There’s no need to fear! Underbog is here.

when DKs in this world appear
and cause pally heals to shed a tear
they frighten all who see and hear
the cry goes up both far and near
not Underbog! Underbog! Underbog! Underbog!

speedy tanks and half-dead runners
fighting all because we blunder
It’s Underbog. Underbog!

when in this world the blogs all read
of those whose pugs are filled with greed
it’s plate gear but the hunter rolls need
to crush your spirits with blinding speed
comes Underbog! Underbog! Underbog! Underbog!

speedy tanks and half-dead runners
fighting all because we blunder
It’s Underbog. Underbog!

Guess what I’ve been doing, guys? Here’s a video so you can get the tune, and not think I’m just nuts. Well, you’ll probably think I’m nuts any way, but I’m okay with that. Plus if you’re anything like me it’ll be stuck in your head for an entire day afterwards!

Outlands has been rough on my little pally healing self. The soul-crushing weight of a thousand inexperienced DK tanks descended upon me, causing me to doubt myself and wonder if I could even finish this project. Sure, they were funny at first. Ramps was, as Rades so aptly put it, a clown car of WTF. (The clown car part, I added the rest myself). But you know, Underbog and Slave Pens aren’t really a joke either in terms of difficulty (particularly tanking difficulty). There are some tricky pulls at the beginning with all of those pathing bats and other miscellaneous doodads. It’s usually around this point where I know whether I’m in for a good run, or A Run. I’ve had a few not even worth mentioning (or remembering).

Today’s, though, was purely epic. Well, technically there were two today. The first one was fairly unmentionable, which is good! Nobody died. I went with the “do not beacon” tactic and it seems to help my mana quite a bit. I used it once or twice and then let it expire, but overall I seemed to do better going easy on Beacon for the time being. So that pug was fine, and I was only three bars away from leveling so I queued myself up for another one.

This time I zoned in and it was like a scene from Comedy Central.

“Who is the tank!” one DK kept saying.

(I kept myself from yelling “WHAT’S THE MAGE.” But only just barely).

Even the tank didn’t know he was the tank. “IDK who is the tank,” he said, “sposed to be me I guess.” Judging from how much I had to heal her, it might as well have been the elemental shaman – incidentally named “Angryfarmhoe.”

We blundered into the main room full of bats and elemental giants, miraculously managing not to die along the way. “I’m gliching! [sic]” the tank said.

“That’s putting it mildly,” I replied. (Yes, all of these DK runs have made me belligerent. It’s okay, though… he didn’t get it.) Fortunately, he was quick with the anti-magic shield there… You know, for all the magic those bats do. They wiggle their little bat fingers. Actually, this is an aside, but have you ever been turned into a bat by the Hallowed Wands and then eaten food? You get a tiny little piece of bread in your claw. It’s so cute.

But I digress. So it turns out both of these DKs were Unholy… and somehow, it was actually easier to heal the one DK than it has been to heal many of the others, so what do I know? By the time we reached Hungarfen, the other DK still hadn’t figured out who the tank was. The hunter didn’t know what the mushrooms were – he was way over on the other side of the room standing by one…and he died, I regret to report. Around this time I endeavored to calm Angryfarmhoe, letting her vent her DK frustrations in whispers.

“****ing ridiculous!” she kept saying. “DKs!” I told her I felt her pain. And then, I couldn’t help myself.

“So, Angryfarmhoe… I have to ask.”

“Sure,” she said.

“No, the name. Is that the garden tool, or a farmwife?”

“Oh LOL,” she said. “The tool”

“Yeah, I could see that, hoeing is hard work, it’d make me angry too.”

By some miracle we managed to make it past the big leviathan thing, and then it got weirder. I don’t usually post conversation screenshots because 1) let’s face it, I am lazy and 2) it’s often easier to paraphrase. However, this time the conversation can only truly be grasped by relating it in full. To clarify, when Angryfarmhoe laughed, it was because she cast water walking on a DK when we were jumping off the platform.

And when I got impatient it was because we were standing in front of the last trash pulls before the final two bosses while those guys talked about cake.

No, save one for me!

Hey, I like cake as much as the next person! At this point, I voted to kick the inactive tank, and someone else voted to kick the other inactive DK. I’m sure that wherever they are now, they got to have their cake and eat it too. I hear it had coconut. For real.

Fortunately, after they left we got another tank and DPS immediately. Two DKs, naturally. They were gnomes. Very enthusiastic gnomes. But the one tanking actually seemed to know what he was doing and spoke in complete sentences, and then Hellfire froze over. I have no screenshots to prove this.

Later in the evening when I was running my daily heroic we had a paladin healer who put Beacon on me (boomkin) and I started whispering to badger him about pally questions. He had the Hand of A’dal title. I asked him why he Beaconed me, and how does he choose who to Beacon? He said: Highest health, second highest DPS, and not hunters. He said that he doesn’t Beacon the tank in five mans because the millisecond of time it takes for the heal to “transfer” is too risky. I wonder if that’s why I was killing my tanks. That’s one paladin’s opinion, though, I’m certainly open to hearing more. Our guild’s pally tank recommended that I Glyph Beacon so that it lasts longer, to save mana, which seems like sound advice but the glyph cost 50 G on the AH and nobody was around to craft me one. 50! For a glyph! I don’t think so.

Meantime, I’ve gotten plenty of luscious OL gear with sockets I’m twinking the heck out of – and I’m so close to Northrend I can taste it! I’m very excited, and maybe it’ll be people’s long-neglected 70 alts tanking for me instead of Every Person Who Ever Wanted To Level a DK.

Advertisement

Wednesday Linking Love

So I’ve been doing some thinking about my lovable Holy paladin since I wrote the last post. I’m contemplating some radical things. Well, not really. First of all, I took Lara’s most excellent advice. I’d been meaning to put gems in the (leather, sigh) gloves that I’d nabbed from Underbog, but I was planning on Northrend green gems. Meantime, I have no less than eleventy-billion Autumn’s Glow in my alt bank – why not use two to twink out my gear a little? Same with the Intellect enchant on my shield. It was 12 Infinite Dust… It’s really not that big a deal. So I gained a good chunk of Int there. (You know you’re a twink when the base stats of your shield are 11 intellect – and you enchant it to have twenty-five more). That should help somewhat with my mana issues.

But another thing I’m thinking of doing is just not using Beacon that much. I’ll admit it here freely. I didn’t even look at the mana cost (duh). 35% of my base mana? That’s huge. I know for a holy pally at end-game swimming in Int that wouldn’t be a big deal – plus there’s things like Divine Plea that I don’t have yet. Just because it heals two people at once, so what? Isn’t much of that going to overheal? So I’m going to try that strategy for five-mans for now, or even consider Beaconing myself at times. I know, it’s not the ‘right’ way to do it and everything holy paladin I’ve read is all “Beacon tanks don’t be that noob,” but do they mean in a raid? Sure, you go into a raid and you’re a paladin so you beacon one tank and heal the heck out of the other, but in a five man at my level? I’m not sure. I belatedly found Ferraro’s leveling as holy guide and how to healing five mans but the second one draws on talents and abilities I don’t yet have. So I’m just going to muddle my way through and see how that goes for the time being.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is related to this article by Matticus I read when it was published, almost a year ago. You know a blog post is a good one when you remember and go back searching for it, deliberately! It’s called The Secret to Being A World Class Healer, and I remember it because it’s part of the reason I’m pugging like I do. This is related to what I was saying in my last post about making myself available to a series of stupid pugs, battleground healing, whatever. I know of no better way to learn how to play as a healer than to just heal, heal, heal. I’ve always got room for improvement. Although the article is healing specific, you could apply it to any class or role. You want to tank? You can practice tanking even if you’re just leveling with a friend! When I was leveling a warrior, I leveled for a time with my husband’s DK and he was so annoying. He spent the whole time deliberately trying to pull aggro from me, even when we were just out questing (not using taunts or anything, but just pushing as much as he could). He forced me to become familiar with my tanking tools and we’d pull huge packs of mobs – Thunderclap and Shockwave were my friends! Consequently, the first time I stepped into an instance to tank it, I wasn’t completely green. I was pretty green, but I knew my tools.

The best tanks I know are the ones who just really love it. They’ll take any opportunity to tank an instance and it’s not because it makes for a faster queue time, it’s what they truly enjoy. Obviously, I don’t always enjoy the pugs I do. (Matticus laments that there is no ‘healing dummy,’ like there is for DPS, but… oh, do I have to say it? There are SOME dummies anyhow, they just aren’t stationary). The fact is though, I enjoy my pugs more often than not.

Since my last post, I’ve successfully completed Blood Furnace. I was all excited because the bear tank was so good, and I looked at his HP and said, “You have four thousand more HP than any other tank I’ve healed!” He laughed… He was level 66. I don’t know how he wound up tanking a Blood Furnace run, but I was glad that he did.

The Ramparts run I did after that saw me again being the element of fail, well, sort of. I always have a hard time finding the right entrance in the maze of Hellfire Citadel instances. I’m afraid I kept my group waiting during a corpse run. I was starting to get frustrated and said that I’d understand if they just wanted to ditch me and find a healer with a sense of direction, but the whole group was super nice. The DK tank had been very up-front at the beginning about how he’d never tanked before and we’d had a bit of back and forth. One group member remarked as we came to the first boss, “We should have been done by now,” and I told him I’d rather have a slow, calm Ramparts run than rush through and have a frustrating wipe-fest. And also, that it was the tank’s first time, so give him a break. The guy chilled out, and we finished the instance. Sure, it took longer than many others. Yes, we even wiped. Do I remember the cause of our wipe? No, I don’t. I remember that the group agreed to do it at a pace that would work for the new tank. I told the tank to just be conservative with his pulls, pull carefully, and we’d be fine. And we were!

Since then I’ve gone to Slave Pens and Underbog. Slave Pens had a druid tank who was extremely excited about Frenzied Regeneration. She kept saying, “Do you like that I’m healing myself and helping you out?!” Yes, Bear Butt, I certainly do. I was confused at first because I thought she meant she was dropping bear form and actually healing herself, but she wasn’t. She was just really happy about being a bear. It’s hard not to have fun when someone else is so clearly enjoying themselves! Also, stupid fearing mobs at the end of this instance can go and die in a fire. That’s it for Slave Pens.

As for Underbog, we had yet another struggling DK tank and a rotating roster of DPS that would either leave or be vote-kicked. The hunter was kicked because he kept pulling for the tank (I think, I voted “I’m going to stare at this box indecisively for a long moment because no reason for kicking was entered). A mage joined and said after one pull, “Ah, I see that the tank is very bad. Good-bye,” and left. The tank was greatly offended by this, incidentally, and spent the rest of the instance trying to prove how Un-Bad she really was. Which was actually good, as it meant that we made it through the Nightmare Hallway of Crowded Naga and Broken Doom relatively unscathed. I’m afraid we had a sacrificial warlock, though. And this ‘lock, she wasn’t doing it to herself. I couldn’t blame her at all. She just… made a lot of threat, and the tank did not. I made it a point to guard her carefully after her first two deaths, tossing her Salv when it was off cool-down and being ready with a quick “Save my warlock” CD when necessary. Once I focused on it she didn’t die again, so I was proud of that. See, I’m learning!

I don’t do linking love often enough and I really should, so this post is also about that. I’ll try to do it more often… perhaps on Wednesdays!

Here’s another great Matticus article I found when I was looking for the other one: 11 Reasons Guildmasters Fail. Obviously there are more reasons outside of the guild master why a guild might tank, but this one is aimed at GMs personally. It’s got some good points to consider, as always.

In a similar vein (aimed at keeping your raid healthy and happy!) I really liked what Natarumah over at Twisted Faith wrote about  Wipe Nights and Sustaining Your Raid. Breaks, people, it’s not that hard! Ultimately I believe you have better attempts after taking five minutes to stretch your legs and step away from things than pushing through and wiping interminably. It took our guild 121 wipes before we downed Mimiron’s hard-mode (back when our gear was equivalent to the encounter) and even the other day we went in with a number of new people to do it again and wiped a few times. It’s not easy. We had 70 LK wipes before a kill, and we took a break shortly before that kill.

A conversation from one of our wipe nights on LK:

RL: “OK guys, we’ve got time for one more really good attempt tonight so let’s make this one count”

Raider: “Or two or three really sh**** ones.”

RL: “You know what I mean!”

Other Raider: “I loled”

Raider: “Well it’s true!”

I also liked what Reversion over at LFM had to say about  Tanking 101: Leadership. I know very well the difference a good tank can make to how smoothly a run goes, and a lot of it is due to leadership. The “Dungeon Guide” can be anyone in the group, but it’s the tank who sets the pace, decides if they are going to pay attention to the healer’s mana or not, and can make a run very fun or very frustrating. I know, no pressure.

Spinks at Spinksville (How did I never know Spinks before now?) has some great points regarding How to Switch to Being More Casual. It’s an excellent post not just for people looking to switch to more casual, but also utilizing your game time and keeping it in perspective. I think so, anyhow!

Leafie has recently been through the classic instances, and she’s got quick reviews of each. Find ’em here at  Classic Instance Nutshell Reviews. I might have to follow her example and do something similar sometime!

Dristanel at Physician’s Log talks about the  Top Ten Things Paladins Can Do (In Bed). I play a Paladin now, folks, and it’s all true, oh yeah. You want some more Beacon? I’m not surprised. But I am quite sleepy. (p.s. both of these links are probably not safe for work).