Khoa took a picture of the dragonborn mini I painted for him for his birthday a couple months ago. I know, dragonborn aren’t supposed to have tails. And they probably aren’t blue. But dammit, they should be! This is a dragonman from the Reptus set, technically. I just thought it looked nicest out of my options.

When I’m done with my current masterpiece, I’ll try to get a pic of it to put up here.

My tanking is improving little by little. Most groups pretty much expect me to keep moving forward, pulling the next group with only a slight pause after the last one. I’m pretty cool with this. I keep an eye on my healer’s mana, and it’s rarely low unless we just aggroed like 15 things and I had to pop Shield Wall.

For the most part, I’m starting to get the hang of things like using line-of-sight to force the ranged things to come back (unless I have a group where the dps is attacking whatever they feel like willy-nilly even when I don’t have aggro.) and realizing that one day soon, I’m going to learn new abilities like Shield Slam and I need to consolidate my buttons if I’m ever going to fit new ones on there later. I’m starting to combine things, like putting the AoE-taunt as a shift-modifier to my single-target taunt, with alt there as emergency Mocking Blow just in case. Saves a lot of buttons, and helps me remember where things are.

I programmed Power Auras (oh how I love this addon) to warn me of things like when I can use Revenge, when my Heroic Strikes are free due to my Revenge glyph, when my Rage is above 80 and I need to start spamming things to lower it a bit, or when Shield Block is off cooldown. Last night I ran three dungeons in about 45 minutes (Armory twice and Library once) and ended up getting a rather nice pair of strength/stam/defense plate shoulders from one of the randomized prizes. The queue time is almost instant. I downloaded Omen late last night so I’d have a better idea of which mobs I need to put more threat on, but I could try just programming a “mark this with a skull” macro somewhere to at least give the more observant DPS some idea of what they should be attacking.

Not like it would help. Oh the huntards I saw last night. On the Library run, the hunter rolled Need on the Robe of Doan. Though I’m not sure it wasn’t an upgrade for him, his existing chestpiece was strength/spirit. In one of the two Armory runs, our hunter was meleeing alongside his pet, despite having plenty of room to stand back and shoot.

But you know… I guess as a tank, I’m pretty laid-back. It’s not like having the hunter melee is causing us to wipe or anything, we’re breezing through these places regardless. It really doesn’t matter to me, so why should I worry myself about it?

Today, Khoa’s brother brought me a CD case and a stack of books that he found on his bookshelf. It turns out that the CD case is one that I had forgotten about, but I remember now that it was my favorite one, a round metal case with a stylized dragon design on both sides with a zipper to open it. And inside said CD case was the complete set of Pimsleur Vietnamese language CDs, which I had searched my room for thoroughly after I moved in with Khoa, and eventually decided, with great sorrow, that it had been lost somehow in the move. I’d barely studied my Vietnamese since then because of this.

And the five books, it turns out, were my missing copy of Ender’s Game, as well as the missing second book of the Quintaglio Ascension, and the entire missing Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. I had been wondering where the last four had gone, since the Robert Sawyer section of my bookshelf was looking a bit sparse, and I had attempted to read the Quintaglio Ascension over a year ago before I realized that I could not find the second book anywhere. (I was not yet aware that Ender’s Game was missing, though I probably would have noticed the moment I felt an urge to read it again, and gone “I know I had a copy of that somewhere!”)

That rather cheered me up today despite our D&D game in which a particular party member of ours yet again decided that he wanted to start randomly killing things for little/no reason (at least this time, it wasn’t one of the members of our party, it was just a prisoner we were interrogating) which ended this time not with us killing him, as had happened before, but with him deciding that he didn’t really like that character any more anyway, and basically jumped in the river, drowned himself, and left the house with a “see you guys in two weeks!”

So after my last post, I totally decided that no matter how bad I am at tanking, I couldn’t possibly be worse than half the tanks I’ve been getting on my rogue’s random runs. And as it turns out, I’m apparently a whole lot better than I thought I was, even though my attempts at tanking are still rather confused affairs (So many buttons! Where did I put that button I needed to press a half second ago in this kind of situation?!) that feel rather sloppy.

I mailed my level 33 warrior my heirloom thrash blade, and went to the AH to make sure none of my gear was more than about 10 levels below me (though I forgot to replace my level 15 cape that I got from a quest in Bloodmyst — oops?) and put points back in my talents (I hadn’t played this character at all whatsoever since 3.2, apparently) and tried to put abilities back on my bars in some semblance of a good working order. Except I kept finding new abilities in my spellbook and going “oh, but I need that… and that… and ooh, I’m gonna need that too!” and having the hardest time trying to figure out the best places to put everything. Warriors have WAY too many abilities.

So I queue for a random dungeon, and hey, I get a group for Scarlet Monastery: Library pops up almost immediately. Awesomesauce. I go in, start pulling things, basically AoEing down packs with my best use of Thunder Clap and Cleave. Get to the first boss, say “if you guys need me to slow down or anything, just let me know.”

One person says “I rather like the pace we’re going” and I reply “Thanks, I actually haven’t played this character in quite a while, still trying to get back into it.” Totally not mentioning that she’s never actually TANKED anything before, just prot-AoE’d solo quests for shits and giggles. But what followed next was pure awesome.

So after I say this, the rogue turns on Sprint, and high-tails it down the next hallway full of mobs. I’m following for a bit, but when his intentions become obvious, I hang back with one of the mobs, until the rogue drops dead and all 10-15 of them come rushing towards me.

One of the DPS yells “THAT WAS MY BROTHER FFS” and I hold my breath, pop shield wall, hit my thunderclap, spam cleave while it’s on cooldown and manage to find Challenging Shout on my bars. The remaining four party members and I survive this onslaught relatively intact, amazingly enough. My heart was racing a million miles a second, but WE DID IT haha. I start up a vote to kick the rogue, which passes almost immediately, and just as quickly we pull in a ret paladin as a new 5th member.

The rest of the instance continues without much incident, with me remembering things along the way like “oh yeah, I should be using Demoralizing Shout on these things too” and “hey, I’ve got the glyph of revenge, that means I should use heroic strike every time I revenge since it’s free” and “oh right, I have a shield block button”.

The group apparently thinks I’m a good enough tank that we continue through two more instances: Armory and Razorfen Downs. I lose the roll for Herod’s Shoulder and the Carapace of Tuten’kash to a ret paladin (either the one we had since Library or a different one who we swapped out later when the first ret pally left suddenly) but I did win the Icemetal Barbute for when I hit 40 off of the last boss in RFD.

I think I’m going to like this tanking thing. I’m sure over time I can hammer out what buttons I want things to be on, and program in some things to remind me when I need to do things like refresh Battle Shout. At least, tanking lowbie instances and setting my own pace seems far preferable to attempting to DPS them on my rogue and getting underleveled groups (not blaming them, blaming the LFG tool) or getting retribution tanks who aren’t using shields and don’t know where their righteous fury button is.

So since the last post, I’ve been queuing for non-random instances, based on loot I want as found through wowhead. See, “running instances for fun, because you can” is great and everything, but there’s only so many times I can get rooted or knocked down by giant plants in Maraudon before I get tired of it, especially with there being no loot I actually want from there.

I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep, so I’m not sure if I’m coherent right now (I got up early to check out the Star Trek exhibit at the tech museum with my dad as soon as it opened in the morning, as the exhibit isn’t going to be around much longer and we’re both too busy to do it any other time — did you know that Scotty was missing half of one of his middle fingers from his time in WW2, and kept his fist clenched in every episode so that nobody would notice? I certainly didn’t — though Best Friend had noticed that he was clenching his fist more than a normal person would) but I had two Uldaman runs today that really made me WTF.

First, we had a group that ran all the way over to the east side to kill the stone boss thing that drops the nice plate gloves, but then instead of continuing on through that room like every single other group I’ve run with does, they left that room and went all the way to the west side. The shaman says something like “left to crococodile boss” which I take to mean that we should turn left at this fork to reach the crocodile boss. I’m like, huh? There aren’t any crocodiles in Uldaman! I argue with her for a bit about it, with her insisting that “he has a pet crocodile” (and my sleep-deprived brain is like “but you get the crocodile minipets from the fishing quest! I know the stone boss near the back entrance doesn’t have any loot, let alone a crocodile minipet) and me insisting that’s very strange, because he never used to.

We kill that “boss” (elite mage quest mob, technically) for some reason, then start heading north, walk past the entrance to the dwarf boss guy’s area, and start clearing out troggs. We head towards Grimlok and manage to aggro the entire room somehow, so there’s like the boss and something like 8 adds. After we finish killing him,

Shaman: I don’t know why I thought he had a pet crocodile.
Me: Well, that’s a good question, since that’s obviously a basilisk.
Shaman: Oh, there it is. It was hidden under all the bodies. LOL
Me: I didn’t even realize you might be talking about Grimlok until we were in his room.

And later on, the priest remarked that he’d already gotten 18k from this run. Shaman’s like “18k??? How?!?” and then a few seconds later “OH! You mean EXP. I thought you were talking about gold! I was like WTF!!”

The second run involved a tiny gnome warrior tank in a group whose selective hearing was apparently filtering out any attempt to fight Ironaya (not that I cared, she drops no loot for rogues, it was just perplexing that we’d be chatting along nicely and then someone would mention the staff and there would be awkward silence for several minutes).

Just FYI, if you haven’t checked out Uldaman since 3.3, I should mention that there’s a particular very stupid thing about it. Namely, the staff and the medallion used to make the staff that summons Ironaya cannot be traded — so if two different people loot them, you’re screwed and simply cannot fight that boss.

This group cleared to Revelosh VERY fast, on the northern side, bypassing the dwarf tunnel completely. The warrior picks up the shaft, we continue walking into the map room, and the priest is all “wtf is up with the tiny buildings?” We clear out the room, stand around for a bit, someone asks “does anyone have the staff?” A night elf says she has it, walks over to the building, then says it isn’t working. (I don’t know why she was saying she had it when she obviously didn’t, unless somehow she actually had both pieces from a previous run but never got to use them, the warrior most definitely picked up the shaft and we never even tried to get the other piece.)

I make several attempts to explain that you need both the medallion and the shaft in order to make the staff, and start hintingly edging back the way we came so we can get the medallion, as the group says nothing and starts running down the tunnel towards the scorpions. I’m like “uh guys, are we just gonna skip this boss then?” and get nothing but silence. I’m to the point where I’m saying “Hello? Anyone listening?” in party chat, and continuing to get nothing but silence. We clear to the east, killing the stone boss who drops the plate gloves (I can’t think of that boss in any other way) and continuing through the correct exit, but instead heading north towards Grimlok. The tank seems to be heading towards the last boss, and I’m like “oh, we’re skipping the dwarf boss too, then?” and someone actually answers me, saying “we can kill him if you want” (which I rather did, my current main-hand weapon is the healing mace from Cathedral, since I won it on a greed roll and it was better than my level 30-ish green-quality offhand, but I was forced to move my heirloom thrash blade to my offhand in order to do so) and running back there to kill him.

The decide to do the “whole” place “for experience” and after heading down to the corner to kill the useless stone non-boss, the tank starts leading us back up. Along the way, he says “am I missing any bosses? I don’t think so” and I remind him “yes you are, we haven’t killed the one you need the staff to summon” again, receiving nothing but silence. No attempt whatsoever to actually go anywhere near that medallion. Sigh. Oh well, at least that run got me the leather pants I was looking for, so I can stop running that stupid place.

I’ve actually got half a mind to mail my heirloom sword to my level 33 night elf warrior (who I was previously raising as a soloing prot spec based on AoE-farming mobs via thunderclap — hey, it was fun, don’t you judge me) and go learn how to tank stuff so I won’t be at the whims of someone who obviously doesn’t know his way around these places as well as I do. Or maybe I’ll go dust off that level 14 troll male priest so that I can see what healing is like at low levels these days. DPS is starting to get rather boring and repetitive. Especially rogue DPS. Combo points are annoying.

Ever since my adorable dwarf rogue hit 41 from a combination of questing and running Cathedral over and over (because, you know, the LFG tool never sent me anywhere else) every single LFG-tool-inspired group I have been in has been for Maraudon: Orange Side.

Now, need I explain to people that the bosses in Maraudon: Orange Side are level 46. The trash is at least level 44. The average group level is 41-42.

You see the problem here, right? The tanks cannot hold aggro on things they are unable to hit. The past two days, I have not killed any bosses in this place. We usually clear our way to the first boss, sometimes losing and replacing a few DPS along the way, with the tank losing aggro to the healer constantly.

What ever happened to Uldaman? I used to love running that place around level 40. Lots of bosses, some pretty good loot. Too bad I can’t get some of the best loot for my rogue there because I’m alliance (a super-nice offhand sword AND some leather agi/stam boots drop from the damn dwarves), but the LFG hasn’t sent me there a single time.

What about Zul’Farrak? I usually aim for around 43-44 for that place, even though the bosses are 46. I guess that doesn’t help my argument, I’d just rather go to Zul’Farrak because it has loot I actually care about.

Okay then, what about Maraudon: PURPLE side? Lord Vyletongue is only level 44. That would be preferable to level 46 bosses. Wait, does Purple Side only have one boss? Or are they lumping Celebras in with Purple so that both sides have two bosses? You certainly can’t kill Celebras as part of the last section.

In conclusion, they need to fix the lower limit of the level ranges for these dungeons so that you won’t be auto-matched to a dungeon if the bosses are still red to you.

Two days ago, we had a paladin in our group, tanking. I initially felt rather shameful because I was pulling aggro off of her, one of those “oops, sorry about that, I usually don’t have that much trouble holding back my threat” but it turned out I was doing about half the DPS of the group all by myself.

We got to a mithril node, and the DPS warrior went over to it and politely asked “is anyone a miner?” and I said “I am.” (engineer rogue who throws bombs as an attempt to do AoE damage!) Then the paladin ran over and mined it, saying “we can take turns” afterward. Umm. No, no we can’t. There’s usually only one mining node in this entire place. What you just did was ninja that mithril from us.

I tried my best to forget this situation, but it certainly soured my opinion of our tank. The paladin and warrior died to the slimes, immediately after we told them that they would die if they got into melee range. We rezzed them, and moved on, and ended up wiping when we pulled two groups of the three annoying rooting plants at the same time. I stuck with the group though, and we got a replacement healer and one more DPS.

But after a couple more wipes, losing and replacing more people, and having to wait for people to run back because Orange Side is a maze and it’s almost impossible for even someone like ME to find the instance portal in that insanity (I ended up porting out of the instance and doing quests in Stranglethorn while I was waiting for people to find their way back to the instance) I eventually realized that it was past my bedtime and we hadn’t even killed one boss.

Last night, much of the same happened with a different paladin tank, minus the ninja’d mithril. I had to inform one of the two mages (the game wouldn’t let me whisper people from other servers, so I had to tell them in party chat) that Focus Magic only works on spells, and putting it on a rogue does nothing for either of us. We actually made it to the first boss, but the paladin was losing aggro to either the healer or the higher-level mage on almost every pull. And those damn eternally-spawning larvae from the upper room would attack us in the middle of the boss fight. We probably would have at least gotten past Noxxion if not for them.

And you know, one of our more successful groups a few days ago actually had a level 39 player in it. What is the point of putting a tank or DPS into a group for a place where even the trash mobs are red-named to them, and expecting them to perform at any level? I mean, I could understand a slightly underleveled healer, but not a DPS, and certainly not a tank. These groups are doomed to failure.

I think I’m going to give up on the “random dungeon” idea for a few levels (they’re only giving me rings and shoulders I don’t really need anyway) and just queue specifically for the places that are within my proper level range. At least until they can either get these issues fixed or I level past the point where it’s a problem.