The Tank/Healer team and 2 way streets

This is not an invitation to tell me I’m doing it wrong. You might be a better paladin tank than me, and I’m totally cool with that. I’m a pretty happy tank given decent people in my party/raid, and that’s all I want, to do my job and be happy.

I own a lot of healers, and a lot of tanks. I learned to play World of Warcraft with my bear tank, and then spent a lot of time learning to heal with the shaman, discipline priest, druid and finally paladin. But on my Battlegroup there is a severe tank shortage (actually I believe this shortage might be in the game itself, overall) so my daily random (heroic or otherwise) is often spent tanking on the four characters of mine that can actively tank in-game. So, I know what tanking is, and I know what healing is. And I really enjoy the dynamic that grows between tanks and healers. I know the Wrath dungeons backwards and forwards. Gearing 4 raiding toons will do that, and I’ve levelled 3 others besides. I like taking a random pug and leading them on a merry chase through the dungeon without stressing a healer (sometimes it’s me, the healer, wanting no stress!) It’s a mark of pride to me to have no incidents and no issues. I can usually tank and spare a few cheerful words in party chat, too!

This was the situation that found me zoning into heroic Violet Hold on my protection paladin with my partner in crime’s demon warlock, and a party that included a Discipline priest healer. Now, I love discipline priests, I love healing as discipline (I have never touched holy and don’t intend to). But in certain situations, a discipline priest can make a protection paladin’s life hell. I learned that the hard way with my partner in crime’s paladin tank. And it’s not the player’s fault, it’s the mechanics of the game that make protection paladins and discipline priests abilities and mechanics just not mesh well in some situations, which leads to stress for me!

If you’re a disc priest healing a paladin tank and they have no mana, don’t bubble them. Because you’re supposed to be observant and know how your spells work, and I’m letting you know how paladins work. They will love you if you do this.

So what are these mechanics that don’t always play nice together? For protection paladins “Spiritual Attunement provides the paladin with a percentage of mana, based on ability level, each time they receive healing.” -wowwiki and for priests “priests deeply specced in the discipline tree, their strength lies in preventing damage.” -wowwiki

Those two sentences hopefully point out the problem here. Preventing damage means no health bars to fill, no healing received. Get it? Discipline priests have the goal of keeping everyone alive by preventing a majority of the damage, and the tankadiin has the responsibility of using his mana to hold aggro on all the mobs in the instance. Typical healer/tank combo. But mitigating the majority of the damage is cross purposes to what the tank needs to keep his mana bar full, to hold aggro on more mobs. In raiding environments this isn’t an issue because things simply hit so hard there. In a majority of instances, the paladin tank can just pull a few more mobs to dodge/block more or take enough damage to eat through the shield and really do some damage so that a heal that pushes health up also increases mana stores. But in situations where the tank has no control over more mobs (Brann encounter, Halls of Stone; Violet Hold timed mob spawns) or simply when the mobs die too fast (overgeared dps, weak mobs) that the tank gets absolutely zero chance to dodge/block or take damage.

I found myself in the perfect storm situation of both of these problems. I had no control over the mob pulls, and they died so fast I barely had a chance to dodge/block. My mana regeneration comes from a few places.

1. Blessing of Sanctuary (Places a Blessing on the friendly target, reducing damage taken from all sources by 3% for 30 minutes and increasing stamina by 10%. In addition, when the target blocks, parries, or dodges a melee attack the target will gain 2% of maximum displayed mana);

2. Judgement of Wisdom (giving each attack a chance to restore 2% of the attacker’s base mana);

3. Divine Plea (You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec) 1min cooldown

4. Glyph Seal of Command (You gain 8% of your base mana each time you use a Judgement with Seal of Command active) My judgements have a cooldown less than 9seconds, thanks to 2/2 Improved Judgements.

5. Seal of Wisdom (Fills the Paladin with divine wisdom for 30 min, giving each melee attack a chance to restore 4% of the paladin’s maximum mana)

I was facing a lot of crowd pulls (just my luck) of 4 mobs, and despite all these tools I was barely hanging onto mana. I didn’t have time to stop and drink because the mobs keep spawning and they were spawning far away from each other. I had to run instead of drink to the next pull. I didn’t want to switch to Seal of Wisdom because Seal of Command became my threat when I stopped consencrating, and was glyphed to give me mana anyways.

So I asked my priest to try to avoid Power Word: Shield on me. It was my last hope to try and retain some mana. They tried, but they were totally confused why I would ask such a thing. And I was too busy really to try to explain that I NEEDED to take damage to get my mana up, that my other abilities just weren’t cutting it. I felt really bad about that, because knowledge is power and I feel they’d just be a more informed healer and possibly could make their next paladin tank’s life less hell in situations where their tank’s mana isn’t cutting it.

And that’s what this comes down to. Tanking and healing is a partnership. Healers want their tanks to respect their mana pools at all levels of the game, while leveling, while pushing through stockades, while in a heroic dungeon, while raiding. And tanks want healers to respect their pull strategies. And, in some cases, tanks have mana pools that need respecting too!

Lovely Ambrosine over at forthebubbles.wordpress.com got to this topic before me (I am a pathetic excuse for a blogger) and there’s a bunch of commentary there. Every comment from someone who both has a disc priest and a paladin tank, or is part of a duo of very close players of those two classes, and weren’t end-game min-maxers that barely do random pug heroics, were helpful and understanding of this situation. I love her blog and tweets quite a bit. But you won’t ever catch me taking gear off my tank, reducing my hit/expertise/crit immunity.

I think I was not violating some silly sacred cow that seemed to erupt on twitter in response to me asking the healer to try to avoid voluntarily bubbling me. Previously tame tweeters acted like I was laying down the law on the poor priest on how to do their job, when all I did was ask them to not bubble ME because it was interfering with MY job. 99% of all the hullabaloo that followed had no bearing on the specific situations where a paladin tank is really at the mercy of the game because the dps are awesome and kill things too fast or the mobs are limited and the priest is too good and mitigates all of the minimal damage the mobs deal. And a majority of the tweeters, not knowing that my twitter question was posed neutrally, but that I was the tank in question, assumed the tank (hi, me) didn’t know how to play, didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t understand discipline priests, etc.

Dear disc priests. I know how you heal. I love how you heal. You should learn how I tank and get mana. Then go do it in heroic violet hold with uber dps. Maybe you’ll consider your words a bit more carefully before lynching someone you feel is beneath you because they were struggling with mana.

I did love that naked-outfit idea in the comments at For The Bubbles though…

Filed under: drama, healing, heals, paladins, pride, pug, QQ, rant, tank, tanking, bubble, disc, mana, paladins, priest, PW:S, tank, twitter

Why do we segregate the playerbase

I stumbled upon a great read today over at MMOmeltingpot.com and it immediately had my attention because it’s a topic that I’ve long cherished, the dreaded Casual vs Hardcore debate. And I don’t mean I’ve cherished the debate because I’m trying to draw the line and clearly indicate who is what. But really, why do we try to label each other? In The World of Warcraft, we’re all playing the same game, with the same tools. At least the first half of that is definitely correct. I think. (Addons don’t change the basics of the game!)

“I think the base terms of hardcore and casual are grossly misrepresented. There’s raiders, and then there are non-raiders. There are people who just do 5 man instances, heroic or not, and then those that don’t even do that, and just stick to questing, leveling professions and doing soloable achievements. There are theorycrafters, followers of Elistist Jerks, browsers of wowpopular.com, people who spec from first principals and those that don’t have a firm grip on the direction of their spec (which Cata will help with, somewhat). There are altoholics who love to level, or maintain as many 80s as they can, or those that have 1 main and bank alt. There are people that prevent the progress of their toons at level 19, 29, 39, 49 or 59, just so they can gear up that toon for BG dominance (they’re called twinks in game, though you may wish to ask your parents about the real world term “twink”). Then there are world PvP, BG PvP and Arena PvP players. There are people that log 6 hours a week of game time or less, and they could fall into any of those categories. There are those that log 35+ hours a week, and they too, fall into any of those categories.

The player who logs 35+ hours a week, just leveling alts, gathering and leveling professions or running 5man heroics and doesn’t do raids could be considered just as hardcore as the player who 9 hours a week to do 25ICC heroic only. Both players might have a very good understanding of their specs, talents and spells for the level of play that they are at.

And out of game, you’ve got bloggers, blog followers, ranters, forum trolls and care bears (though that can be in-game as well).

Yeah, narrowing down the field of WoW player definitions to hardcore and casual is like to describe colour in terms of black and white.”

Quotes straight from linked post. Pathak’s homepage can be found here.

So what do we get by trying to categorize? Is it really that difficult to have a discussion with other players without “identifying” their loyalties? The great thing with twitter is that I’ve been able to chat with other players so far outside my own comfort zone and really get a feel for what they love about their game. It’s another amazing example of how the Internet can tear down barriers between people. And while I’ve waded into the muck a time or two (yeah that was me talking about pvp-geared-toons in my heroics giving me headaches, namely pvp-geared-tanks&healers) (oh and that #realid fiasco sure did raise some tensions between the different life-stories of the players) it’s been an eye-opening experience I’m eternally grateful for. While I knew a fellow guildee was a teacher in his real life, I’ve met probably half a dozen at least on twitter. While I have a few server friends that pvp a lot, I’ve actually been able to watch the discussion of pvp in a manner that made it… make sense to me. Thanks to twitter. And all this without FIRST identifying that player based on their play style. On twitter, all I care about is that they tweet generally interesting things and love the game to some degree. Really I’m not that picky. Look at my Warcraft list. It’s freaking huge.

I don’t think I have a point except to draw attention to this FABULOUS little review of what it means to play this game, which just highlights why I think these labels are pretty silly when used in arguments/debates/discussions of any kind, really. Although we may still have to work on our ability to talk nicely to each other, and not assume everyone sees the game from the same point of view. Let’s knock the labels down to mumbo jumbo first, then we can work on being nice, maybe?

Filed under: pride, rant, warcraft, wow, addons, casual, hardcore, labels, twitter, warcraft

realm forum bragging

Seeing as how we killed the +1drake achievements this week I was gonna put us up onto the PVE progression thread sticky on my realm forum.  But I think I’ll wait til we manage three drakes.  We’re a small nobody guild.  Better to have some OOMPF.

But here’s all the hard work I put into what would have been on the forums…

[A] tuesday killed 10man OS+1 drake. Grats to Dermoon, Vheissu, Xaio, Nadleeh, Paineternal, Sasquache, Tharisel, Nuit, Vendin, Sugarpie.  

Wednesday was 25man OS+1 drake. Grats to everyone in the guild that was online, as well as Anthrakks and Salluna of Verus Via, Cjo, Merdon, Vandith of War Lords, Versie of Saga, Kamarigus of Uncensored, and Famish of Abbadon

Hopefully the first of many! Next step

Filed under: achievement, guild, pride