I’m waiting out my Dungeon Cool down by writing this post. I JUST WANTED MY BADGES.
Once upon a time there was a DK tank who entered an instance as tank in his DPS spec. So this here Shadow Priest come healer out of desperation of 13 min queues told him he was in the wrong spec, and I’m the baddie!
Look I went for a week without posting bad Looking for group stuff. I deserve a rant!
I have Elitist Group installed. He was taking a fair bit of damage – and I wanted to understand why. So I checked the summary for the party. I was confused. Gear = 0% and then I checked his details. He wasn’t in tank spec, but was in tank gear.
Could I have healed a DPS tank with no sheild, and in the wrong spec. Probably, and I would do it if a tank I knew wanted to try it for kicks. Means more work for me, but thats ok – if its someone I know.
I just cannot believe the nerve, and hell yeah it was worth leaving party for it. If only I could have left a warning note for the next healer.
And yes I was nice enough to leave inbetween pulls.
I shall do another random and find someone nice to talk about.. Wish me luck!
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
lol… a few people popping up and saying they made it a week… but can’t stand it any more… Typhoon Andrew decided if he couldn’t write anything nice, he wouldn’t write anything…
So it was a week without posts…
I guess a good run is where nothing bad happens..
Just as an FYI, there are perfectly good Unholy tank specs. They’re not generally in vogue for prog raiding, right now, since a couple of ICC mechanics hurt them (fast bosses and ICC radiance kick Bone Shield in the teeth a bit) but in a heroic, they have acceptable mitigation, and insanely good sustained AoE threat.
Mind you, I tanked half a VH+ on my unholy DPS DK (in DPS plate) with nothing but a weapon and presence swap macro, after the tank took a ninja-AFK after the instance was started.
Not by any means saying you should feel obliged to stick with someone quite so… inconsiderate… but do realise that there are genuine Unholy tanks out there.
You don’t have much choice if a tank does that in Vh ><, and I know that as long as they are in plate, or bear form a semi tank is better then a clothy – I probably could have kept the tank alive if we had continued, we made it past the first boss. The group was taking more damage then they ought, and so was he. However having noticed the spec, I would have been remiss to not have said anything- regardless of intended or not. I'm sure tanks wouldnt be too impressed if I healed in shadow Spec – I fully expected him to say something along the lines of "Opps" I will change right now.
Next time won’t leave.
Just shadowmeld after the pull and say, “sorry, I healed as hard as I can, but you took way too much damage”
He will call you bad and suck and loser but can’t kick you in the first 15 minutes.
Repeat until he breaks red.
Gevlon has it right here, methinks. If he wants to do fast queues as a tank, he should spec for it, and not drain everyone else’s sanity. I have a macro to keep dps in line, something about if you stand in fire you die, if you pull aggro, barring a poor tank, you die. They doubt me, and die once, then either leave or shape up.
Tanks are no different. I had one, just once, mouth off to me about my heal style. I am a tree, and typically only use Rejuv, Lifebloom, and Wild Growth as long as that does the trick. He started telling me I need to use “real heals” and wouldn’t drop it. He never got below 75%, which is my comfort zone, but was convinced I was doing poorly. So I whispered the retadin, asking if he would toss on Righteous Fury for one pull “if the tank died,” and then, by chance, the tank died. He said nothing further the entire instance.
thats mean! – and the only reason why I stayed for that pull was the Dk had already pulled, and I wouldn’t just be ‘punishing’ him, but the rest of the party –
I don’t really have any way of knowing if a tank is tanking in dps gear or not. I’m not knowledgeable about tanks, and don’t have any addons that clue me in.
I think I prefer to remain ignorant on this one. I’d much prefer to think I was helping out a really poorly geared tank than an impatient/selfish one.
As a healer – and even as a player the more I understand about a spec/class then the better I can apply tools. Eg can expect more spike damage, be more careful with keeping my renews up, ( or renewing dps that pulls agro before they pull agro – and try for less reactive healing – I’ve been playing with more add ons just to see what sorta of usefull information I get can out of them.
a DK tank spec, any spec (all three trees can tank) will at a minimum have 5 points invested into each tree. dodge, armor and blade barrier. now. becasue the difference between dps spec and tank spec for a dk is slightly more mitigation and a defensive CD or 2 here and there, technically it IS possible to tank in dps spec (unlike other classes where tanking trees provide some essential tanking talents) though it sounds like in his case, he wasn’t making the best of the baseline abilities and was a douche so…
Sorry, but you were the wrong one here. The difference between DK tanking spec and DK dps is 15 points – so your unholy will have 5% less avoidance, 5% more incoming damage and 5-6K less armor ( he will still be in the 24k range armor). Just pop frost presence and you are ready to go if you have the tank gear with GS 4500+ .
This DK can tank any heroic with ease. How do I know that – well I am one of those tanks. Yes a healer you will have to heal with 20% more then usual but if you are able to keep a tank during ToC 10, you will be keeping this kind of tank in heroic with ease.
So yeah – for heroics the DPS spec for a DK is optional – we get more of our survival ability from our frost presence then from the build.
Sorry, Daniel, but that is just plain wrong… Try healing them.
DKs are already the skipiest of the tanks, and healing them can be stressful if they are not on their game. If they don’t have the holy trinity of tanking 5 pointers, it gets MUCH worse. If they are geared far above the content, it doesn’t matter as much, but it still makes a difference.
Doubt it really … my DK at the moment has 15k hp, 4k armor and 15% more avoidance then the times he first tanked this heroics almost an year ago. We did fast run then, and I was healed by disc priest in naxx 10 gear. So I take your opinion with a grain of salt. Now if you are one of the healers that are used to keep whole group up with only earth shield + healing stream totems – then yes, DK with tanking gear of 5000 and dps spec will indeed seem fragile. But in absolute terms he is not.
rubbish, if you want to tank, use tank-spec.
How would you like it if your druid is in Boomkin-spec while healing??
You are expecting more work from someone else, for what? More DPS?
I would have been more open to trying to heal him if he had justified himself in anyway – we have cookie cutter specs and strats for a reason, they make things easier – and easier may not be fun, but in fairness we expect a tank to be a tank – we should be allowed to question things that are odd – and I can’t see him being ok with me healing in shadow spec.
Here’s the thing… I am talking about Tree healing, with Rejuv and 3xLifebloom rolling, and keeping Regrowth up. These HoTs even out the spikes fairly well, so that I have time for bomb heals and Swiftmend. But the thing is, a DPS spec’d DK in tanking gear is more likely to go from 100% to 20% in 2 punches than any other class.
I am not saying that I will not run with off-specs, I love Arms warriors in tank gear and Def stance, and even some Rets in a shield… But DKs are spiky to heal already until well geared, and making it even worse is something I won’t deal with. Because even if I keep them up and fine, what about the dps that is taking aoe damage from random crap? I have no time for them because our tank is being an idiot?
And what in the world could bring a 40K hp tank to 8k hp in 2 seconds in heroic? We are not talking about raids – we are talking heroics here.
And yes – I have been healed by an ele shammy for a lots of runs. I have a bit different attitude in this game – most importantly – this will do. You take the first person that has good enough gear spec whatever and run with him. Usualy it is enough. i have done it in ilvl 200 items days. With the grossly overgearing of the original heroics now – we ran in our guild just for fun to see if 5 DPS can do any heroic – all but ICC ones are doable.
And I am not talking about someone in ICC gear. I am also not talking about steady damage, like other tanks take. I am talking about spike damage, taken by less than fully geared retardks too stubborn to make a tank spec, or use it.
It is not a pita to heal them, until rng crits and every hit lands mitigated only by armor for 5-10 seconds and all of a sudden between the HoTs rolling AND big bomb heals they barely make it. Much less likely to happen in a proper tank spec. And the likeliness is the big issue in my mind.
Basically, if the tank isn’t geared to the nines, or shows that (s)he is spectacular and can rotate cooldowns, then they are only making my job harder. That’s when I let them die and heal the Retadin.
I agree he shouldn’t have been an ass about it. That said, I would almost RELISH the thought of healing a DPS-tank… because healing has become a horrible, horrible bore with the current gear levels in heroics.
Horrible.
I wouldnt mind trying it on a friendly tank – eg one that I know is not as asshat – will change back if its gets too hard. Is aware that he might have agro/damage taking problems and so use tools available to help, if I get bored I dps – I have a friendly tank offering to tank with his pants off ( on his avatar.. ) just to make it a little more interesting..
I got to say I love when chicks talk dirty 🙂
It was a quote!
I know, i just like to share. LOL!
There seems to be a higher % of retarded DK tanks than any other tanking class. A pity because there are also some fantastic ones.
WTB Fantastic tanks and fantastic attitudes
This. I love having a great tank of any class or spec, it makes the run so much better. I am even open to some old school SHAMANTANKING! I didn’t do ZF with a “proper” tank until 3.3, but I remember some fun times on my Mage back in maybe 1.6-1.8 with my buddy tanking on his Enh Shaman. Sheep one, sap another, FROST SHOCK one, and melee the other.
A lot of these newcomers to WoW never really got to experience back when you made shit work through coordination and the MASSIVE runbacks when it went wrong. Uphill both ways, too.
That tank was an ass, but tanking 3.0 heroics in a dps spec is no big deal for a dk or druid who has all their key abilities with a dps spec (or even dps gear on the druid), just less mitigation/cooldowns. I regularly tanked in all or part cat gear on my bear, just because if I didn’t, I would be rage starved from the lack of damage, and that was back in 3.0/3.1 so I wasn’t anywhere near as overgeared as tanks are these days.
I’ve been healed by boomkins, ele or shadow specs, if they can keep me up with no problems, I don’t care. 3.0 heroics do not require anything like the power a geared, skilled player can bring. They are balanced to be doable by average players in quest gear, as long as the tank has enough gear to be uncrittable and 23kish health. Someone with i245 tank gear does not need a tank spec to be way OP in that situation if they know how to tank.