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I have been doing a lot of randoms. And lately, I’ve been running into more and more people who, if they spoke to my face the way they speak in party chat, would be lying on the ground dead and I would be exonerated of any wrong doing. But, only on the horde side.

Yes, I run into the occasional jackass on the Alliance side, but they are usually just whiners who drop group ridiculously fast. Every non-guild horde run I’ve done for the last week has contained at least 1 abusive asshole. I guess anyone who thinks Garrosh Hellscream is cool is going to have problems, but seriously why does the horde seem to have an outsized proportion of truly vile people playing it?

Come to think of it, most of them have been wearing Arena gear too. Another primary indicator…

I really like the new random dungeon tool. No, really. I like that I don’t have to spam LFG or be picky about the gear people are wearing or even be worried about class composition. The tool does a fairly good job of that.

And for the most part, I haven’t had to group with a lot of jerks (one or two in the time since the tool came out). Most people are civil, if quiet.

But man. 18 minutes on average if I queue as DPS. That’s primarily on Chingching or Seneschal. Yes, Seneschal has a tanking spec, but her gear isn’t, IMO, up to tanking heroics yet (I want more health and more hit).

It’s enough some nights to make me just do the random on Flaime (who always tanks) and log. I know the solution is to get Sen’s tanking gear up to snuff and tank on her, but, to be honest, I don’t know DK tanking all that well yet, and I have fun DPSing. And that doesn’t help with the mage at all.

Hopefully there’s a streamlining coming soon.

Well, I tanked on my death knight for the first time last night. Now, I am just barely defense capped. I’m not close to hit capped in my tanking gear. I have little to no expertise rating. So I thought I would start out with a normal instance. The result? It was trivial. Normal Trial of the Champion was my first instance. It was, if anything, easier than on my fairly well geared bear.

Now, I believe you can safely attribute some of this to the fact that it was a normal instance, not a heroic. And, for the most part, the group seemed to know what they were doing (except for the DPSing dk).  But once I remembered to switch to frost presence, nobody was ever within 10% of me on Omen. And aoe tanking was so much easier on the death knight (mind you, I’m Blood, not Unholy, so AOE tanking really isn’t how I’m specced). The only thing I could ask for is a tanking talent that would allow you to reset the cooldown for death and decay every couple minutes…that was a part of one of the other tanking talents I already have:D).

So, after succeeding on TOC, I decided that I would be willing to try tanking a heroic. 1st up - Utgarde Pinnacle - let me preface, I don’t like UP. Skadi is one of the worst fights in the game for randomness and people not paying attention and I’m really not great at tanking it - my reaction times are just too slow to save people who won’t save themselves.  On the other hand, after we worked out that DPS would have to single target to start out with (and I remembered to switch back to frost presence), it was a pretty smooth run. In fact, at the end, one of the random people commented I was one of the better DK tanks they had seen lately. Now, I’m sure that wasn’t that hard, but considering it was my first run in a heroic on my DK, I was pleased.

It remains to be seen if I will like DK tanking as much as Bear tanking when the gear level is comparable, but It has been okay thus far.

Well, long time, no post. Burn out and real life do that to us. I don’t know how long I’m back for, but as I’m between jobs at the moment, there is time to get a bit of blogging in. So, I’ll start back with this message. I’m back. Still playing a bear, My other main character is a horde side DK, blood DPS but I’m moving into tanking. Got my mage to 80 and have used the random group tool to great effect.

I’ll be commenting on things I want to comment on, and talking about playing and so on and so forth. If you wander back here, great. If not, well, I’m mostly writing this for myself anyway:D.

Blizzard is nerfing bear tanks so far that even Ret Pallies feel sorry for us. -30% armor, -10% or more health…And you won’t be able to tank every fight now. Any fight that in any way interrupts your attacks will now be untankable by bears.

And the few feral druids that do numbers in the blog world don’t even care. Karthis doesn’t even seem to tank anymore. He’s all about the DPS nonsense. As is Kalon. BBB hasn’t commented, but he’s pretty much all about the hunter now anyway.

The problem is, I don’t want to DPS. I want to tank. Tanking is fun. DPS is boring on a druid. And healing…healing sucks ass. The most unpleasant task in the game is druid healing. (Those druids who don’t think so must not remember the “heal or get out of my group” days we went through).

And yet, I haven’t found a class as fun as the druid to play…maybe it’s time to look seriously at my DK>