Well, I was telling The Cranky Sysadmin all about my World of Warcraft adventures as a brand new bear-form Druid tank the other day and he suggested that I post them on his blog. So, either he thought my stories were interesting or just wanted me to redirect my chattiness. :-)
As an introduction, I’ve recently reached level 70 with my main character — a night elf druid named Moonraker. I am pretty much a solo player, coming from other RPGs like Oblivion and Fallout (1, 2, and even Tactics). So before last Saturday, I had never really been interested in grouping and had never run an instance with a group. Og the hunter had taken me through Deadmines and Scarlet Monastery, but he was level 70 at the time, so I just trailed behind hoping he and his boar would hurt themselves and need some healing. They never did…
Recently Ep suggested that if he changed to a healer spec and I changed from Balance to Feral, we could be a tank/healing team for future instances. So, at level 66 or so, I took his advice and traded my moonkin and treants for… um… bear and cat form that I already had before. :-(
At first, I was a pretty lost and sad — since the treants were my favorite panic button and I loved to stealth up to people in PVP, unleash the treants on them, and watch them flail around and panic at the weird trees swarming them. (Good times, good times… )
But then I realized that a Feral-specced kitty kills things very fast (with no casting time!) and the Feral bear form was spectacular at keeping me from dying.
So, I read up on bear tanking and collected some more appropriate gear. Funny enough, at around the same time some of our guild members started a push to get people in the guild keyed for Karazhan. We had a meeting and scheduled a Shadow Labyrinth run to get the first key fragment as a group, with me as the tank and another druid as the healer.
I was all nervous about tanking *and* grouping for the first time, so I read up on the instance and was even more nervous to realize that it is a relatively hard one for a recent level 70. Drat! But, I had spiffy new tanking gear and strategies for the bosses in my back pocket and was ready to give it a try.
Too bad our healer who needed the key frag didn’t show up. Neither did any other fragment-needing people except an Arms warrior. So, my guild very kindly filled in the three empty spaces with a pally healer, a BM hunter (the guild leader actually), and a warlock with a demon-y thing (Felguard?) and into the instance we went!
Things went pretty well, with me learning how best to pull as a tank and how to keep my threat up. (I had read about bear tanking, but it isn’t as easy as experienced people make it seem.) The tricky part was that most all of the pulls were five difficult mobs and my Swipe only keeps the attention of three. We wiped a few times because of adds on a few of our pulls, but didn’t wipe on either Hellmaw or Blackheart the Inciter. Yay!
But, then we got to Vorpil…
For anyone who doesn’t know, he opens “rifts” that spawn voidwalkers who both explode(!) and heal Vorpil if they get to him. They move slowly, so the strategy is supposed to be to lure Vorpil down alternating hallways to keep him away from the Voidwalkers. (There’s also some teleporting of the party by Vorpil that complicates this.)
Only this strategy didn’t work for us at all and we wiped three or four times. The warlock dropped out of the party, so we swapped him out for a kind mage from the guild and tried one more time, unsuccessfully. At that point, the healer said that he couldn’t stay any longer, so we grudgingly gave up.
(By the way, I went on a short solo adventure afterwards to find out that you can sneak by Vorpil as a prowling cat, but there’s a closed door after him – I assume it only opens upon his death. Also, if you leave the party and try to prowl around alone, you get a warning that you’ll be teleported back to Shattrath because you aren’t in “this instance’s group.” I rejoined the party so I could prowl more then got killed by Vorpil when I tried to sneakily grab a Soul Device near him for a quest. So I didn’t release my spirit and quickly left the party — and the game teleported me back to Shattrath… where I was alive! Cool, eh?)
So, I found that tanking is pretty fun — and harder than I thought it would be. I guess I’d like to be in a party where I can see everyone’s threat (nobody had threat meters in this party) and see if that makes it easier for me. I spent a lot of my time spamming my attacks because I had no idea where I was threat-wise or if could safely go pick up some of the “extra” mobs (beyond my three) that were running amok.
And, that concludes my self-centered tale of my very first tanking/grouping experience. I learned a lot and can’t wait to try again — though Ep and I may get our own Shadow Labyrinth key so I don’t have to drag my guildies through again (except for ones that need the key fragment, of course.)
Over and out from Newbie Bear Tank Land! (Is that really a place?)