Anyone who has played with me for long knows that I have this dark trait… I tend to obsess over the acquisition of various items. I’ve written about this fact a few times, and the way that certain items seem to evade me. For example I ran Karazhan every week for well over a year without ever seeing the Barbed Choker of Discipline drop, only to have it drop the very first time I attended Kara on my Alt-adin. The Shoulderguards of the Bold were similarly coy, in that it took around 30 runnings of the dungeon to finally see them drop.
So in truth, it should have been no shock for me, that while every other group I knew was getting them almost every week… Duranub had yet to see a Titanguard drop. It had even become a point of teasing, as friends from other raid groups linked them the one they just won on their alts. When our offtank recently left, she got the cursed sword on her very first running post-duranub Flame Leviathan kill.
Bitterness Pool
One of my previous raiding incarnations, the infamous Late Night Raiders had a concept known as the “bitterness pool”. Each week we would put up money, betting that the item we wanted would not drop. When an item dropped, that player paid their bet into the pool split up amongst the “winners” who did not get the drop they were after. I had joked many times, and was somewhat serious about starting up one of these again. Feeling that certainly I could start recouping some of my repair expenses by with the fact that Titanguard hated me.
Last night I would have been a major loser. On my 12th time killing Flame Leviathan, the rusting bucket of bolts finally made good with my sword. Sure in the grand scheme of things, it was not a massive upgrade over my Stoneguard, and in truth it looks way worse… however things like this become a point of honor for me. I had to beat the RNG at all costs, and walk away with my sword with an orbital docking ring.
The odd thing about knowing practically every enchant, is that you simply don’t know any enchanters anymore. So there was a good deal of hoop jumping trying to track down a player in my expanded circle of acquaintances that unlike Duranub, had gotten some enchanting drops. After 30 minutes of networking, I located and acquired my Blade Ward enchant. My sword is ready for battle and looking forward to giving it a good test. Hopefully we can push through to Thorim and maybe get Ornquist our tankadin a Legacy of Thunder.
Above Average
All in all the night was a pretty good one. The raid formed without much haranguing, and getting my sought after drop from the very first boss definitely set the tone of the evening on a positive note. We had some great showings from a few dps, and some truly lackluster from others. In the grand scheme of things it worked out to us having a pretty median night. Healing was more than a bit weak, for reasons I have yet to fully figure out, but it was adequate for us to get in and blaze a path to the boss we needed to work on.
Auriaya once again posed some issues for us, mostly on count of the odd healing discrepancies we were having. My connection seemed to be laggier than normal which also posed some problems. In general I run about 19 ms ping to Argent Dawn, but all of last night I sat in the range of 90-300ms pings, with a few crippling lag spikes and a few disconnects. It seemed to be something upstream from me however, as another of our raiders would lock up at exactly the same times.
It was a good loot night all around, with only 2 items going to DE, which itself explains the severe shortage of Abyss Crystal in the guild bank. Maybe going to have to start implementing a minor charge on mats to afford the purchase of whatever we need like @Nibuca suggested. It is probably a good thing that we have not started a bitterness pool, as one of our priests would have had to pay out handsomely as well considering we finally saw our first Rapture drop and we had the good luck to get another Fragment of Val’anyr. Probably the most important occurrence last night is we finally had someone to soak up all the accursed paladin loot.
Warrior Pride
Now for a completely divergent direction, I want to talk about some comments Ghostwalker made a few weeks back. In these comments and a few others in the past, he has stated that he believes there should be fewer warrior tanks. That in the grand scheme of things blizzard would like to see an equal distribution of all tanking and healing classes. Reading his statements you get the impression that warriors are getting a few necessary “fixes” withheld in order to make them less popular. This is probably not what Ghostwalker wanted the community to take from it, but its my feeling that in essence that is what is happening.
The problem with this gem of social engineering is that Warriors tend to be a pretty stubborn lot. For those of us who have been in wow since the beginning, the class warrior equated to tanking. So by that lot, if you entered the game wanting nothing than to be the best raid tank you could be, the only logical choice was to roll a warrior. As a group warriors have a class loyalty that seems to be only rivaled by that of healing priests, and those insane pre-bc ferals. So with that in mind, to say that there should be fewer warrior tanks just seems like a slap in the face.
I am confident that recent changes are going to screw us over (block changes and parry/dodge changes), but at the end of the day I am still going to be a warrior tank, and still going to be the main tank for our raid. Where I start to get sensitive is when I am forced to question whether or not my choice of class is in effect harming our raid progression as a whole. I do everything I humanly can to be the best tank I can be, even going so far as switching from a fun fury build, to dual tank specs to help out the raid as a whole.
I can accept the fact that warriors are no longer the pinnacle of tanking, but by the same token I do not feel that it is fair to be forced to work twice as hard as a paladin or death knight to achieve the same level of tanking. I realize we are no longer the golden boy that we once were, and that raids no longer need more than one of us. However I do not feel that the time of the warrior tank is an outdated practice either. As always myself, and the legion of other warrior tanks will adapt to the changes and bring with us years of tanking experience. I just hope my class loyalty won’t hurt our raid in the long run.