Why all the hate?

An oldie but goodie

Rhidach and Honor’s Hammer have both blogged about this today, but I feel like I need to put in my own two cents. There has been a trend for the last 4 weeks or so where warriors are QQ’ing to no end over the perceived dominance of paladin tanks. This has perpetuated the official forums (which shouldn’t surprise anyone who lingers there), but has also found its way into much more intelligent forums (like Tankspot.com).

What we need to ask ourselves is, “Why is there such hatred from Warriors toward Paladins?” Honor’s Hammer brought up the possibility that it is because we share gear. Possible, but is that really that much different from BC? In BC, paladins who wanted to tank and who didn’t have access to tier gear largely wore warrior gear with a spellpower weapon. I know I did. Back in BC I was in a guild of RL friends and didn’t progress much (meaning I did a whole lot of Kara, and then worked on my alts). I only saw Gruul’s a couple of times. Never saw Mags. I missed all of Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. I’ve never seen Black Temple (I still need to do that at some point) or Hyjal. I did complete Zul’Aman pre-nerf (with some friends from a much more progressed guild). And through all of that content that I didn’t do, I geared like a warrior, except I used a spellpower weapon. Warriors didn’t care then. Why would they care now.

My suspicion is because they are not being propped up as the “best” tank by the devs anymore. And the less skilled warrior tanks out there don’t like losing tanking spots to more skilled paladin tanks. Notice I didn’t say anything about warriors tanks losing spots to paladin tanks on the basis of their class. The skill of the player behind the keyboard is the key. I have a warrior co-tank who is also our raid leader. He doesn’t QQ about paladin OP’ness. At least not when I’m around. I hate to admit it, but probably 50% of everything I know about tanking (situational awareness, movement, etc), I learned from watching him. He is in no danger of losing his raid spot to a tank of another class.

It’s funny. When DKs were the defacto hard mode tanks, paladins didn’t cry on the forums for a nerf. It was mostly warriors doing that. I think I see where this is going now. It is my suspicion that there are a number of warrior tanks out there who have been tanking since vanilla based on the fact that they rolled a warrior. Now that the other tanking classes are basically on par with warriors, player skill is rearing its ugly head. And many longtime warrior tanks are finding themselves out of a job.

“Don’t blame the player, blame the game.” Wait…..no, absolutely blame the player. The game is fair and balanced (within a couple of % points anyway). If you warriors want to channel your rage at another tank, point it at druids. They are like improved warriors anyway (amirite?). They use the same resource system. Have similar skills and abilities. But have more effective health and do more DPS while tanking than warriors, paladins, or death knights.

Let’s be brothers of the shield and dog pile on the druids!

Communication is Key

Nerd Rage downed Rotface last night. It was glorious. But it did not come quickly or easily.

Fight mechanics are not our strongpoint as a guild. We really like to just line up, and overpower ever encounter. We have some of the best DPSers on our server, and it shows. I do feel truly blessed, as I firmly believe that our top DPSers could go play with some of the top guilds in the world should they be so inclined.

After downing Festergut on our second try on Tuesday, we took a few shots on Rotface, but all we had to show for it was 8 wipes before we called raid. So Thursday night was dedicated to Rotface. We had all seen the fight. We had all done more research and study. We were ready. We zoned in, ported up to the Plagueworks, and started pulling trash (mmmm……yummy rep). As a side note, we need to get better with the trash pull with the two big Abominations. We always end up getting all of the mobs inside the room and end up with like 6 people alive by the end of that trash pull.

Anyway, once all of the trash was cleared, we buffed up and pulled. I have the easy job. I tanked Rotface. One of our new prot paladin recruits pulled ooze duty (she’s solid BTW. She knows her stuff and is skilled). At first we were using a strat where we blow Heroism right off the bat. But doing it that way, we were hitting a brick. Time and time again, we just couldn’t seem to get him past ~20%. One of our holy paladins suggested that we save Heroism for 30%, as that is when the Mutated Infections seemed to always get out of hand. So we tried that strat, and instantly saw an improvement. We got him down to 17%. Then a wipe at 6.8% on the next pull. We were getting close. Then, during that corpse run, we had the surprise of trash respawns.

/sigh

Usually, on progression nights, if we hit the trash respawn timer, we call it. We usually take that as a sign that we have banged out heads against a wall for long enough. But it was only 10PM at that point. Our raid usually goes until 12. So we cleared trash again (mmmmm……more yummy rep). Once trashed was cleared again, we pulled again, and wiped at 16%. Now we are headed in the wrong direction. While we were running back, I re-explained the Unstable Ooze explosion mechanics. It appeared to me that the raid was running when DBM warns of the ooze explosion, which is before the “ooze projectiles” are actually fired from the big ooze, and therefore spreading the ooze explosion all over the room. So we had one of our healers call out when to move. That helped tons.

We were also having problems with DPS/Healers tunnel visioning and not running out when they got the infection, so we had another one of our healers start calling out who got the infection. These two things combined helped tremendously. On our next pull, we got him down to 8%. Then on the following pull, Rotface went down.

We banged our heads against this boss for about 15-20 attempts, but were only successful when we started properly communicating with each other. Look out Professor…Nerd Rage is coming.

Communication really is the key to success in a team environment.