Hourglasses and Inattentive PeopleFollow

/pseudo-rant

I miss my static group ; ;

They haven't been on for the last couple of days so it's been me fiddling around and doing a bit of this and a bit of that working towards rep/gear. With my Looking for Group settings set to Steamvaults (Beast Lord x 2 ftw!), Shadow Labyrinth (Lower City Rep) and Arcatraz (1200 rep -> Sha'Tar Revered, 3rd Kara key fragment) I get an invite to a Black Morass run. Go figure :P

So I think to myself, "Hmmm...might as well give it a shot." The guy who invited me was a guildless Warlock, and along with him came 3 people from two of the more "successful" raiding guilds on the realm.

I had never been to BM. I had read a little bit about what to expect...portals, protect Medivh, etc...oh, and that it could be a very challenging instance.

As soon as we run in, our Holy Paladin MT (yes, that's right...Holy Paladin main tank) starts gathering up mobs. I had no idea what was going on so I just start pewpewing them down with the rest of the party as he shows up with a cluster in tow. No problem. After a while, it was time to get on to the real action.

We were doing pretty well to start. First boss dropped an epic tanking ring. Somewhere between the first boss and the second boss, however, our Warlock got disconnected...and stayed disconnected. So here we are, Holy Paladin tanking, DPS warrior managing adds, and Holy Paladin healing with me on tank mob for dps.

We managed to 4-man the second boss, and he dropped an Hourglass of the Unraveller. "Yippy!" thought I. The dps Warrior rolled Need, I rolled need, and the other two passed. I won the roll (double yippy!) and then I saw the three symobls of death from the Warrior:

"..."

Now, maybe it's just a netiquette thing, but I've always been under the impression that when someone types, "..." after someone does something, it means, "I'm so shocked you did that, I'm speechless." To be fair, it could also have meant, "I can't believe I just lost the roll on that..." Either way, the Warrior had already won the roll for the epic tanking ring, so meh.

Onwards we go, still with only 4 people. We're on about the 16th portal, the Rift Keeper guy turns on me 15 seconds after I FD and I go down. **** happens, but I made a comment to the group that it's a tough instance to 4-man. Apparently, nobody had realized that the Warlock had disconnected 10 minutes ago. Consequently, I guess the tank thought I was complaining that I had died and that I was rubbing it in that they'd be without me for a couple of minutes. He starts up with the, "well you should manage threat better," to which I replied that he simply wasn't building threat fast enough.

Now, to be fully honest, the tank was right. I should have aborted all offense and waited for him to get a healthy margin of threat before I resumed. I had just used FD after 4 crits out of 5 shots and it was resisted with me at 19k threat and the tank at about 16-17k. I was getting impatient after standing around at the start of fights watching the tank's threat creep up 170 here, 300 there, and having to stop again mid-fight with the dps warrior getting overrun by adds and the Rift Keeper having only 20k HP left kind of sucked.

By the time I got back in, the last boss had spawned, the 17th portal had been skipped, Medivh's shield was at 30% or so and the party was just a few seconds from a wipe. I managed to get to where they were fighting the last boss and got one shot on the boss before I had to FD because I had a crocodile chomping on my ***. A few short seconds later everyone else wiped.

At this point, the Warrior starts up with the "This is how you manage threat..." lecture to me.

So let's do the math, shall we?

Let's assume the Warrior's statement was entirely accurate and that the main tank was holding steady at 300 tps. As an almost raid-ready Survival Hunter in terms of gear, I'm hitting Auto-Shots for 400-450ish non-crit damage (buffed) every 2.1 seconds. That by itself is about 190-240 dps, working out to about the same tps. No room for Steady Shot/Arcane Shot. A couple of unfortunate back-to-back crits and all of a sudden I'm pushing up to 490-620+ tps, and with a 27.xx crit %, that means if I'm going to stay under the tank's threat threshold, I'm going to be aborting even my Auto-Shots. Not acceptable when you're on the clock and have to be downing mobs before the next portal opens.

(The Prot Warrior I normally run with sits at a pretty solid 600-800 tps, builds up easily 3000-3500 threat in the first 5-7 seconds of a fight, and then I race him to see if I can get to "gotta FD now" threat levels on trash mobs.)

The Warlock managed to get on just as I was about to run out of the instance...his PC had overheated and he had to wait for it to cool down and reboot. Once outside the instance, I left the group and the Warrior runs by on their mount and flashes a Damage Meter report in /s.

The warrior had apparently not reset his damage meter in some time, as it reported him as having done 1.32 million damage (remember that he was on add duty), the Holy Paladin tank 532000 damage and me 480000 damage. Because...you know...the combined total HP of all the mobs we fought in there excluding those from the last two portals was 2.5 million HP or so...

I think they were trying to find a 5th and run again when I hearthed out of CoT and who knows...if the Warlock's PC didn't overheat again maybe they cleared it. I had no regrets about leaving when I did...sometimes it becomes apparent that folks aren't looking at the big picture, which is fine until they start up the lectures. If I was a super-uber team-player SV Hunter, I would have kept my threat below the tank for the entire run...and we woul have gotten overrun by the 14th portal.

I still got my trinket though. (yippy!! :D)

Have better tanks and use FD aggressively. I run into this all the time.. and they always blame it on the hunter. If a tank is doing there job the mobs should almost never come to you. You cant always be pumping out max dps but if Im stuck on auto shot because our tank is inept I will simply leave that group, or talk to the rest of the group and get the tank kicked. In raids my guild would never abide that crap, we really put our MT's through the ringer before we allow them to MT in a raid setting. It makes them better and our jobs all easier because we can start dps'ing faster.

Directly to the op, you shoulda known something was up when a holy pally tried to tank BM. Its a hard instance and you need someone thats specced to tank to actually get through it.

No, my issue wasn't (well not in particular) with the tank. It wasn't with anyone specific.

I was unable to avoid getting aggro even from auto-shots, and yes I did have to feign continuously. But on the same note the mage was putting out far superior dps but not taking the same aggro I was. He did a few times, but not as often as I did. A warlock also did more damage.

I can sit back and not even auto-shot, but if that's so what is the point of me being there?

I'm not sure why I am taking the aggro over classes that are doing more dps.

Right I get it, which was part of the intention behind my post.

You basically knew that the instance was going to whipe, it was foreseable, since you were experienced with that run. You did everything you could to prevent it, at the cost of your life. The tank was already P/Oed about losing the epic(wether he was pissed about you rolling or just losing it in general he was still pissed), on top of that he could have mistook your comment, which made things even worse.

The point of my post was, by even stopping auto-attacking, basically by doing everything "right" in terms of controlling threat, and a whipe still occurs, the tank is less likely to be able to rationally place the blame entirely on you, but as it stands now, with the way things turned out, the tank probably thinks you are a scrub player, and shruged the blame off of himself onto you. But had you not died, but not done enough DPS, you had the arguementative protection of not being able to DPS enough because he wasnt generating enough threat.

I didn't know he was Holy until after the fact. I still can't really tell just by watching someone play which spec they are, unless it's a Hunter and I see Trueshot Aura or a giant red pet with a giant red master. I found out he was Holy after I died and the tank seemed to misunderstand my comment about 4-manning the run. He made the comment about me managing threat, I responded with a comment about him building a threat, and then the Warrior on add duty pipes up, "He's holy :P".

For what it was we were doing quite well and likely would have cleared the instance were it not for the Warlock getting disconnected. The main elite on the 16th portal was down to 1/3 health when I died...with another person on dps we would have probably kept pace with the portals and been able to manage the last boss.

I just got my third key fragment for Kara last night, so I'll have a BM rematch in my not-too-distant future, only this time I'll be going with a Prot Warrior tank and a Frost Mage on main add duty. Should be interesting >:D