Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

Sian let me know last night that she had just logged on to World of Warcraft so I decided to go join her as I’ve been taking a bit of a break from it lately, having just recently hit the pre-expansion level cap of sixty. We’re still hanging around Hellfire Peninsula making a nuisance of ourselves with the mobs around there, though I know Sian is powering ahead of me somewhat and has already started branching further into Outland.

We had a few group quests however so we headed to the Great Fissure to cut through a few rock flayers I needed for a quest as well as to take down their leader. The flayers were easy targets, however their backup in the form of rock burrowers were annoying as anything. Obviously inspired by the creatures from Tremors, the things display above ground merely as clumps of earth being kicked up unless you get too close, when their large snake-like form bursts forth from the ground and spits venom at you. They disappear beneath ground repeatedly, making it hard to get a good lock on them, they have the venom which has quite a range and they’re usually accompanied by at least two flayers. It’s not that they’re a huge risk, it’s merely that they are capable of being just so annoying when you’re trying to pull just a couple of mobs at once.
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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.
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