A Funny Thing Happened to Me on My Way to the Obsidian Sanctum…
I stayed up late last night, mostly because Ellie went to bed early. Just on the off-chance, I logged into my WoW account to see if any PUG’s were running VoA or OS (10 or 25 man, I wasn’t bothered and both are equally straight-forward). Backtracking a little, my primary toon is a Night Elf druid by the name of ‘Tremendous’. Druids are a hybrid class, equally capable of tanking, healing, ranged and melee DPS. However, and this is critical, the ability to fulfil each role is reliant both on gear choices and the proper allocation of talent points.
My talent spec is the cookie-cutter 0/55/16 optimised for feral, single-target, melee dps. I gemmed for +AP and +AGI, which means I am something of a glass cannon - high burst damage, high crit chance but low survivability. Unfortunately, there tends to be an assumption within the WoW community that just because some feral druids choose to tank (with the associated talent, gear and gem choices aimed at +stam, +def, +dodge etc.), all are equally effective.
So anyway, I was wandering around Dalaran monitoring the trade chatter on the off-chance that something might present itself. I put myself forward for a spot in a VoA10 group, but it seemed they already had their quota of DPS and just needed healers. This reminded me to check my off-spec gear in preparation for the changes in patch 3.1… but that’s another story.
Just as I was getting ready to call it a night, someone put out a call that they were preparing a group for OS10. I’ve run this a few times before with a decent success rate, and a good group can rip through it in twenty minutes, so I put my name forward and joined the raid party. The group was in it’s early stages of coming together and, as usual with PUG’s, there was a mix of talent, gear and attitudes. The RL, unfortunately, was utterly hopeless and, despite the protestations of the MT that an OT was needed, we somehow managed to enter the instance with a single tank and, it later transpired, only one healer.
Of course, as soon as this became clear the calls went up that ‘the feral can tank’. I explained that my gear was sub-standard, my spec was inappropriate and that I hadn’t even attempted to tank since a disastrous run through Sethekk Halls late in the Burning Crusade. I don’t think I’d even looked at my bear form action bars in a year.
Nevertheless, I went through the entire run operating as an off-tank and it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t die once, although I came close on the second drake and had to quickly pop Survival Instincts. The hardest part was generating enough threat to pull aggro off the main tank, but I quickly worked out a rotation of feral charge -> growl -> feral faerie fire -> mangle -> 5 stacks lacerate -> repeat from growl. This worked ‘OK’ and despite a couple of hairy moments on the Sartharion fight when the MT pulled adds and had to shout for help I think I did OK.
Of course, after all that excitement, having picked up the Dragon Hide Bag on a previous run, no gear of note dropped from the boss and I lost out on a /roll for the Bag of Spoils. There was always the emblem drops to cheer me up, though, and at least I learned that, in a desperate situation, I can function as a fairly effective tank. And that’s what I did last night, between the hours of about 10:30pm and midnight.
So… did anyone, anyone at all, keep reading that gibberish until the end?