So with my paladin, Sigyn, languishing at level 40, I did something silly; I bought a bunch of caster Heirlooms and rolled up a priest. I had this idea to level her solely in LFG, you see, after having had a taste of it on my lowbie Horde priest on Proudmoore while Mok’Nathal was down for 24 hour maintenance a couple of weeks ago. It seemed… pretty fun. Running RFC over and over and getting quick levels and easy blues.
So when the server was back up, I ground out some badges on Severin and bought myself the requisite Heirlooms, enchanted them with the ridiculously OP (and expensive) Molten Core enchants, and quested/PvP’d my new baby priest, Luxxa, up to level 15.
Then I jumped into LFG.
I figured I’d do a compare-and-contrast. Where Sigyn levelled entirely through quests, Luxxa would be dungeons (and dungeon-related quests) only. Where Sigyn had two gathering professions, Luxxa would have two crafting ones (Enchanting/Tailoring). I’d get them both to level 40, then check various indicators like their /played, how much money each made,[i] and which experience I found more enjoyable.
Dee’s condensed philosophy of healing
It’s worth noting that I’ve never played a priest in a group before. Well, that’s not entirely true; I did some outdoor group quests on my level 12 undead priest back in vanilla beta, but that’s it. I learnt to group heal on my shaman, under the watchful eye of our old MT warrior, Kale. Kale was good and he was fast, and I was usually his G1 healer (for… some reason). Back In Those Days, shaman didn’t have no fancy Earth Shield or Riptide; we didn’t even get Chain Heal. We were also ridiculously mana inefficient, and the net result was basically learning how to chain spam (a probably downranked) Lesser Healing Wave followed by the fine art of drinking in combat. Point being, priest healing is a walk in the fucking park compared to that shit.
I originally specced Luxxa as Holy, but I got all of about seven points into that before realising that my actual play-style was Discipline and respeccing. I like bubbles, basically. I like bubbling the tank and chillaxing for ten seconds before re-bubbling. I like bubbles up on every time. I like bubbles, bubbles, bubbles for everyone.
And so on.
Discipline is a soothing spec; it doesn’t have the frantic casting shaman healing used to. Because the tank is literally taking no damage most of the time (and the window for “tank takes damage now” is, like what, seven seconds max) it means things like huge room pulls generally don’t faze me. Actually, my Condensed Philosophy of Healing can basically be summarised as: I’m there to make the tank feel confident. When the tank feels confident — when she’s making big, neat, fast pulls with minimal downtime and no deaths — then I figure I’m doing my job.
Anyway, so if Making the Tank Feel Confident is my responsibility, I have two rules I enforce in order to ensure this occurs. They are:
- DPS who deliberately pull aggro don’t get heals; and
- I have zero tolerance for misogynistic bullshit.
Let me tell you about how these things work in practice.
The curse of the DPS tank
As those of you who follow me on Twitter may have had the misfortune to hear, I ended up in a group/argument the other day with a rogue who kept insisting he was a totally pro leet tank, and subsequently got shirty when I started enforcing my Rule #1. And, okay, the druid tank was a bit of a noob, but the answer to that is, like, to teach the tank, not to run off on your own — frequently out of LoS — and start aggroing mobs (protip, DPSers: As the healer, my priority is keeping the tank in LoS, then the DPS who are doing their jobs right, then you). Tanking Rogue’s basic argument was that he had some pro leet dodge score and because druid tanking is (apparently) based on dodge, he was therefore more qualified to tank than the druid was. Or something. Proof of his credentials were that he had allegedly “rogue-tanked Gruul” (though not on his level 28, I’d assume), and that he’d totally watched a YouTube video of some shaman on some other server who tanks heroic 25-mans and don’t you know shaman were a tanking class in vanilla[ii] and man only ignorant noobs insist on class roles.
And, okay, it’s kinda hard to make a cogent argument when you’re trying to keep the party alive in what another member of the party referred to as the “hall of death” in Gnomer (no-one died, incidentally), but my main point was this:
I just can’t be arsed keeping your special snowflake unmelted if you can’t be arsed learning aggro management and class roles.[iii]
The group is not about you, or even about me for that matter; it’s about the group. You going off being An Hero by yourself because you’ve got some alternate reality idea about how the game should run care of YouTube videos[iv] does not actually take priority over the function of a group as a whole. If you’re not playing with the team, I don’t consider it a failing on my part if I let you die. And yes, this is a view that I’ve come to thanks to a few unnecessary wipes which were my fault because I did convince myself I was “awesome” enough to run after the DPS Tank and keep him alive despite the advice of the actual tank.
I’ve since disabused myself of the notion that this is a good idea. People who are performing their jobs get heals. People who are not, do not.
Thing is, it occurs to me that there’s probably a bit of confirmation bias going on here, too. I’ve been in plenty of good groups in LFG; groups where the tanking was tight and the DPS was focused and neat. It sort of occurs to me that Joe Average DPS Tank probably has not. It’s like that old demotivational poster with the line about the common element in all your failed relationships being you. Well, if all the groups you’re in in LFG suck? Yeah. There’s a common factor going on there, and protip: it’s not the healer and it’s not the tank.
The one thing that will make me (nearly) instantly drop group
It doesn’t happen very often, thankfully; we’re talking maybe once a week out of an average of three-to-five runs a night. Still, it happens. It happened the other day when I blogged about it, and it happened again last night. And ironically,[v] it was crappy DPS that caused it.
The tank was complaining about DPS pulling aggro. I announced my enforcement policy of Rule #1. The hunter dropped with a “this group sux anyway”, and the rogue — I have no idea why — said, “warm my cock with ur (sic) mouth”.
“Sorry,” I said to the tank (male draenei pally, IIRC). “I’m not continuing with the rogue still in the party.” The tank was good, so I did feel bad. But policy is policy; I don’t need the aggro (I’m here for fun, not angst), and people need to learn. Besides, situations like this tend to leave me ragey and shaking, and it’s hard to concentrate on actually doing my job when I’m in that state.
“Then I’ll kick him for you,” says the tank. “I’m a girl too.”
Sadly, the vote failed; the other DPS was apparently also a cocknocker. But thank you, tank whose name I don’t recall, for trying.
In the end, I left the group. But I did wait until we were out of combat to do so. And I did feel bad about it.
Oh, and I found the women
And then, last night, I did SM Graveyard. Male draenei warrior tank with unusually grammatically-correct typing (like with capital letters and everything). We move fast and hard and clear the place in record time, then re-queue and do it again. And again.
Finally, some of the DPS have to go, so we dip back in the potluck and wait for someone new to appear.
And wait. And wait. I go back to town to train in order to get RankWatch off my back,[vi] and we’re still waiting. So we start chatting; it soon becomes apparent that the tank is an oldschool player from vanilla, so we reminisce a bit about The Bad Old Days of BRD “raids” and the frustrating drop-rates of the tier-0 class sets. We also talk about what it means to’ve played the game for six years, and how I’d grouped with someone recently who talked about having started playing when he was 11 (he’s now 15).
And then the tank starts talking about training your kids to do your dailies for you as part of their chores, and refers to herself as “mommy”.
Where are the female tanks, you ask? They’re here; tanking lowbie LFGs with powerful competence, often as male avatars. You remember the Mr. Rogue Tank? When we started arguing, a DPS Pally took over leading the group; she was a woman,[vii] and I gave her an exemption from Rule #1, partly just to see Mr. Rogue Tank nerdrage about it (which he did).
I raised the issue of the abundance of lowbie female tanks with Future-Mommy Tank, speculating on whether the “conventional wisdom” around the lack of female tanks in endgame was reflective of the actual situation — since there sure as hell seemed to be a lot of them in the lower levels — or was just the WoW equivalent of an urban legend.
“I think a lot of women level druids and paladins as tanks,” Future-Mommy Tank said, “then switch to healing in endgame.”
I say I think she’s probably right, and we talk about the notion of the “triple shift” and how Someone Should Totally Do a Study. We still haven’t gotten a group,[viii] and eventually she mentions she has to go walk her dog and make lunch. Meanwhile, Mat’s come home so I also take my leave and go socialise with my husband for a while, cursing the vagaries of WoW that mean I can’t add my new tanking BFF to my flist and will consequently probably never see her again.
About half an hour later, I jump in the inevitable last-LFG-before-bed. It’s SMGY again, and Future-Mommy Tank is there. We terrify the DPS by pulling the entire instance, yelling madly in caps and refusing to stop for mana. The run takes about 10 minutes.
Every story should have a happy ending.
- My initial results on this one are that — despite being in a prime environment for collecting the requisite mats — Enchanting/Tailoring are both huge money sinks. I usually start my lowbie characters out with 10g. That was good enough for Sigyn, who also earned a good few hundred more by selling leather and herbs. Luxxa, on the other hand, just sucks money; she struggled along on her 10g, which became 5g, then 1, before I finally gave up and sent her another 100g. Net recommendation: Don’t take a crafting profession unless you can bankroll it with another character. If you want the golds, go with a double-gathering combo. ↩
- As I think I mention in every post, I played a shaman in vanilla and I have to admit that no, I did not remember this; even though I have tanked a few instances in my day (badly, incidentally). WoW’s “philosophy of tanking” was still being worked out in vanilla, and while Mat assures me that shaman were originally intended to be tanks — hence the shields, I guess, and the original effects of Earth Shock and Rockbiter — I don’t recall that ever really being implemented on the ground, as it were. ↩
- And no, “aggro management” does not start at level 28 when you learn Rank 2 of Feint, Mr. Rogue Tank. ↩
- Which, let’s remember, are usually produced by very competent players and their BFFs who enjoy stretching the limits of the game’s mechanics. They’re like the red leather stiletto heels of WoW; something you break out on special occasions, not something you wear everyday down the virtual local shops of LFG. ↩
- In that way that may-or-may not, in fact, be ironic; I get a bit confused sometimes. ↩
- 30, yay! ↩
- Well, she was using “feminine” cultural references and had previously mentioned a boyfriend, so I’m extrapolating here a bit. ↩
- Seriously; IDK either. A tank and a healer and we can’t find three DPS? WTF, LFG! ↩