Marking targets

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But I am equally entitled to disagree. Another WoW blogger recently wrote this comment…

unless the tank is entirely unfamiliar with the instance, or just doesn’t know how to assign CC and pull properly (in which case they’re not a very good tank anyway), there’s no logical reason for anyone other than the tank to be leading. Any decent player should know this, which is why mister I’m-a-DPS-class-but-want-to-be-leader will typically fail in every role they’ve assigned themselves in the first 20 minutes.

Now I’ll agree that the tank should do the pulling, unless you happen to have multiple hunters using a misdirect rotation. However, I object to the idea that a tank should do the marking by default. What makes a tank more able to click a raid icon than anyone else?

Marking targets has nothing to do with tanking. Zero. It has everything to do with understanding the CC capabilities of all of the members of your group, as well as knowing the abilities of the mobs being marked. That knowledge is certainly not exclusive to tanks. A good leader/marker knows how the traps, saps, sheeps, seduces, fears, banishes, shackles, cyclones, mind controls, hibernates, and tanking work, and can make rational and informed decisions about their use. Tanking is just one more form of CC. It doesn’t give any amazing insight into how to set up a pull.

The act of marking targets is simply placing a raid icon over mobs. It doesn’t take a tank to do that. In fact, I think that anyone that assumes a tank is best suited for it just because they are a tank is probably missing out on some innovative and effective pull strategies.

Weekend Report

This weekend was my first ever attempt at 25-man raiding (I never did 40-man raids before BC, either). My impressions can be summed up as: (1) enjoyable, (2) exhausting, (3) expensive, (4) encouraging.

1. Enjoyable – anything can fun when it goes well. Our guild alliance went in and slapped around High King Maulgar on only our 2nd attempt. Since this was the first try at 25-man raiding for most of our group, that was very exciting. It was a fun, chaotic fight. I have no idea how we pulled it off. As the fight was going on, I saw felhounds running everywhere, and Kiggler (the shaman) was running all over the cave. I guess our healing was awesome. Half the raid was dead when dps moved onto Maulgar, but they were able to keep the tank alive until we finished him off. Fun! I, personally, did not do terribly well. I died to a Whirlwind almost as soon as we switched dps onto Maulgar. I was top dps at the time that I died. Next time I hope to survive until the end of the fight.
2. Exhausting – once we moved onto Gruul it became more tedious. That was my first experience with the repetition of “learning a progression boss”. We tried Gruul a couple of times Friday, then many times Saturday. We never killed him (got him to 7%). Doing the same fight over and over again is no fun. On Sunday I actually felt like I wanted a day off of playing WoW, and that’s unusual for me. Just from that small exposure I can immediately see how raiding can burn people out. When I hear stories of guilds wiping on Vashj for months – I couldn’t do it.
3. Expensive – all those wipes on Gruul… all those consumables. I used easily 150g worth of consumables on those two nights of raiding. Fortunately, I only expect to raid one or two nights a week, so I can easily make that back in a day or two of daily quests. But if this becomes a weekly occurrence it will certainly cut into my gold.
4. Encouraging – we did get Gruul down to 7%. When you consider the fact that we had a less-than-optimal raid makeup I think we can finish him off. In order to get 25 bodies into the raid we had a prot pally and arms warrior doing dps, along with a rogue still in blues and greens. If we can get geared dps classes in the raid to replace those three, that would account for the last 7% of Gruul’s health.

We’re excited to go back in next Friday. Some are already talking about Magtheridon’s Lair in our future. We definitely have some gearing-up to do… a lot of us need more stamina for survivability. But overall I have to say… WOOT!

P.S. (sorry about the wall of text… wordpress isn’t letting me insert images into the post this morning)