Feral Tanks get No Love (rant)Follow

Since my Hunter hit level 70 over a year ago, I've always been intrigued by the idea of raiding. Big groups, fun fights, cool toys. I had a hard time finding a guild that matched my "ideals" about raiding. Call it the mullet approach to raiding...business up front, party in the back. Be a good sport in guild, be a nice guy. Treat people fairly and have fun, and carry that attitude into raids, but when the flasks get quaffed it's go-time.

I never even got into a "raiding" guild with my shaman. Did a couple of Kara clears in PUGs but that was about it.

Returning to a PvP realm with a shiny new character (my druid), from day one the idea was to level as fast as possible, get appropriately geared, and find a guild that would allow me to contribute and explore my interests. Tanking really appealed to me after a brief stint with a tanking class in LOTRO, and you just can't beat a druid for all-out versatility. I can be specced to tank and still swap some gear and solo like a champion? Sign me up!

My gear is decent for my level of progression. I'm probably about ready to take up a role as MT in Kara without much difficulty, I can fill a role in T4 25-man fights, and when it comes to the source of tonight's (minor) frustration, I can even OT Zul'Aman without being a liability.

Right now, my self buffed stats are sitting at about 14.6k health, 27.3k armor, 33% dodge, 441 defense, 85 resilience. By no means ideal for anything beyond Karazhan, but certainly managable. I just picked up my Idol of Terror today, and I'm not sure whether to go for the SSO tanking ring or save and splurge on either the legs or the chest...a lot of that will no doubt depend on what comes out of Kara/Mag's/Gruul's over the next 3-4 weeks. I've got the extra defense + resilience to be able to afford to lose defense rating as I upgrade, and when I'm not doing dailies to fund what I need to raid, I'm working on accumulating badges for future upgrades.

So tonight the guild I just recently joined had 2 ZA groups going. The first group was the top-geared people from the guild pushing for a bear mount. No question, I didn't even consider signing up for that one. In fact, I had planned on spending the evening grinding Aldor rep items had not someone mentioned that there would likely be a second ZA group forming with more emphasis on just learning the fights. A progression group, if you will.

Before anything else, my experience in the guild the last few days has been good. I did a couple of heroics with guildies before raid time and the runs were both fun and successful. What I noticed right away as the ZA group was forming up in Ghostlands was the chatter in vent about how such-and-such would be impossible without a pally tank. Need a pally tank for the gauntlet. Need a pally tank for the bird boss. Pally tank this and pally tank that. It just so happened that what our group had tonight was a warrior MT and me as OT. We had what we had. Keep in mind, we're not talking about "such-and-such would be easier with a pally tank"...it was more along the llines of, "this will be impossible without."

I'm as guilty as anyone else of prefering a paladin tank for some things. I won't touch Heroic Shadow Labs without 3 cc/dps classes backing me up. It's not a gear thing, it's a "how the hell am I going to hold aggro on 4+ mobs through big heals and the inevitable mistakes?" If I'm asked to tank heroic S.Labs (like I was today) by a group without 3 cc classes, I politely recommend that they push for a paladin tank so the run goes that much more smoothly. I absolutely loved Kara with a pally MT when I was running it on my Hunter. It just simplifies things. I get that. But I'm extremely reluctant to go so far as to suggest that something is impossible without one.

So back to ZA. We clear to the bear boss' platform without any difficulty. I do what I figure a tank should do...hold my assigned mob(s) on me and be ready to intercept any runners in the event that something goes sideways. We get the four mobs directly in front of the boss marked with 9 minutes left on the timer. I was to tank one of the bear/rider mobs, one of the single mobs was to be trapped, and the MT had a bear/rider + second solo mob misdirected onto him. I pulled my mob to where he was supposed to be and started going through my standard rotation. MT goes down and the inevitable wipe ensues. No biggie...we were hoping to get the first timed chest but nobody was expecting it. We start up on attempt #2, only this time the MT pulls his mobs up the ramp where the quest item for the 20 slot bag is...out of healer range. MT goes down and the next thing I know I'm dead. It happened pretty fast. I noticed on the first attempt that the mob I was tanking was hitting for anywhere between 1200-4000 damage and hitting fairly fast, but I was also dodging a lot and the hits for more than 2k were few and far between.

Right away as we were running back, people were trying to figure out what happened. Someone pipes up in vent, "X was running free...don't know what happened there..." (X being my mob). I told them that I had gone down fast and wasn't sure what had happened. With exasperated voices they begin complaining that a feral tank really needs to be almost all T5 to tank those mobs. My gear sucked and that's why I died so quickly. Seriously almost on the verge of calling the run because in their mind, the feral druid OT wasn't capable of pulling their weight. "You really need more armor and health...I'll bet if you check your log you'll see a lot of big crushes that dropped you." (Nevermind that the warrior went down just before me because he ran out of healing range...somehow don't think I could have salvaged that even in full T6/Splat gear).

So I did just that...I checked my log. I have my combat log set to show only what I do/what happens to me. Okay...let's see here...1200 physical...1400 physical...1100 physical...3900 physical (ouch)...1200 physical...2200 physical...etc. etc. No crushing blows. The one glaring omission from my combat log: over 18000 damage taken without a single heal. Not even a HoT. What had gone wrong wasn't an undergeared feral tank holding back the raid, but a total lack of healing assignments. When the MT had gone out of healing range, all three healers had run over to try and top up his rapidly depleting health bar.

We managed to get the bear boss down on our first attempt after clearing the trash in front of him. Flawless transitions from warrior to druid tank between boss forms and all around a good, clean fight. We next attempted the gauntlet and I was assigned to pick up the two troll spawns from behind the party and bring them to where the MT was for AoE. I ran into trouble not knowing how long they would take to spawn and hit Enrage too early...by the time they appeared, I was back down to zero rage, ate a charge stun, and before I could pick either of them up they had found their own way to the main group and had been drawn in by a thunderclap. Between 3 trolls + birds while a near-rageless feral tank was struggling to pick some of them up, we didn't last long. We abandoned the gauntlet and fought our way to the lynx boss. Folks were getting tired, and after three wipes we called it. I wasn't taking any more damage from the boss' cleaves than the warrior and there's nothing I could have done to mitigate the damage from the chain lightning. An extra 3k health wouldn't have saved the raid on that one...it was just a progression group learning the fight.

I have to admit, it bothered me that a great many things were immediately assumed to be my fault because I was the marginally geared feral tank. Bad enough that I wasn't a pally...zomg I still have 5 blues. I had no airs of being ideally geared to be on the run and had no intention of signing up until one of the guild officers told me to sign up anyways and if the leadership decided I wasn't geared to be there, I wouldn't get an invite.

The solution, as I see it, isn't to wage war on ignorant guildies who consider feral tanks to be the least of three options. The solution is to keep doing what I'm doing, work at improving my gear and my skill set, and prove them wrong.

This


Don't sweat it, it was a learning run.

My defense is high, no doubt about that. Currently, the only thing I could do right away to lower it would be to swap out the enchant on my bracers. It would likely represent a marginal increase in another stat and depending on how things go over the next week, my bracers may actually be the next piece I upgrade through badges so I'm holding off on getting them re-enchanted.

I have no problem with skepticism about the new guy...especially when the new guy happens to be the OT you're relying on to be successful in the run. What bothered me was the attitude that a pally tank was necessary. I read up on the fights we did in ZA before the raid, to include the gauntlet and the bird boss we never got to...both areas the group had almost unanimously decided was impossible without a pally tank. I didn't read anything about a pally tank being necessary...in fact, I read strategies to manage those fights assuming no pally tank was present. This guild has been around for a while and most of their core raiders are full T4/partial T5 or better. To an extent, even the lesser geared members are pampered. A lot of them have been at least partially carried through a lot of content. When you've got a T4/5 prot pally zipping you through Kara/Mag/Gruul's, anything else seems like...work. You mean there's a chance your tank/off-tank might actually die if someone else is asleep at the switch? zomg...heavens to mergatroid...