Belghast, Author at Tales of the Aggronaut

Evergreen Content

August 9, 2013 by Belghast

After some technical difficulties caused by the fact that my upstairs computer appeared to have come back in a half alive state after what I can only assume was a power blink caused by last nights storms… aren’t run-on sentences awesome? I am finally sitting down at the computer to write this mornings post. Additionally I am drinking the sweetest cup of coffee ever… because in my half awake state… I dumped the Splenda designated for my wife’s cup into mine. The end result is a cup of coffee with like six packets of sugar in it.

Evergreen Content

One of the things that has always frustrated me with MMO design is the fact that the higher up in level you are, essentially the fewer options you have for where to spend your in game time. What I mean is that usually games spend a good amount of time to provide alternate starter zone experiences, and then those usually funnel into shared zones for your faction before dumping you out into a ladder of zone progression towards the “end game”. Once you arrive at the end content you experience the same thing… everyone is pushed towards the same few content items.

When an expansion is released the same thing happens again but even more limiting. You are pushed out of the “old world” content and into a much smaller new world with the same very vertical progression path. Everything about the old content becomes completely disposable as it is immediately replaced by the shiny new things from the expansion areas. Not only is the new content separated by distance usually, but it gives players absolutely no incentive to ever return and revisit the older content. As a result each time an expansion is released the players are ultimately throwing more and more content in the dustbin.

A Better Way

Granted some games do a much better job at addressing this problem than others. In Rift when mentoring down you receive xp and rewards as though you were doing content at your level. The same is more or less true with Guild Wars 2 and its always mentored system of scaling the player down to the content level at all times. But in neither system do you really address the problem of lost dungeon and raid content. Ultimately you can get rewards similar to what you could earn at level, but you will never actually be able to progress your characters in the same way unless you are always doing the latest and greatest content.

With the advent of systems like StoryBricks that allow for smarter AI encounters, I keep wondering if this is now the time to have a much better system. Ideally this would work better in a system without hard level ranges, and more a “tiers of gear” approach like The Secret World has in place. What if a mob could perceive you as a greater threat based on your “tier” and ultimately fight “smarter”. This would make the old content scale to whatever level you happen to be at the time. The old encounters would be evergreen in that beating them at Tier 1 would be significantly easier than beating them at Tier 4.

Horizontal Progression

As a result you could continue to “pay out” the best tiers of gear, because all content would essentially scale up to meet the level of the players taking it on. In a mixed level group it would get far more tricky. You would have to do some sort of an average level for the encounter, but ultimately the base idea is that as you level your character you continue opening new doors to experience, rather than constantly closing permanently the doors behind you. I feel in part that this is so enticing as no amount of hard worked content provided by the designers would ever be considered “throw away” or “leveling” content again.

This of course is a massive pipe dream, and I am sure there are all measure of technically limitations to what I propose, but I have always wanted a world that scaled to me that I never outgrew. We can have this concept in single player games like Oblivion, I just think its time that we see a proper implementation in the MMO world. One added benefit is that being able to progress regardless of the content you are doing… incentivizes players to do the right thing socially… and assign their friends and guild members through that “old world” content.

Socially Beneficial

Being one of those players that regularly helps out the “young-ins”, it can be frustrating knowing that you will not actually progress your character while doing this thing that was “socially” the right thing to do. Games like Rift or EQ2 provide alternate advancement paths that make it much more enjoyable, since you know you are ultimately still making your character better in the process. However… would it not be that much cooler if you could provide a system that allowed for both the low tier player and the high tier player to receive the best type of rewards they could get… together in the same group?

It is always awesome watching a new player get their first really awesome item, because you grouped up with them to help them through a challenge. Would it not be equally exciting for them to watch you getting the same because you chose to help them? I have had a mantra for awhile… “anything that prevents me from playing with my friends is bad” and this is exactly the opposite of that. It makes sure that playing with my friends will always benefit me in the same ways it benefits them. Sure the content might be ultimately more difficult when you have 3 tier 1 players and 2 tier 4 and the end difficulty level is something in the middle… but as group you will be able to work through the challenges.

The Problem

As I sit here to write this post, it feels like it is coming out super esoteric… and as a result I am hoping to place it more firmly on the ground. In my office on the wall are lots and lots of maps, and many of them are from MMOs. There is one above my monitor that came from the Kunark expansion to the original Everquest for example. As I look at the glorious landmasses that are all these games… I am bit sad thinking that so many of those zones I will never have a valid reason to return to. They will never again be truly important to me, the same way they were when I was first leveling through them.

I would just like to see a design scheme that makes it always valid for us to return to the content we know and love and have conquered and find completely new challenges. This goes double for dungeon and raid content. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could zone into Blackwing Lair in WoW with a group of friends… and get an encounter tailored to fit YOUR level… and not a “roflstomp” soloable mess? The worst part about the “e-sport-ification” of raid content, is that we are constantly having to throw away fun experiences for whatever the newest tier happens to be. Sure you can always return to the older stuff, but it has been trivialized by the progression you have made since then.

I would just like to see something that fixes this. So that a zone stays epic regardless of when you tackle it, and that there will always be new and more exciting challenges and rewards to be found there. With the construct of scalable AI and encounters… I think that maybe finally this concept is ready to be explored. I have no desire to stay in the starter zone, grind boars, and become amazing like they did in the South Park spoof… but it would be awesome to be able to go back to that low level content and have a reason to be there.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap up and get on the road. I feel as though I have laid out a huge rambling mess. Hopefully this will make sense to someone. It has been a concept bouncing around in my head for awhile and all the talk of Storybricks and EQ Next and Scaling Mob intelligence has dislodged it enough that I wanted to try and put it down into words. I feel like I am fairly grossly unsuccessful at doing so. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope you can grasp the crux of what I was trying to say.

Playing Without Rules

August 8, 2013 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings where I am sitting here struggling to find purpose… or at least something to write about. After a few nights of lousy sleep I managed to get a pretty solid one last night. The Ceiling Fan has essentially died in the bedroom, but yesterday I hooked up an oscillating fan and it was actually quite comfortable using it. Oddly enough though, even with a good nights sleep I am just out of it this morning.

Guest Posts

I have to say I was shocked that both of my guest posters had topics ready for me yesterday. I apparently fail miserably at the concept of a guest post, since most bloggers use them for days when they don’t actually want to post. I kind of feel like that would be cheating this little experiment I have been on, to see if I can manage to post every single day for a year. I fear for November, since I plan on doing NANOWRIO this year… and I am not sure how I will be able to write every night… and then still be able to come up with something worth saying in the morning. You guys might just get a lot of status updates to my word count.

Ariad and I don’t always see eye to eye, but honestly he said a lot of things I would have said. Ultimately my problem is not removing the Trinity persay… but that when you remove it… it has to be replaced with something. In his post he did a great job and outlining how various games both digital and real all have roles that are played. So if you want to remove what World of Warcraft essentially distilled those roles down to… you need to replace them with something else. The absence of role based play essentially turns everything into a mindless deathmatch, which while fun for some time does not lend itself to engaging gameplay.

Playing Without Rules

Sevok has been a pet class in essentially every game I have ever played with him. He pretty much personifies what I think of when I think about that type of player. There was a pretty good debate that spilled out onto Google+ as a result of yesterdays posting. Essentially when dealing with a pet class, I get frustrated because I would rather just do it myself instead of sending my minion in. That along pretty much identifies me as NOT being a pet class person. While I raided on a hunter in WoW during Vanilla… I tended to lose interest once they fixed the pets and we actually had to use them in combat.

The above shot is from a run through Scarlet Monastery House Stalwart did a few weeks after the launch of World of Warcraft. Essentially we had two hunters, a shadow priest, a dps warrior and a mage. We had no real “healer” and we used a combination of the two pets to tank…. additionally if you look above you can see that I was a survival tree “melee” hunter. I am in fact the dwarf banging on the Abbot with the polearm. Everything we were doing was “wrong” but we didn’t really care.

Why did we play this way? Quite honestly because we didn’t know any better… we had yet to be told by the internet that everything we were doing was not effective. Honestly I think that has been more to blame with the stagnation within the MMO market than anything else. The “Elitist Jerks” of the world quantify and distill everything about the game world, and reduce it to a series of equations. Math is solid and unyielding, and extremely hard to argue with… but also pretty boring at times. It seems like in EQ, DAoC, and the early days of WoW we were extremely willing to make bad decisions… just to see what the consequences would be.

So what if I was a melee hunter… the brunt of internet jokes. I had fun doing it… I made it work… and through a mixture of stubbornness and creativity we were able to make things work. Sure there was always a point at which it became difficult… but even once the golden path was deeply ingrained in me… we managed to do a Blackrock Depths run with 2 rogues and 3 hunters and finished it off without much issue. Additionally our raid used to do all hunter Upper Blackrock Spire runs for fun. When 10 hunters cast aimed shot at exactly the same time… mobs pretty much just evaporate.

Flexibility of Roles

Ultimately what I am saying is that while we were using sub optimal builds and class compositions we were able to get through the content by the use of our wits. While we did not have the things that people prescribed as a “tank” or a “healer” we adapted through the use of what we had. We still very much had someone playing the role of the main tank, and someone playing the role of the healer, but we were doing so in non-standard ways. Ultimately this is the sort of thing I feel we need going forward. The ability to blur the lines of what is the tank and healer, and allow multiple people to fulfill these roles in multiple ways.

Ultimately to me it is not the failing of the trinity or role based combat, but the failing that the designers have allowed games to get distilled down to the equation of “only one right answer”. Having a Golden Path is fine, but quickly there becomes way too much social pressure to conform your character to the most optimal path. I think that is why I have enjoyed playing Rift so much over the years, is that there are literally thousands of possible right paths out there, that can be tweaked and tailored to fit the exact preferences of a specific player.

Sure there are golden paths, but they seem to change on a weekly or monthly basis. With the ability to have an extreme amount of prebuilt “roles” you can switch to it allows players to have both their experimental builds and their tried and tested builds and be able to swap back and forth between them freely. On my warrior I totally have a 61 paragon and 61 champion tried and true dps build… but I also have a number of Tanky builds that have different personal flavors to them that I am using to test various things out.

No Right Answer

Ultimately I think this is the hope I have for Everquest Next and its implementation of Storybricks. I feel as though there will NEVER be only one right answer. That we the players will be able to tailor a solution that fits the skillsets we have available. But I still feel as though role based gameplay is one of the tools in that toolkit to allow us to build those solutions. I think as Ariad, Sevok, and myself were trying to point out.. that each of us as players brings with us a certain favored role based mentality. My hope is that we can apply those ways of thinking towards new and complex challenges regardless of the character abilities we happen to currently have and come out with interesting gameplay as a result.

Flexibility of purpose and the ability to shift back and forth between what role a given player happens to be playing at the time completely seems like a viable way to deal with smarter mob AI. As evidenced by all the comments the other day regarding my wanting not to lose tanking as a thing that is done in MMOs… some of us have very technical definitions of what that role is. Much of that is rooted in the construct of the “Taunt monkey”. But as I tried to explain in the “Tank is” post… I am very flexible in what that definition means as it is applied to a given games mechanics.

My initial fear with Everquest Next was that they would be going with the “Everyone is DPS” solution that Guild Wars 2 used. This was most definitely not the path to interesting gameplay, and more or less over the course of several discussions since the weekend I have arrived at a point where I believe that EQ Next will have much more meat on its bones than that. It sounds as though they are building in roles to replace the trinity… but we just simply do not know what those roles will be or what exactly they will entail. I really look forward at getting my hands on Landmark as it goes through the beta process. I am hoping it will help to answer a number of questions.

Wrapping Up

It is that time again, and I need to be getting on the road. I have managed to turn a day where I had no clue what to write about into another long ramble. I cannot guarantee that anything I wrote is really worth reading… and is likely just me working out concepts in my own head… but my readers should be long used to that by now. I hope you all have a great day, last night we had a fun guild night running around and closing rifts. Was fairly relaxing and had a great time hanging out on mumble with Rowan, Psynister and Fynralyl. Hopefully we can get some dungeons going before too much longer, even if I have to start playing my cleric so we have a healer. I will be happy when 3.0 releases and rogues and warriors finally have a main healer.

Shaking the Toner

August 7, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy hopefully rested people. Last night was another toss and turn fest… because it seems as though our ceiling fan has broken, or at least is on its last leg. As a result I slept on top of the covers all last night, some of it relatively unsuccessfully. Here is hoping that I got enough sleep to prevent me from absolutely shutting down over the course of the day. Tonight is guild night so hopefully I have the steam to lead us on a wild adventure.

Guest Contributors

Some time ago a good friend of mine started posting the occasional article on my blog under the name of Ariad. However we did a pretty lousy job of messaging that the posts were coming from him and not me. As a result I feel there was some confusion as he and I do not always see eye to eye. We were talking yesterday and he is the Spock to my Captain Kirk. As a result I have created the banners above to denote when a guest contributor is making a post.

Additionally another friend had shown interest in making the occasional post. When I told him the Spock explanation above… he said that he was more like Khan. In the same way his opinions will also not 100% align with what I am saying, but I feel a breadth of different opinions is a good thing. I’ve known Sevok since the early days of Everquest 1 and have managed to keep up with him off and on through the various games I have played. I look forward to seeing the posts they come up with, I know Sev is currently working on a spin on my “A Tank Is” post from the other day about his favorite role… the pet class.

The Grand Experiment

It has been 103 days since I started what I dubbed the “Grand Experiment” and began posting something every single morning regardless if I want to or not. I have no real idea if the results have been a net positive, but I have been true to my cause and even when I was in a hotel room on vacation… I continued blogging each morning. Yesterday a friend of mine Talyn of the Pumping Irony blog asked me a little bit about my morning routine.

Essentially he stated something I have heard from myself many times before. That ultimately he felt like he just did not have that much time to post a blog post and as a result there are lapses between postings. This pretty much explains all of the lags in my posting pattern since I started the blog back in April of 2009. I would get into a pattern where I felt like I just did not have time to post, or that it came down to a choice between playing a game or posting. Every time the blog lost out to me just logging in and playing something instead.

The Routine

When I started down this path I figured I had a bit of time each morning as I drank my coffee and attempted to wake up. Previously I had been gaming a little bit to wake up, so I decided I would give that up and devote it to blogging. Since Talyn was curious about the timeframe it took me every morning I thought I would go through my average morning, in case anyone else out there was curious as well. My alarm goes off a 5:30 am and I get up and out of bed, making my way to the kitchen to fill the Keurig and turn it on. I stumble back down the hall and jump in the shower.

While I am in the shower I try to begin thinking about what I am going to post that morning and continue doing so as I get dressed. At roughly 6:00 am I go back to the kitchen… this time less of a stumble… to make a cup of coffee for myself and one for my wife as well. After delivering the cup of coffee to the bedside table I am usually upstairs and sitting at my keyboard by 6:10-6:15. Now begins the hard part. Some mornings I know exactly what I am going to write about… others I don’t have a clue in the world.

Shaking the Toner

If it is a writers block morning I try and flip through my RSS feed to see if anything arrived since I last read it that might start some thoughts percolating in my head. The opening paragraph is ultimately the same in most of my blog posts… this is less for you guys and more for me. This is my equivalent to the wind up before a pitch. Starting words coming out onto the page often times unjams the printer in my brain and causes the topics to come spilling out. Additionally the closing bit… is my way of turning off the faucet and allowing myself to transition from thinking about the blog to thinking about the work day ahead of me.

After lots of writing hackery and many trips to google image search and or launching a given game to collect screenshots… by about 6:30-6:45 I am wrapping up my post. I give it a once over, add any links I feel I might need, add categories to the post… and finally hit publish. I religiously use Microsoft Live Writer for my posts as it allows me to see visually how my post will look before I ever place it on the site. Additionally it does a lot of niceties like managing the image uploads, has in client cropping and resizing and lets me do my alignment trickery.

Finally once the post has been made I advertise it on both Twitter and Google+. Sure there are plugins that do this, and I could configure one and just make it happen automagically. However I like to tailor my post each morning towards the content platform I am advertising it on. This takes another 10-15 minutes depending on how many names I need to reference in the posts. I go downstairs, tell my wife that I love her and am heading out the door. At this point it is between 7:00 and 7:15… so after I jaunt over to QuikTrip for breakfast I get into the office between 7:30 and 7:45. From the moment I wake up to the moment I leave the house is roughly an hour and a half.

Constraints Help

Talyn’s initial comment was “Holy crap you’re fast!”, but in truth… it is the time constraint that helps me be speedy in the morning. When I do my weekend posts, they can take an hour and a half to two hours of just writing time. The difference is.. on the weekends I have all the time in the world, so I do not feel rushed to get in and get things done. However on the weekday mornings I know I have a finite amount of time that I can devote to each step. While I have an extremely flexible report time, I personally refuse to abuse this too much. I still end up as one of the first people into the office. Ultimately our core hours that we MUST be there are 9-3, and as salaried employees we can carve out our 40 on either side of that fixed point. I tend to work 7:30 to 4:30 most days, so I can blur that line a little bit and still be fine but I try never to absolutely violate it.

My Wife is Amazing

Yesterday while I was at work, my wife was out with some friends hitting a bunch of “junk stores” for lack of a better term. This was one of her last days of freedom before the start of the new school year and got roped into this adventure by another teacher friend. I was ramping up for a meeting and a got a text saying “are there any Lego sets you are looking for?”. My addiction to Lego has not really surfaced much on the blog yet, but I have always loved them. Of late I have been picking up sets whenever I found them cheapish. Apparently at one of the places they stopped they had a large number of sets that were marked down, and then had 20% discount applied on top of that.

An example… the Lego TIE Fighter is roughly $45 in the store, and they had it priced for $35… and then after the 20% discount the final price ended up a steal at $28. After many texts back and forth with pictures of different sets, I expected her to maybe come home with a TIE Fighter and something else… but instead she came home with this massive haul of sets. She spent roughly $100 and got all of the sets pictured above… 3 sets for my niece and nephew that are from the “easy to build” line… and a second Lord of the Rings Gandalf Arrives set for a friend.

It is not that my wife bought me Legos… it is that she saw them and immediately thought that I would want them. Granted this is a two way streets… I cannot count the number of times I have picked up some random item for her classroom that I happened to stumble upon while shopping without her. I just thought it was amazingly awesome that while out with friends, doing something completely out of the ordinary that she thought about me. I guess this is why we have been a successful pair for over 15 years. While I did not marry a gamer, I married an awesome nerd that “understands” my geek nature.

Wrapping Up

I need to get this wrapped up so I can get on the road. I hope this satiated any curiosities about my process that folks might have had. Additionally look for the first of the new round of guest posts to be happening in the next few days. These will be in addition to my morning posts. I don’t want to get out of the habit of writing each morning. For those in House Stalwart, be thinking about what you want to accomplish tonight. I am completely game for splitting into dungeon groups if we have a viable comp, running hunt rifts… or just doing random rifts and such to work on the guild quest. I hope you all have a great day today, and that you accomplish whatever you need to.

A Tank Is

August 6, 2013 by Belghast

When I typed out yesterdays post in my extremely groggy early morning state, I had no idea it would blow up as much as it did. It is probably one of the most interactive topics I have ever posted about on this blog. There are huge threads of comments on G+ and twitter as a result, and even here on my blog there were 10 comments. During all the exchanges yesterday, I had a suggestion from Brian “Psychochild” Green, that I expand on the topic of what exactly a tank is to me. I thought this was a pretty good idea, so here goes nothing.

A Tank Is

One of the things that came out from the last two days of discussions relating to the EQ Next class panel and the concept of removing tanking as a requirement from dungeons… is that we all have slightly different visions of what a tank is in our minds. As evidenced by so much of the discussion, for certain players a tank is just that character that has the taunt button. For me the definition goes so much further beyond the “taunt monkey”. Tank in my mind is made up of a bunch of different roles and personalities all wrapped together into a bigger package, and this is my attempt to explain each of these sub roles.

Tank As Juggernaut

A tank is in my mind a “meat shield”, an immovable wall that soaks up damage for the party. My vision of a tank is a massive heavily armored bulk that is an imposing force on the battlefield. My personal choice has always been to have as much stamina as humanly possible and as a result have a phenomenally large hit point pool and simply capable of laughing off most blows. But it is honestly completely up to the individual tank how they choose to full this role of being able to soak up a goodly amount of damage for the party saving the other members from certain death.

In various games I have seen various schemes for making this work, and I feel like going forward we should expand this role quite a bit. Traditionally you have mitigation or avoidance as the tools in this toolkit, but I am open to other methods such as a mage for example that is adept at shielding techniques or an agility based melee who is capable of moving so fast that they reduce the chance to hit. My personal preference will always be the big guy in the big armor that lumbers across the battle field like a moving rampart. However the game and to some extend player chooses to do it, this sub role is about being able to take abuse for the party.

Tank As Defender

Like I have said, Tanking for me feeds into my protective nature. I want to protect my friends and family and keep them safe. Another facet of tanking is the protector. Traditionally this has been to juggle targets to make sure that the big bad things stay off your healer and your dps, but I feel that the role is so much more than that. Ultimately the goal of the defender is to interrupt the flow of combat and impose itself in the middle of the process. This role has long been defined as the person with taunt, or the person with massive aggro generation… but quite honestly taunt is not the only tool or even the best tool in most situations.

Any ability that can reset the flow of an attack, can interrupt the flow of battle buying your healer or dps time to get out of harms way. In various games I have seen multiple ways of doing this, including slows, stuns, grip attacks, charge attacks, knockbacks, throws, and roots. All of them play a part in resetting an attack to cause the mob to change direction and focus even momentarily on the tank allowing the other party members to avoid taking the big damage. League of Legends is a prime example of a game that does not have taunt or aggro in the traditional sense. However they most definitely have tank characters. Each of them has some way of screwing up a players attack just long enough for someone else to either escape or swoop in for the kill.

Tank as General

Of all of the facets of tanking, this to me is by far the most important. A tank controls the battlefield, they make order out of chaos. The tank is the battlefield leader, controlling every aspect of combat from the pull, to the target priority order and even down to accessing the situation at hand and determining if it is time to recover after every confrontation. In the best dungeon and raid environments, the tank directs the flow of combat using the above abilities to keep other players out of harms way, and interrupt the attacks of the monsters in a pattern of their choosing.

So much of this role also is the ability to assess the risk at hand, device a strategy and execute it letting your team know what they should be doing in the situation. This encompasses not only knowing your own skills, but knowing the skills of all of the other players in the party and how best to leverage those for the ultimate win. This can always happen from “behind the lines”, but I have always felt that the flow of a grouping encounter works best when it is the “puller” directing traffic and preparing the party for what is coming. This facet of tanking really has little to do with the mechanics and more to do with the leadership of the player in the tank seat.

Tank as Mentor

Many times during combat things go horribly wrong, and since the tank is there in the heat of battle they can often times diagnose what is going wrong. In many ways the tank also acts as a battle mentor, and it is how they go about this that often times means the difference between success and failure. A tank that is willing to help the other team members with issues on the ground in a polite and not ego infused way, can rally together a defeated team into victory. A tank that passes the blame onto others always, will end up fostering a bitter environment that often ends in catastrophe for the party… or at least their repair bills.

A humble tank that shows a willingness to work with the other players to solve problems can do a good amount to set the morale of the group as a whole. Again this is a juggling act between being the forceful always right leader, and letting someone NOT directing the flow of combat become a backseat driver. A tank that is ready to assess what is going wrong, and provide constructive criticism in the form of “helpful tips” will go a lot further than one that sends down proclamations from on high. In many ways the tank is the cruise director for every outing, and unfortunately it ends up our responsibility to make sure the entire mission is flowing smoothly and that everyone is happy.

A Tank is… Complicated

Hopefully thought all of this you are beginning to see a picture that for me a Tank goes beyond simple threat and taunt mechanics. Quite honestly it is an extremely complicated role, and one that I do not take lightly. Ultimately all of this, and my protective leanings are why I do not really like tanking for pick up groups. I just don’t feel that protective towards people I do not know, and after years of bad experiences with the WoW Dungeon Finder… I simply cannot bring myself to queue as a tank for anyone but my friends and my guild.

Quite honestly I used to tank for pick up groups on a regular basis in the days before the dungeon finder. When you had to talk to players face to face in order for form a team, you were far less likely to be a complete dick to them over the course of a dungeon. Sure I encountered more than my share of haughty elitism, but that is something you can brush off much easier than outright disruptive and damaging behavior. I miss the days when in order to be successful you needed the personal skills to be able to assemble a team for your purpose. I met so many friends doing this, as contrasted with the “silent dungeons epidemic” where no one actually talks anymore.

I realize I am lamenting a bygone era… and the modern “push a button, get a group” is here to stay. However I will still build a team by hand if given the choice, and even now I prefer to draw on guild, social channels, and even random strangers in general chat over queuing up for a random dungeon. Or sadly… more often than not I just do not run a dungeon at all and resign myself to doing over world content. The dungeon finder system seems to have failed tanks like me, and the community or lack thereof that has sprung up around it. Or quite honestly… as Rowan alludes to.. the community might have just been something I had imagined all along.

Wrapping Up

Well it is the time I need to wrap this post up and get it advertised. I hope after reading it you get a much clearer picture of what exactly I mean when I say “Tank”. Last night I was completely out of sorts and didn’t really do much gameplay of any significance. I blame sleeping horribly the night before. Here is hoping that tonight I will be up to doing some funtime shenanigans again… and maybe even pull together a dungeon. I hope you all have a great day, and that everything goes smoothly.