So, being an idiot I left one of my power cables at home when I moved to my university accommodation this weekend just gone. Being a complete and utter idiot, I didn't leave a less important cable like my DSi charger, I left the one for my monitor. As such, I can't do the post I intended on writing because my backup option (my laptop with my PC's power cable plugged into the monitor) is an ancient piece of crud. Hoorah. In its place I guess I'll give a brief update on me, because what is a blog if not a place to be egocentric?
For me, 3.2 made early group finding into a mixed basket of hate, pity, vague hope and almost painful concentration. That is to say, some group members hated me for my comparatively tiny health pool; others recognised that gearing up a new tank has to start somewhere and were sickeningly sweet; more still saw me tanking well in sub-par equipment and added me to their friends list on the off chance that I might become useful; and I made use of every single tanking trick I know of in a desperate attempt not to die or let die. It was almost painful because I kept catching myself forgetting to blink.
Nevertheless, after an initially poor start (my first heroic was the Culling of Stratholme, in which the kitty druid took one look at my 21k health, scoffed and said "I'll tank", leaving me to put out a piddling 900DPS and acquire a painful headache) I have to say that every heroic has been an enjoyable experience. Once every group was in the instance and moving through trash at a reasonable rate they became much less critical of my tempered saronite and distinct lack of anything purple; in fact, I made a lot of friends with whom I'm still asked to instance fairly frequently. I've learned a lot and I'm eager to post in-depth about it here.
The other day, however, I found myself in my first ever VoA group. Thankfully, Moonglade's Horde population is small enough that no one insisted I have all the achievements that could possibly be linked to VoA success (unlike on Alliance side, where my priest was asked to provide Koralon 10 and 25 achievements, Epic and Got My Mind On My Money - apparently to prove that I at least had the money for enchantments at one point in time). Instead the group leader just wandered up to me in Dalaran, inspected my gear and gave me the thumbs up.
The other tank was a warrior. A much better geared warrior, in fact, sporting some awesome looking Ulduar25 loot. He was immediately awarded the post of main tank, which was something of a relief to me. The relief, sadly, did not last. The run went badly. Though we downed Koralon eventually it took a good five wipes to do so, after which the instance locked us out as no one had really been paying attention to the Wintergrasp timer. It shook my faith in my ability somewhat, to the point at which I made a post to WoW_Ladies hoping for some advice. And you know what? According to them (and hindsight) it was almost entirely the other tank's fault, not mine as I had initially expected. His threat was low, his kiting was poor, he was incredibly slow to taunt (to the point at which I found myself main tanking on a few occasions because otherwise DPS would have died horribly). Not just that, but he had an atrocious attitude. Although he barely spoke in raid chat, every time he did it was to insult someone.
I don't really understand why people act that way. My being terrified and his being terrifyingly unapproachable meant that we didn't swap notes much - I asked him once who his Vigilance target was and received no reply - and I believe that added to the number of wipes. It makes me wonder how many failures his attitude had caused in the past and whether he had even stopped to consider it. Probably not.
Later, of course, I checked Recount's breakdown of our healer's performances and noticed that the disc priest had been spamming Greater Heal on raid members, without touching Penance once. I wonder if he ever stopped to consider what he was doing wrong.
...Definitely not.
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