Lo-Quality WoW

Since I realized that this blog has been primarily my hunter with a general rant here or there, I figured I would kill some time writing about my warrior, Aleania. Oddly enough, she’s one of the few characters with a “real” name. I’ll go into how I name my characters later but it’s rare to have my character’s name match one from the real world.
I don’t quite remember but I think she was actually my first alt. Yes, I said “she”. I don’t have a problem playing female characters, I’m secure enough in my manhood for that. But as I mentioned way back when this blog started, her creation was mostly dictated by my co-workers. What? Let me explain.

I had been running my hunter for awhile and he was high up there when my co-worker managed to hook another co-worker into the wonderful addiction that is WoW. Now since my hunter and his rogue were a little too high level, it dictated that we create new characters to run with our new member. Now he had created a NE druid. The rogue player decided he’d try the NE hunter then. Well, that meant I had to create a NE in order to do the early quests together and I already had a hunter. I figured the druid could do some healing, the hunter was ranged, well that means we need someone to get up close and personal with mobs and I went with a warrior. That and I wanted to try to see what a melee class was like.

But why a female? Well, the other two had created female characters, so why not? And it worked out well. It’s amazing how many random players will swing by and help up a gaggle of girls out questing. Didn’t even have to pay them. I guess that if it’s three female characters questing, people figure there’s no way it would be a bunch of guys behind the scenes.

Now, my warrior was made mainly for our lunch break quests. She also became my general change of pace character. While my hunter had skinning and leather working, my warrior ended up with tailoring and enchanting. I know people are saying “What? Why didn’t you take blacksmithing you idiot!” The truth of the matter is, I didn’t think about it. I just knew that between my hunter and warrior, I wasending up with a lot of cloth and I figured tailoring would be a good way to use that. And since there’s no real gathering skill necessary for tailors, enchanting seemed to go well. Would I change? Probably not, I’m used to her being a tailor and enchanter. Plus she’s the highest enchanter in our guild so she does practically all the disenchanting for everyone.

Anyway, for the longest time my warrior was a fury warrior. There was no reason to go any other way. But as our guild grew, we slowly started doing instances. Appropriate level instances. At first, one of our paladins tried his hands at tanking but he didn’t really enjoy it that much. So we found ourselves needing a tank and since I had a high level warrior…

Well, I didn’t take it well to be honest. I liked being dps. I had no idea what to do as a tank. But I spent a weekend looking through the protection tree, figuring out what worked with what, and decided I could probably put a decent build together. Then I started getting the gear I needed.

This is where I went astray. As I’ve said, I didn’t really get into the hows and whys of WoW for the longest time. So I had no idea how a tank was “supposed” to be built. So while I was getting gear, I knew I needed armor and stamina. But instead of strength, I tended to lean towards agility! Why? Well, I knew agility gave me extra armor, improved my dodge and gave me better crit chance. While I knew various abilities helped me generate threat, in my head, threat was mainly from damage. So dodging gave me Revenge, another attack and the better crit chance meant that when I did hit something, there was a good chance of me hitting it for a whopper.

So I ended up with a fast, agile warrior would did quite a bit of her threat through damage. But weren’t you in Defensive Stance? Yes, but oddly enough, I was able to do more damage that way than when I was a Fury Warrior. What? Well I used the basis of the Ogri’la quest, “Banish the Demons”. Now, the portal from the banishing crystal lasts 3 minutes. In 3 minutes, my hunter generally takes out 5 demons. As a Fury Warrior, I usually could get 3 demons. As a Protection Warrior? I was taking out 4 demons on average! The damage decrease I had from being in Defensive stance actually was being off-set by what I was wailing out with Revenge and Devestate!

But what about instances? Well, I had the usual problem that Warrior tanks had. I was great at holding aggro on single mobs and bosses, less successful when there were multiple-mobs. Still, some skills I picked up as my hunter (which I’ll explain later) allowed me to generally pick up those that pealed away to go eat my healer. I was still using Shield Slam and all the other skills Protection tanks used, it was just that I was also doing slightly higher dps than other tanks at the time were doing, allowing me to hold aggro just fine.

Since then, I’ve learned how a tank is “supposed” to be but I kept doing it the way I did for the basic reason that it worked! And since we usually still had to PUG a player or two when we did runs and apparently nobody else noticed and complained, so why worry about it? I held the attention of things while others beat them about the head. I was doing my job. I also did a lot of OT work, mainly in Karazhan, but that had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t quite hold multiple mobs so it made sense to let a Paladin or Druid MT while I made sure to grab anything that broke free.

Well, tanking definitely has changed since then. Warriors got a bit better at handling multiple mobs and Blizzard also did a few changes that ramped up damage by tanks as well. My hunter will every so often run with a tank who does close to dps class damage. Which I think is terrific. Unfortunately, since I’ve been doing all this new neato stuff with my hunter, my warrior is still lagging a bit since Wrath came out. She’s only 73, but she has tanked Nexus and Utgarde Keep for the guild. She’s running across gear here and there that replaces what she has, but it hasn’t gotten to the “gee golly that’s neat” point yet. It also helps that one of our guildmates a few timezones away has setup his paladin as a tank as well. With Daylight Savings Time in effect, we have a greater chance of running with him, which means he gets to MT while my hunter tags along. That might change once Daylight Savings switches and my warrior becomes necessary for MT work but we’re not at that point yet. I definitely look forward to it though.