shadowlabs holy tank Follow

So this is essentially just a rant, and hopefully I don't offend anyone in the process.

A few nights ago I was running shadowlabs on my hunter to finally hit 70. Took about an hour to find a tank, but someone in the group told the leader to invite a pally he knew that could tank for us. I was thinking great a pally tank, love them when they know what they're doing.

So we start out with the trash mobs, nothing to hard. Had a moment while we were taking a quick mana break to check out our tanks gear. At first glance I was impressed because he had everything gemmed and mostly epic gear, some pvp gladiator stuff and then some either heroic drops or kara drops. Then I look a little more closely at the gems and some of the enchants he has.

All gems were for +healing/+spell critical strike, or +intellect. His enchants ranged from +15 spirit to +healing. Essentially he was a holy/ret spec'd pally that thought he could tank. Now granted I'm not the most knowledgeable pally tank, but I know that you need a ton of +stamina and +defense over +healing/spell critical strike.

Then I look at his talents since as of the patch you can check out people's talents. Not a single point in protection!! So then he goes on to rant to us about how the DPS wasn't that good and that we needed to focus more on his targets. This guy would pull 6 mobs at a time and expect our poor healer to try and keep him alive as well as the few runners that would invariably get away.

I even asked him why he thought as a holy spec'd pally he could tank shadowlabs. Of course I get the usual response "I've tanked this instance a ton of times...blah blah blah."

Needless to say it took us 3 hours to clear shadowlabs so that two people in our group could get their first kara key fragment.

My repair bill was over 10g just for mail. The healer who had a few epics totaled 15g. I swear we wiped 12 times the entire run. I've never had such a bad run in shadowlabs.

That is why I've realized that some people don't like pally tanks. Just because we wear plate doesn't mean that we can spec anyway we want and tank any instance. Come on a holy tank for shadowlabs? It's bad enough with a protection spec'd warrior of pally, why make it even tougher when you're not even spec'd to tank?

But that's what makes pally tanks so good! They can tank and heal themselves!

But yeah I agree with Selverein, just because a few people can get away with it situationally doesn't mean it's viable or even a good idea.

What made me really laugh was the +15 spirit though.

mmmmm,

I just did that the other day actually. And no, I wasn't happy with myself (holy tanking SL) but we needed to get the key frag for someone and no tanks were on, /shrug.

They let you see the talents of other people so that you can (to the best of your ability) gauge the caliber of a group member, among other things. With the lower requirements for heroics, I'm all smiles and candy before we group, and when we finally are all at the meeting stone, that's when I go over EVERYONE's gear.

If you don't cut my mustard, I politely bow out. And that's both gear AND talents. So when I saw holy epicced gear and 0 points in prot, I would've said, "Hey guys, thank you for the invite, I've gotta bow out. I apologize."

Tada!