In Which I Am A Hypocrite

It’s been awful for the last two weeks – no bear to tank for me whenever I want a run! Couple that with my renewed interest in Valor Points and you have a recipe for… well, annoyance. I’ve been trying to do guild runs but probably half my randoms have been total randoms so far.

Yesterday I queued up to do a heroic, by myself. I got Stonecore. Never my favorite but not that bad. I’ll have to actually pay attention to some fights, is all. The tank, a DK with a name something like JohnnyDK, starts complaining immediately that he hates this place and “please something else”. I point out that the dungeon finder is on cooldown so we might as well start.

He tells the shaman to hex one of the trash mob, pulls, and goes down like a cheap… tent in a high breeze.  And then lies there dead while I keep the rest of the party alive longer than he was. We wipe. I release and come back. He still hasn’t released.

It’s really bugging me. I point out that if he had released and come back we might have taken out this group. Did I mention that his “pull” was to face-aggro the mobs? And he ignored Millhouse Manastorm who was standing 10 feet away shooting us? And that he’s a dk with Death Grip?

After a minute or two, he still doesn’t release. I’ve recovered my mana so I rez him. He stands around, waits for his mana to come back, and then charges into the group again exactly as he’d done before. Once again, his health heads for the bottom like a has-been popstar’s charts…. he showed no signs of cooldown usage or anything. Only this time I die before he does.

So I do something I’m not proud of, I say, “You are the worst tank I’ve ever seen” and drop group. Could I have worked with him to figure out why this trash was so hard? Probably. Was he actually the worst tank ever? I don’t know, two pulls isn’t really long enough.

My brother was online. Not Logarithm, a different brother. He’s been slowly gearing up his paladin tank and he told me he was high enough to get into a heroic. I convinced Falahla to come and lend her mage-y awesomeness and we queue up.

We get Throne of Tides, which is great, and I look at my brother’s gear. It’s…. painful. He’s got 10k more health than me and his gear is barely acceptable for this place – if he was ret, or “this place” was a battleground. The only things he has with tank stats are his shield and relic.

I whisper to him about what stats he needs to look for and to make sure to use crowd control and we’re off.  Our random people are a mage and a dk, apparently together/in vent together, since one tells us the other is afk. No problem. It takes about five minutes to kill the first trash pack since the heals aren’t getting interrupted, but we get past that and are good. I have to tell my brother where to go; he never came here on regular so this is new to him.

We get to the first boss without incident. Between Falahla’s awesome sheep and great dps, and my very powerful heals, we can do this. And my brother has all the right tank instincts, just bad gear and no clue about the fights. I can work with that.

Wipe on the first boss due to some… misunderstandings…. that you need to kill the crowd controlled caster adds, not just watch them sheepily wander about.  Came back and wiped when he stands in a blue waterspout. Came back again and won the fight easily.

Now I could say something about how it’s nice that the puggers aren’t complaining but – my brother is beating both of them on dps easily and Falahla is doing more than everyone else in the party combined. It’s pathetic.

I give my brother very basic instructions and he handles the next boss like a pro. Again Falahla is carrying the party… that fight is a dps race, that’s all, and she can apparently win that race even hobbled to the rest of us.

We skip the corridor leading to the brain eater. I just don’t think I can keep him alive on this trash. Instead we do the gauntlet and he does an awesome job picking up adds. No sweat. And on to the final boss. He’s a bit sluggish to get the big adds in phase 2 but I get all the aggro there so I just kite around a little until we hit phase 3. Then I die because nobody else is killing the flesh beasts that are left over, so I decide to, so I forget to heal myself. But we finish off the fight no problem.

I tell my brother to go finish Twilight Highlands, get a Wildhammer tabard, and look for gear with parry, block, and mastery instead of hit and crit

Then finally Ado and Kerick get done playing with their real friends on their Horde server and come join me and Falahla. That makes 3 dps, one healer… and no tanks on. But Grom’s on, and he’s sad that we don’t have room for dps. And I know for a fact that his tank set is pretty great!

It took a little arm twisting but we got him, and drew Halls of Origination. We decided to make it a fast run and just go for the necessary kills. With all of us in vent, the run was smooth and fun, just like we’d hoped. I know Grom isn’t that fond of tanking but he did a great job for us.

So there’s three runs, three tanks. One in absolutely terrible gear that I spent all the time it took to coach him through. One in great gear but unsure of himself that I had no qualms about. And one who probably had good gear – his health pool was nice – but I didn’t give more than 6 minutes of time to before condemning him back to the darkness from whence he came. Not exactly my best performance.

But with my brother, and with Grom, I knew they’d listen if I told them something. And they’re people I like, who like me. Neither was just in it for fast VP.  I’ll heal in a situation where I know it’s going to be really hard for me, but for a stranger?  One who won’t even release when he dies?

Yeah, I don’t think so.

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