paladin (plural paladins)

1. A heroic champion (especially a knightly one).
2. A defender or advocate of a noble cause. (A defender of faith).
3. Any of the twelve Companions of the court of Emperor Charlemagne.

I’m not sure what sort of cause my paladin is defending (I’m not a lore person), but it looks like I’m back in the tank business again.

While waiting for Cataclysm, I had been happily playing a priest and enjoying the relatively short dungeon queues.  But the itch to tank  was too strong and I had another look at my warrior.  I redid her talents and queued for a dungeon, and … found I’d forgotten how to play.   Somehow we got through, thanks to a nice group who didn’t rush me, but I realised that I should start at the beginning again and relearn how to tank.   I didn’t fancy another warrior, so I said hello to a four year old level 2 blood elf paladin.

Learning as a tank is great, because of the short queues for dungeon finder.  Every time I get a new ability, I have the chance to try it out straight away.   And, dare I say it?  Tanking seems to be fairly easyish when you’re always equipped with nice dungeon drops (my warrior used to do solo questing and queue every now and then.  My paladin has barely seen any of the world beyond Orgrimmar), and when the healer has heirlooms.

Protection paladins seem to be well designed to survive.  If I notice the healer is having difficulty keeping up, I can help by keeping myself up.  I really noticed this yesterday, when the healer left a group for Blackrock prison as soon as they arrived.    The group were happy to carry on regardless, with my paladin acting as both tank and healer.  We completed the dungeon and did another boss, and would have kept going if we’d had time.   The funny thing was that I really enjoyed the challenge.

You’d think that, given that my character can tank and heal, that their dps wouldn’t be great (my warrior’s wasn’t), but I often seem to top the dps meters, even though I’m not deliberately trying to do a lot of damage (except to create more threat).

I’ve also tried solo-ing parts of dungeons.   Sometimes the group has completed the part needed for the loot bag and left, leaving me free to explore.   I’ve found that, yet again, a protection paladin does very well at soloing dungeons, even sometimes (to my utter amazement) if they’re below the level of the mobs.   That’s another really fun thing to do.   The lovely thing about soloing, is that there’s time to stop and think and plan.   Those areas which are more challenging, where lots of mobs attack at once, aren’t a problem for a solo player.  I just use the ancient technique of pulling them round corners in small groups.   It’s what we used to do, all those years ago at the start of World of Warcraft, and it still works – it’s just that if there’s a group, there’s more of a rush, and because wipes are so rare, risks can be taken.  I love pulling the mobs to where I want them.  I wish I could do it in groups, but I’ve come to realise that the groups won’t stand for it.

The rudeness ratio is still much the same – just not enough to make me stop playing.   Sticks and stones, eh?   I’ve noticed that the tank gets the blame almost as much as the healer.  I remember being frustrated in one group.   They didn’t give me a chance to get aggro, and pulled a mob off me.  Not usually a problem, but with slowing spells, I was having difficulty getting to the mob to get the aggro back and took too long to notice that I wasn’t being healed.   Nobody tried to run the mob back to me, and I ended up dying, being hit in the back by the casters behind me.   The healer apologised and said that they had computer problems and hadn’t been able to heal.   It was possibly partially my fault for not noticing and self healing, but then I’d been told off for self-healing before so I tend to let the healer get on with it.   But the group said that the healer was healing fine, and it was my fault, so they kicked me.   I still have to work that one out (how could the healer have been doing fine, when I wasn’t getting healed and they’d explained why?   And why didn’t the dpsers help, if there was a problem?).   It’s very frustrating not having a chance to answer back when you’re kicked!  (At least, I assume I was kicked.  I was suddenly no longer in the group).

Sometimes the “kick” option seems to be overused.  I almost never vote to kick, although often the person will be kicked anyway (I presume it only needs a majority vote).   I think that it’s possible to carry “bad” players, to continue for a while to see if disconnected players come back, etc.   I suppose I have the luxury of getting straight into dungeons, whereas people who have waited a long time (one told me that his average wait was 40 minutes) do get frustrated more easily.

But let’s look at that situation again, in terms of fault.    Now, I don’t claim to be a great player or even a good player.   I think I have an idea of what my role is, and when to use which ability.   However, I don’t have quick reactions, I use a mouse to click on my toolbar (I’m sure I should be using the keyboard, but if I do, I hit the wrong keys too often) and sometimes I find the screen is too busy for me to see what’s going on.  I freely admit that I can make mistakes (and I don’t mind other people making mistakes).  In this case, three of us went wrong.   I didn’t create enough threat at the beginning.   The healer didn’t heal.  The DPS pulled a mob and instead of bringing it back, kept it away.

My fault.  I didn’t get enough threat.   I ran into the group, targeted a caster and used my threat-generating abilities.   A melee mob was pulled off, and I tried to chase after it, using my taunt.   I accept that I didn’t generate enough threat, but I’m not sure how to get more right at the beginning.   Maybe I should have targetted the melee mob instead of one of the casters?  I don’t think so.   I’m not sure if I could have created any more threat than I had already done with the abilities I had, so although that might have been the cause of the problem, it wasn’t my fault.   However, there were things I could have done differently.   Perhaps I should have let the DPS keep the mob he pulled, and concentrate on keeping my health up.   That would have worked.   I could also have set a skull on my target before I ran in and that might have meant that I had a little more threat on the mob the DPS had gone for.  (That would only help if I did it in advance).

The healer’s fault.  The healer said it was his fault, because he had lagged.  Again, although that was a major cause of the problem, it wasn’t actually the healer’s fault as there was nothing he could have done.  Perhaps if he knew there were going to be problems, he could have warned me in advance and I could have self-healed as much as I could.

The DPS’s fault.   The DPS guy didn’t seem to feel he had any fault at all.   However, he pulled one of the mobs that I was trying to build up threat on, meaning that I had to stop attacking, couldn’t use my AoE skills and had to try to get threat back from that one mob.   DPS overall went down (as I wasn’t attacking but trying to run towards his mob through a slowing spell), my health went down (because I was being hit in the back by the caster mobs, who weren’t being attacked), and his health went down (because he was being attacked).  It wasn’t an efficient way to do it.  Perhaps it wasn’t his fault that he pulled the mob in the first place, but there were some things he could have done to minimise damage – in particular, stop attacking the mob and bring it back to me instead of making me neglect the others and run towards him.

Three of us contributed to the cause of the failure.  I’m still not sure why I was considered the most at fault (presumably by the three DPS players – the healer thought it was his fault).   The person who could have done most to save the situation once it was happening was the DPS guy, and he failed to do it.

I think the solution is not to kick, but to all try to work as a team.   We’re supposed to be working together, not against each other.   In that situation, I think it’s best to see what will help “the team”, whether it’s me going for damage reduction rather than dps if the healer is struggling, for instance, or the DPS lowering their dps or taking mobs back to me.   (Sometimes the DPS skills really don’t help the tank to tank!  That group I pulled all together so that I could AoE them?   As they come to me, they get stunned or frozen and spread out.  The worst one is the ability which knocks the mobs back so I can’t attack them and lost threat!  The first time I saw that I thought it was a sneaky new ability of the mobs designed to them more difficult to hit!).

In other news: Cataclysm arrived a week late.  Ordered from Amazon.  Never again.