To all the lowbie groups

I am going to start this post by announcing that this is a rant. If you have no desire to read my angry rant, please feel free to browse through my other posts until you find something more to your liking. If you’re still with me, hold on to something because this is going to get angry and possibly violent. I’ve been leveling my panda and I LOVE it! They are a fun class to play regardless of spec and I highly recommend leveling one. Now because I am one of those weird people who like to play a class to level cap as the same spec that they are going to be at said level cap, I tend to level some characters as healers or tanks. For my panda I decided to level as a Brewmaster, which is the tank spec. 

This means that I’ve run a lot of dungeons so far. I usually quest for a bit and then queue for a bit so that I don’t end up running the same dungeon a million times in a row. Nothing like running RFD 5 times in a row to make you want to stop playing for the night. Anyway, since I’ve been leveling I end up in a lot of groups with everyone but me wearing all heirlooms. Why don’t I have heirlooms you ask? Well because until this expansion each account could only have 10 character slots per server. I had one of each class at level cap. I had no need to buy heirlooms because I didn’t have a character that could benefit from them and I would rather spend the JP on other stuff like mounts or crafting mats or gnomish hookers. Had I been smart, I would have bought them with the extra JP I had before it got turned into gold in 5.0.4 or whatever patch it was. But since I’m dumb and didn’t remember to do that, I have no heirlooms.

Does this make leveling harder, having no heirlooms? No. Does it make leveling slower? No because I level pretty fast since I know where to go for each quest and I supplement my questing with herbing/mining for more free xp. Anyway, back to my rant. Whenever I zone into an instance the first thing I do is greet the group. Some groups respond and some are dead silent the entire time, it varies. After I greet everyone, I type the following message “Please don’t pull for me or ahead of me and we’ll have a great time.” Why do I do this? Well I do it because as a tank there is nothing more frustrating than tanking a group of mobs and seeing one of the dps go and grab more mobs that they then expect you to pick up. If you don’t and they die, you better be ready for them to accuse you of being a bad tank, the healer of being super bad, and the dps for not helping them out.

It is super frustrating because it happens so often in groups now that so many people have access to heirlooms. I often have to tell people that they aren’t the tank and that if they wanted to tank they should queue as a tank. As a tank I know what I can pull and survive, I know when my cooldowns are available, and I know when mob groups should be pulled back to not grab pats. When a DPS decides to grab more mobs I warn them once or twice to NOT do that. If they persist on pulling more mobs, I don’t taunt off them. I let them die. I got into a fight with a DPS who kept trying to defend a dumb DK that not only pulled for me, he death gripped mobs off me. The Dumb DPS argued that as long as stuff was dying and no one was in any real danger, what did it matter if people pulled for me?

At first I was shocked that someone would argue with me when I told the dk that if he pulled again, that he could tank whatever he pulled. I was nice and warned the dk several times before letting him deal with the mob packs that he pulled. The Dumb DPS thought I was in the wrong because I, the tank, wanted to be the only person TANKING! Honestly I don’t care if you have a million heirlooms and feel that you can solo things, if you queue as a dps, you are dps and NOT a tank. It’d be like me queuing as a healer and just deciding to dps or tank. You select what role you want to be in the instance. I choose to tank because I like tanking and I want to make sure that when I get to level cap I will know all there is to know about tanking. If you are a dps and feel that the tank could move faster, drop queue and requeue as a tank and see how you feel when people pull stuff for you, pull off of you, and blame you when they die to agro. Don’t pull if you’re not a tank.

Tanking in instances at times can be a thankless job and it gets worse when I run into dps who want to tank/pull for me. It can get seriously frustrating. I haven’t had any issues when I’m tanking on my pally in MoP regs/heroics so maybe it has to do with people not taking lowbie instances seriously. I know some people go “lawls lowbie instances who cares steamroll it all” but that can piss off your group mates and I KNOW it pisses off your tank. I’ve leveled through running lowbie instances on several healers and when I see it happening, I just don’t bother to heal the overeager dps. When they ask why they didn’t get heals, I explain that they are not the tank and should not pretend to be. Usually the tank will whisper me thanking me for either sticking up for them or to laugh at the dumb dps.

People wonder why there are so few tanks leveling, this is why. If you’re new to the game and want to try your hand at tanking and run into this kind of behavior, you are going to get discouraged really quickly.  If you’re with a group of guildees and they don’t mind you pulling stuff for them, good for you, have at it! When you queue with a random group as a dps, remember that you are a dps. Now I am not saying that if a group of mobs gets pulled accidently to not grab one or two of them and hold them until the tank can grab them. If you want to speed the group along, do everyone a favor and don’t.

Well that’s my rant. Angry tank is angry! But Pandas are cool, Pandaria is cool, Battle pets are AWESOME, and my guild starts raiding next week hopefully. I would write about dailies and how raiders are forced to do them…except I haven’t really been doing dailies. I do some of my farming dailies on my mage and then switch over to either my pally for heroics or I switch to my monk for lowbie leveling action. I don’t let things like dailies stress me out, I play the game to enjoy myself and honestly I don’t even have enough points to buy anything worthwhile on my Pally even if I had the required rep. If we have a night of 1-2% wipes next week well I’ll be all over them dailies to get a little bit more edge so we can down stuff. Until then I’ll be here flying around on my He-man the Movie flying Disc. =D