dark spot in the corner

A tank’s blog, mostly…

A very nice shared topic brought up by Fumbleknock from WoWblog Plus.

To answer this we have to take a good long look at the fundamentals that define our World of Warcraft:

Damage

Everything evolves around it.

• Tanks should receive it exclusively, because they have the tools to handle it best.
• Healers need to heal the damage caused in order to keep the players alive.
• Damage Dealers need to deal as much damage as rational possible to prevent the mobs from dealing damage as soon as possible.

So, we have a role dedicated to damage mitigation, one for damage removal and one for dealing damage.

Even utility abilities can be sorted into one of these categories. Polymorph, for example, is a tool for damage removal or damage dealing (sheeping a healer). Curse of Weakness on the other hand is damage mitigation. The list goes on and on.

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*Druid warning*

Introduction

Last Friday, while staying up longer than I should, I was tabbing through the LFG Tool in search for something that may help in my druid advancement. Finding groups that let a feral tank is not hard on our server, so I’m pretty fast group-bound if I want to.

So, at 21:30, i stumbled upon a few people who wanted to continue their Kara ID. They already had Attumen and Moroes down, and I got a whisper a few seconds after entering the tool.

I was asked to offtank, and was invited quickly since I did not scream and run away immediately.

The raid had only 4 people at that moment, but it grew over the next half hour or so. After inviting a MS warrior, they seemed to realize that they were running out of tank slots, and asked me if I could maintank the show. I’m not relunctant to take important positions, but I’m not overly confident in my feral gear. I surely paid attention to all those nice bear-tank guides and blogs out there, but I’m only socketing green gems at the moment, due to lack of gold. I cringed a bit, but said yes eventually.

We started to head over to the ol’ tower as soon as we had 9 people in the group. I had mixed feeling about our healers. The first holy paladin seemed just right, sitting at mostly blues and a few epics and one or two greens. The second paladin was retribution specced, but was willing to heal and decked out in Karazhan healing gear. So we were looking for a holy priest to fill the 10th slot.

Around 20 minutes later we invited a very well-geared healing shaman, because there was no single holy priest in sight.

Okay… no shackles… we are starting at the opera… Skeletal Ushers… ugh…

“Well, we’ll survive it” I thought, and we started to zone in and buff up.

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In a Nutshell

Moroes, the Tower Steward, is the first non-optional boss in Karazhan. Once he is defeated you will be able to talk to Barnes, the Stage Master, to start the Opera Event.

The fight evolves around crowd control and two tanks competing for top aggro on the boss. For priests, this is a battle that requires you to do a lot of things, continuously, throughout the whole encounter.

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