Identity Crisis: Resolved

So, I've had quite a lot to say lately. Lots of interesting new changes to the game, lots of Cataclysm speculation, lots of class-related discourse, a bit of GearScore-related bitching, even some roleplaying posts. Yet the blog remained silent.

This is because I've felt unable to reconcile the name of this blog – which refers to my bone-thin warrior tank – with the characters I've been playing lately. I'd write a page about my fire mage or my multi-tasking druid, then scrap the whole thing because I wasn't sure it belonged here. And as Aelys is still sitting unplayed on rotten old Moonglade it rather looked like Skinny Tank was over.

Then, the other day, as I was tanking Utgarde Keep for the first time in ages as my death knight, Daelythir, I realised what I was doing internally as I looked at certain pulls.

This particular pull was the one just before the first boss, Prince Keleseth: two mobs on either side of a wide table, two of them prone to pausing to self-buff when aggroed. As a death knight, I generally pull the closest on one side with Icy Touch, throw down Death and Decay, yoink the furthest loitering Runecaster with Death Grip, Plague Strike the first one, spread diseases with Pestilence, reactivate a blood rune with Blood Tap and immediately Blood Boil. The thing is, I hadn't played my Death Knight in a while so I found myself having to puzzle this chain of actions in the split second before I reached the mobs. And in the absence of a class-specific game plan, I defaulted to warrior.

Pull with ranged weapon, use Heroic Throw on a Runecaster, toggle on Cleave and Charge a mob that's roughly central, Thunder Clap, Shockwave. Engrained in my brain. As a WoW-player, I am a warrior at heart, and the experience of playing warrior for so long happens to be very useful when playing other classes. Mob positioning; controlled pulling; marking; keeping up the pace: all of these skills are wholly transferable to any other tanking class. Meanwhile, knowledge of mob abilities and which are worth actively countering; knowing when to start nuking; knowing when to or why not to root, CC or snare; understanding the tank's likely threat levels on each mob before AoEing: these are all very useful from a DPS role.

With this in mind, I've finally established this blog's defining thread: it is a blog from the point of view of a warrior tank. It is no-longer solely about warrior tanking, it's just written by a girl who happens to think like one. “Musings of the paper-thin meatshield” - now with boundless subject matter. Hoo-hah.

And... I have internet again!

So, that whole post about how my driver update saved the day? It really didn't. My wireless adapter refused to connect at all until I finally did a total move around of everything in my room so as to get my computer as close as possible to the router.

I don't retract the main thrust of that old post - seriously, do update your drivers - but I was utterly wrong in thinking my wireless adapter was anything other than useless. :( I'll be back to posting soon enough, anyway. I hope.

Drivers

This really isn't warrior-specific advice but I think it important enough a reminder to muscle its way in here. Everyone: remember to regularly update your drivers. If you don't, you risk reducing the effectiveness of (or even rendering useless) parts of your computer. Why do I mention this now? Well...

I made brief mention of my terrible connection in my last post. I have two ways of connecting to the internet wirelessly: through my ZyXEL wireless network card and through a Belkin USB stick. Although the card recognised my network it just wouldn't connect so it seemed I was stuck using the stick, which gives a deceptively normal ms of roughly 100-200 but also adds in the odd 2-3 second burst of lag (as extra flavour). Frankly, it sucked. I was still a passable tank thanks to gear and begging Tricks and Misdirection off friendly DPS, but I just felt incredibly bog-standard. I couldn't do any fun tricks charging between mobs and whatnot and my TPS was mediocre at best.

Being single-minded and remembering issues with thick walls blocking signal in the past, I tried moving my computer to the corner of my room closest to the router downstairs. My card did notice the improvement in signal, but it only changed the little "your signal is x strong" and nothing useful. So my mind turned to buying a new network card or router. Frankly, I'm glad I'm a penniless student, or else I would have one or the other by now.

Vista saved me. My computer crashed for the first time ever while being shut down last night, and this morning Vista gave me a handy little dialogue box. "This computer has suffered from an unexpected shutdown. This is a serious error." It gave me a list of things to check. And there at the very top? "Check your wireless network adapter drivers." I did. And the little properties box... told me that my network card was working on drivers from 2007.

Admittedly, my card was made by an obscure company and I remember searching for and failing to find drivers for it in the past, but I persevered this time and located them. And yes, they appear to have fixed my problem!

In summary: treat your hardware and relative drivers like your own children. They require love, attention and, importantly, not being left to look after themselves since 2007.

Oh, and as I rarely get to say this I really must add: I love you, Vista.

An Idiot's Update

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.