A brief intro, I suppose

I'm still a little unsure as to what I will inevitably use as a theme for this blog. Obviously it will be WoW based. I thought about using it as a how-to in terms of playing a death knight, but there's already far too many of those out there. Maybe a collection of my in-game experiences? Again, many of those exist as well. The problem is that it's very difficult to actually come up with something original. As I am no expert in writing, sadly I don't believe I'll be able to offer anything of major interest. Maybe I'm just being hard on myself. Meh, whatever.

To start, I've been playing WoW for a little over two years now. Yes, I am indeed a "Wrath baby." Bring forth your judgements! I currently play on Kargath server in a raiding guild that is somewhere in between casual and hardcore. I feel that I tend to lean a bit more towards the hardcore end a bit more than others. But at the same time I enjoy having free time and the little personal life I have is important to me.

My main is a death knight tank. Oh, here we go. More judgements. It's true, the majority of death knights are people who just leveled a character to 55 so they could play a dk. Most of them just faceroll the keyboard and do top dps, blah blah blah. Yeah, try that while being a dk tank. Sure, holding aggro isn't hard, even before the major threat buff. But dks are spikey as hell. Even more so if they don't know how to properly manage their ridiculous number of survival cooldowns. A good dk tank is one that a healer doesn't have to heal that much. We'll always be spikey, that's our nature. But our self healing and shielding is designed to negate a lot of the need for heals. Often I hear from my healers that they feel like they can ignore me for a bit and heal others that stood in fire or something and not worry about me dying so suddenly.

Gearing has always been fairly important to me from the time I first started raiding on my warrior tank. Maybe that's why I ended up the loot/gear officer in my current guild. I've thrown around different methods, tested the EJ approved ways of doing things, made up my own gearing strategies. In Wrath, I was constantly ridiculed by other tanks and raiders because I didn't stack stamina in every possible socket. I, instead, went for an effective health model. Gearing towards defense rating to raise overall avoidances and then stamina in all blue sockets. When pugging during that time, I laughed as all the stam stacking tanks would spike up and down in health. Probably giving their healers a heart attack in the process. Meanwhile, when it became my turn to tank the boss, my health was fairly steady. When the other tank died due to a huge melee swing, I lived long past the amount of "stacks" a tank should have safely taken before the other should taunt off. No, I didn't rub this in everyone's faces. But I should have.

Pugging to me is a dirty word. I can't stand those who cannot do their job with a certain degree of competence. Unfortunately it seems as if my luck in the dungeon finder is terrible for that. I know I'm not alone there. But I refuse to tank for any pug unless I have friends with me. Tanking is a thankless job most of the time. I would imagine healing is much the same. There's no real way to measure how good a tank or healer is aside from no one dying, which most people assume is all due to the healer. I will not downplay the role of the healer. Some of my best friends are healers, amazing ones at that. But the tank is also responsible for the group's survival. So try not to rag on a tank who isn't doing everything perfectly. Sometimes this is hard for me as well. I tend to backseat tank. I must be a terrible dps when I use that spec, always looking for a way to help the healer or pick up strays adds that got away.

Well I did say this would be brief. Clearly I'm a liar. I suppose this will be a blog about the two things I mentioned at the beginning. Sounds like as good a plan as any. Stay tuned for more awesome?