the tank you have a very heavy responsibility on your shoulders. From a five man group to a 25 man raid, the entire group looks to you for many things. You control the flow of the instance, the mood of the group, and many other aspects of the experience. In the five person dungeon scenario, the tank is generally the designated “group leader” meaning he is in charge of setting up the marks for kill order, croud control, and anything else that needs to be done.

Another aspect of the necessity side, is just that. You are always needed. Tanks are generally in short supply, particularly good tanks. How many timeshave you seen in trade chat “LF1M tank”. You can very quickly build a name for yourself by pugging a few runs in heroics or kara. As long as you perform well, aren’t too hard to heal, and aren’t an asshole, most people will remember you and probably put you on their friends list.

Now to shift the discussion more to what separates the good tanks from the bad. As with any statistic or assumption, there is always a degree of error, and in the end this is my opinion so think what you may.

You may say that “every group also needs a healer”, and while that is true, tanking obviously has a much different feel to it. While both equally important, tanking is much more involving and exciting. You have a much more active role in the encounter, between threat generation, boss positioning, mitigation management, among others.

For most of TBC raiding, skill > gear, and sadly enough 9/10 skill = “don’t stand in the fire”. But for tanks you have to have the gear and the skills to utilize your entire toolset to be a great tank. Sure anybody in plate can strap on a shield and put themselves in front of an enemy, and count on the healer to keep then alive, or the dps to CC the mob they didn’t pay attention to. However a good tank is going to know how much he can handle, and more importantly, what his healer can handle, as well as the competency of his dps/cc (if needed). Just because you came in here with a BT geared healer and AoE tanked the room before doesn’t mean that you can do the same with every other group. Maybe the healer and dps were just so strong that your group could muscle their way through, or maybe you have decent gear and the healer was able to keep up. A good tank will be able to know the difference.

Blizzard will take the realms down for a very extended maintenance (2am-2pm PST) tonight. This is very good news for most classes and specs. I know there are a few out there who feel they got the short end of the buff stick, but I think most things are pretty good.

To divert the happy feeling I’ve got here, there is one thing that has been bothering me about the class changes lately: Taunts.

It seems Blizzard was more than ok to give the other tanks AoE ability like paladins, but in general they have always pulled the “homogenization” card when talking about changes. I understand this point, but so much has been given to warrior, and I’m not going to lie, we have received our share of buffs too, however, one thing paladins need is a RELIABLE taunt.

Righteous Defense is nice in certain situations, but it’s downfalls out weigh the benefits. As many paladins have suggested, I would love to see RD switched to 2 ranks, one that taunts the mob directly, and the other that taunts the mob directly as well as two addition enemies attacking their target.

This change would eliminate many annoyances in 25 man raid scenarios. Several occasions during BT trash, I’ve had to get a mob off another tank, however, I don’t really have an ability that just pulls a single target from another tank. Every other tank has (or will have, regarding DKs) a single target taunt. Blizzard has responded that they don’t feel it’s needed. If it’s not needed then why doesn’t one of the other tanks have a “alternative taunt”?