A World of Warcraft Blog about Tanking as a Protection Warrior
(Beware: Non-native english speaker trying to write all rp-style beginning soon. Conclusio already summed up in headline. For some OOC-reading skip to the last paragraph) Strange days we live in, indeed. Orgrimmar, Undercity, Thunderbluff and Silvermoon, those impressive examples of fine horde architecture are ever-empty ghost towns.
Since Talldar, my warrior tank main char, is pretty much decked out from the content we do it was about time to get an alt ready to go. So I picked up a hunter – very creatively named “Tardall” (bear with me) and blasted to 80 with all that sweet heirloom-gear. And while raiding with him I learned a lot about tanking.
Ever since TBC we’re all subject to the madness that is daily quests. I mean, honestly, a game doesn’t get more repetitive than “do the same thing every day, over and over”, does it? For wintergrasp blizzard realized that it’s weird, that whole daily thing, and made the quests weekly instead. And i love it.
Cornfedhick asked in reply to “Time to (re-)build your gear set. But how?“:
While guilds are focussing their runs on Ulduar there’s an unusual much of pugging going on in Northrend. Naxxramas, OS, EoE and VoA are all being ambushed by pugs left and right and there are very, very mixed reports on how these pugs go. While a lot of that depends on the raid lead, every single participant contributes to the overall outcome – especially in a pug.
The problem I see with tanking is that it’s a very passive thing to do. Your tanking performance cannot be measured. TPS are nice, but they ain’t everything, so it’s pointless to measure them. Incoming damage? Hits avoided? Nah, combat math is too complex. And still, what a tank does actively is not so much related to what he’s actually supposed to do: Avoid damage.
In the last two months, after the initial WotLK-hype vanished, warrior tanking instantaneously went from “hot topic” to “silent mode”. The blogging scene paints a clear picture here: Even the most insightful and highest-quality blogs seem to struggle with the quest of finding valuable content to post, interesting stuff to talk about.
A raid’s motivation most of the time is a fragile thing that may rise or drop at any time. Usually it’s based on how encounters go, and thus on progression raids can be a real problem some times. But there’s always a booster, and nothing gets your raid up and running as well as a clean, smooth kill.