Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

Ever since I finally chose to defect from my Ranger ways to a more hard hitting holy warrior, I’ve had the aim of being a tank. I even had visions of one day becoming the Main Tank though with my slow reflexes and awful coordination, I did wonder just how likely this was.

What’s a tank? I was anticipating this answer, not many of the readers I know of are actually MMO enthusiasts so will likely be confused, however in MMOs no matter what the classes are actually called, they fall under a number of types which are always called the same thing. In a group you ideally want the enemy to be paying attention to someone other than the weaker members of the party, like the cloth wearing healers as well as to keep the attention away from the people who need to concentrate on getting distance to use bows and spells. This is where the tank comes in, mobs love to focus their anger on the guy that won’t stop hitting them, won’t stop hurting them and they get royally annoyed by the guy who takes a beating without flinching. This is the role of a tank, to hammer the target with a lot of damage and to take a beating without falling. You don’t even want to concentrate on killing targets, that’s the job of the people who aren’t being directly attacked (or more importantly, defended against,) you just want to lay down the hurt.

Ever since I returned to World of Warcraft and actually started learning how to play the game, I have had my Paladin on the Retribution specification. This role has one purpose, to allow me to kill things without a group and get through quests. I didn’t have to take the damage, on the contrary my main aim was to do a high amount of damage at once, bringing it in big lumps, dazing the enemy, keeping it from reacting and killing it quickly. This worked wonders until recently when Sian and I started working our way through dungeons. Dungeons are a whole new perspective, where the enemy are elite and a single player is never going to be able to kill them, it’ll take five players minimum and even then each fight will last a few minutes and involve multiple creatures at once. The other day we found ourselves clearing out The Sunken Temple over in Swamp of Sorrows and we did it extremely effectively, killing every boss and activating every nifty little puzzle. The only problem? The Rogue was tanking. When you’re a plate wearing Paladin this is a truly depressing state of affairs, and my Damage Meters application told me out of the group I was only doing 6% of the damage.

So after months of being a Retribution Paladin, I took the painful and expensive decision to fully invest myself in converting to a ‘Tankadin’ role, respeccing as a Protection Paladin. I did my homework on the subject too, researching the spells, the talents, how to use both, how to grab aggro, the stats I would want to be improving and the weapons I’d want to be using. It was a long process and incredibly instructive but at the end of it, and with a massive investment in gold, I’d pulled it together. First I began with the weapons so I wouldn’t be left with a Tankadin spec and the wrong weapons for the job. I got the obligatory shield and then invested in a one handed axe. This was foreign to me, my approach to axes had always been to check damage range, period. However it seems that for a Tankadin what actually matters is damage per second and speed of the weapon. My two handed axe was admittedly capable of 42dps and a damage range in triple figures, however it only hit every 4 seconds. My new axe is only capable of 35dps but it hits every 1.5 seconds which it turns out in practice is a lot of damage. Why does this matter? Well when you’re trying to hold the enemies attention, even if you’re doing 200 damage per hit, the mob still has 4 seconds to think “Hmm…he’s not really that quick is he, let’s go after that guy that won’t stop pounding me instead.” A faster hitting axe even with less damage is still laying down a persistent rate of damage, it’ll be irritating even if it’s not doing a huge amount of damage at once.

[Cut forward two weeks now…I began this post a while back]

The difference in styles has truly been astounding. Thanks to an extensive upgrade in equipment which has led to me being kitted out in full rare armour as well as a rare axe and also thanks to my earlier research, I’ve now discovered a new and exciting approach to levelling. My tactic before was simple, one target of equal level, hit it hard and fast and probably walk away with 50% mana and 90% health. My new tactic is extensive and a true adrenaline rush in comparison, thanks to the method of combat that Protection specced Paladins can use. Tankadins have a huge array of Area of Effect spells at their disposal meaning that it’s perfectly viable for me to think “If I can take on one level 61, I can take on three level 61s.” My new tactics mean that at the end of a fight with four mobs all of the same level I will be left in exactly the same position as if it was just one, which is a little bizarre at first but certainly makes things entertaining.

The other cause for my new found success is that Syarli and I finally achieved a major goal. We passed through the Dark Portal and entered Outland.

Everything said about Outland is true. The rewards are vast (Much XP to be had), your monetary gain will quadruple (I’m now gaining something like 10gold a day minimum) and the drops are to die for. We’re talking about major armour upgrades for a pre-Outland armoured character dropping from every boar, lizard, bird and minor thuggish orc to cross your path. The mobs are also very tight, so my new all adrenaline approach is really coming into it’s own, with one particularly epic quest seeing me take on eight level 60s on my own at once. It was a close fight, granted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Gaming, Hobbies, Rayda Skaldensen, Dwarf Paladin, World of Warcraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.