A Tanking Primer: Adaptability

Welcome back to the Tanking Primer series here at Going Bearfoot! Here we’ll explore a new aspect of tanking each week for the next several weeks, continuing with today’s topic, Adaptability. My hope is that I’ll manage to stay objective enough to cover tanking aspects without making this a “druid only” resource, and even include things specific to my warrior, paladin, and death knight brethren.

Tanking Primer Table of Contents

1. The Pull

2. Tank Talk

3. Adaptability

4. To be continued…

The World of Warcraft, like the “Real World” ™, is usually in some state of flux, and while you’re tanking there will always be patrols, groups with casters, groups without casters, bugs, lagspikes, awful PuGed people, and Cenarius knows what else. Your job then, is to always be prepared to deal with things, shift around, and make changes on the fly.

A Tanking Primer: Tank Talk

Welcome to a brand new series I’ll be starting here on Going Bearfoot, a Tanking Primer! Here we’ll explore a new aspect of tanking each week for the next several weeks, continuing with today’s topic, Tank Talk. My hope is that I’ll manage to stay objective enough to cover tanking aspects without making this a “druid only” resource, and even include things specific to my warrior, paladin, and death knight brethren.

Tanking Primer Table of Contents

1. The Pull

2. Tank Talk

3. Adaptability

4. To be continued…

——————————————————————————–

One of the strange things that has evolved over time in this game is that the tank is the leader. It’s entirely possible for a healer or a DPS to take charge and direct a group, but it’s a lot harder to do so. One reason for this is that it generally falls to the tank to be party leader for the sake of using raid markings to show priority kills. (Raid markings can be used for a strange concept called “crowd control” too, but this is a very ancient concept that no longer seems to apply to the world…) Because it falls to the tank to lead 85% of the time, it’s important that you find a way to establish yourself as the leader right off the bat, and remain in that position for as long as you need to work with your group.

Herding Cats, AKA …Let’s go to Plan B, shall we?

So. This is what happens when guild drama explodes at a somewhat late hour on a Monday night. I think more than anything I’m probably confused by what happened, but generally I’m proud to be a card-carrying charter member and senior officer of the newly formed <Blades of Dawn>.

Being in the position at the moment, I’d like to take this white space and talk about guilds and guild management. There are a few things that I think are absolutely essential to having a healthy guild.

• A mission statement, and defined direction for the guild.
• A reliable officer core that is both larger than the one person leading the guild, smaller than 20% of the guild (or so), and shares a reasonable amount of power with the leader.
• Defined rules about behavior within the guild, when running with PuGs and a general looting policy.
• An application with recruiting policy.
• A trial period with a defined end point.
• Semi-regular guild meetings.
• More than 4 events a month, less than 25.

Things that are nice to have but not essential include:

• A forum, with “News” section or splash page.
• Themed officer roles.

Why the Old Country is also the “Motherland”

Nerd that I am, and addicted as I am, WoW Insider is my home page. Whenever I open Firefox, unless its by taking a link from somewhere else, WoW Insider is the thing that pops up. I don’t agree with a lot of things, or even most things that get put up there (And I’m seriously sick to death of hearing about Karatechop. SRSLY guys, find something new!) But it sits there anyway because it’s a good place to get a quick run down of some of the big news that comes up. In the vein of not really agreeing with things, one of the articles this morning was titled “The End of Vanilla WoW” in which the idea was proposed that now that we have Death Knights and all, leveling any other class is simply too much work.

Now, there are two philosophies to approaching the game. (Really there are far, far, more philosophies to the game than I could ever cover, but right now we’re talking about leveling and it’s my blog-o-verse so I can simplify it as much as I want to. Neener neener neener!) One is that Warcraft is a great game with tons of content that works for a number of playstyles, and another is that “The game doesn’t actually start until max level.” I’m in the former camp. The concept that everything is crud until you hit 80 (Or 70, or 60 back in the day, probably 90 in the future) makes me wonder why people even got hooked enough to level their first character up anyway.

For Freedom

Today I’m not going to talk about Warcraft, roleplaying, tanking, or even another game altogether. This last Sunday afternoon my father passed, and I’m going to take this space here to leave a memorial for him. Please feel free to comment.

When I was just a kid in kindergarten (or maybe first grade- it doesn’t really matter which), my dad took off the entire day from work to stay home. After I left for school, he snuck into my room and pulled out my Lincoln Log building set. When I got home that afternoon, the entire kitchen table was a huge “Old West” cowboy fortress being attacked by Indians and we spent hours playing through the battle.

Another time, a weekend in February, there was going to be a blue moon; a second full moon in the same month. It was special because February is a very short month, so the odds of it happening in February are extremely slim. He set up his telescope out in the backyard and taught me not only what a blue moon is, but about the craters on the moon and how he was watching when the first man walked around on the surface. How things in the sky always move across from East to West so we had to make sure to keep changing the telescope so we could see things.

Almost every summer we’d go camping, and when I got older I could even help back in and level the trailer. I always thought it was “soft” camping (and still do) but you were right that it’s nice to have pancakes in the middle of the woods in the morning. We never did have to argue about whether campfires were better built “pyramid” or “cabin” style though, because with enough beer and propane anything will light, even without kindling.

I think it was in Starved Rock campground where you took us and I remember seeing sandstone for the first time. I couldn’t even imagine how all that sand could have gotten there to make a rock out of, but it stuck with me and now I’ve gone off to college for Geology. Illinois was under the ocean! Who knew!

Things didn’t always go smoothly between us, but I’ll always love the black & white version of The Day the Earth Stood Still (the new one sucks), and I’ll always prefer and old, solid, durable tool to a new, cheap, and plastic one. I hope all the best brands of beer are in stock for ya, Dad. I love you.