Big Kahuna, my awesome Tauran protection warrior is now level 22. I ran a few instances over the weekend with SAN, with my buddy Sparky healing on his new tauran shaman. So we had a ready made Tank/Healer team and just needed to pick up DPS. You remember DPS, right? They’re those pathetic people whose job is so easy a chimp could do it. Anyway, we ran Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deeps. We didn’t wipe in any of these runs, and I think we only had a single death in one of them. Sparky is having a great time with healing – he seems to have found his niche. My tanking is coming along. I’m having some troubles switching from one mob to another to keep threat sometimes, particularly if I have more than 3 mobs. Warriors have Thunder clap, but that has a 6 second timer which is a long, long time when you’re trying to keep aggro on a bunch of mobs. So you pull the group, thunderclap, then Cleave, then switch targets to throw a taunt on them, then back to the original and hit thunderclap again, all the while having to keep an eye out for other mobs or what is going on around you. It’s complex, and you can find yourself falling victim to a wave of panic rising in you when you see that everything is going pear shaped.

That happened to me at the Murlock boss in Blackfathom Deeps. I tried to pull carefully, but inevitably one of the little bastards got away from me and pulled a whole bunch of his mates. So I was completely absorbed in trying as best as I could to keep the whole room away from the boss. Which I managed to do, but the fight must have taken a good few minutes to get them all down. We finished the run and I was outside doing a stupid warrior quest to get some Brutal Armor, (honestly, what the hell were they thinking with this quest? They send you all over the world to get the bits, you rock up to the Hillsbrad Foothills to get one of the four components and the mobs are level 28? When you’re a level 20 warrior when they give you this quest? I mean, what the fuck is that all about??)

Anyway, I was doing my thing and one of my guildies who was on most of our dungeon runs with his paladin whispered me and asked if I could come back to Blackfathom and give him a hand with a PuG gone wrong. He was tanking so I’d have to dps, but I wanted to give him a hand and back I went, (yey LFG teleport function). They had wiped in the same murlock room and a bunch of them had left. So we got back in the queue and filled up the places and … wiped again. It wasn’t the tanking, nor the healing, it was the DPS. And I remembered back to our own run just an hour previously and I remembered what I had thought when we eventually cleared that room with the big fight, and it was, thank god the DPS were onto it, (which I wasn’t really, to be honest, as a protection warrior at level 22 specced for tanking just doesn’t really pump out the numbers and I didn’t want to use thunderclap as I was worried about stealing the threat).

Tanking is tough, don’t get me wrong. But if anything it has given me a new insight and appreciation into how important good DPS are, and how they shouldn’t be taken for granted. And the fact that you need three of them means that there is a good chance you are going to find at least one who doesn’t know what he is doing. Kudos to all the players in my guild, Single Abstract Noun, as every one of them has been top notch on every run we have done. So this is a shoutout for DPS appreciation.

Incedently, Troll Racials has a post up today about Blizzard failing to teach new players about talents. I have to say, if I didn’t have Achtung Panzercows freaking awesome guides to learn to tank from, I’d be buggered.