DrainingSouls.net

Egwene and Damer are two characters that my wife and I play together. She plays Egwene, a Gnome Mage, I play Damer, a Human Paladin, and I blog about our adventures together as we level. If you want to read how we got started, the first part of the series can be found here. There are also links to the rest of the series at the bottom of this post.

Gameplay

I continue to be incredibly impressed with the Paladin class, and especially with their tanking abilities. It’s interesting to me, having played a Warrior for a long time, to see the changes that have taken place among the tanking classes. Warriors have gone from being the only really viable tank class, to being just one class in a crowd of three. And due to a near complete lack of utility in other roles, Warriors can be less desirable than the other tanking classes. Pallies, on the other hand, have gone from being a laughingstock to being possibly the most popular tanking class in the game.

What makes Pally tanks so special? Let’s look at the reasons:

Consecration - If you’ve ever run an Outland instance with a warrior, and then the same instance with a Pally, you know all about this. Due to the threat caused by Consecration, CC is practically an afterthought with a Pally tank. You might need to Sheep/Seduce/Sap one mob, but not more than that, and often even that is not needed.

Threat Generation - Pally threat is primarily determined by the amount of Holy Damage done to the target. Warrior threat is pretty much independent of damage caused, and many of the main Warrior threat generating actions cause little or no damage. While no Pally tank will be leading the DPS charts on a Boss fight, more damage done is always better.

Mana Bar - Pallies start the fight will a full “Rage” bar and all of their spells at their disposal. Warriors and Bear tanks start off with 0 Rage and must build it as the fight progresses. Also, it’s virtually impossible for a Pally tank to run out of mana during the fight (unless he out-gears the fight by a significant margin, and therefore doesn’t need as much healing).

General Utility - When not tanking, a Pally can be used for other roles, to some extent. For instance, when my guild runs Kara, we usually take a Warrior and Pally tank to fight Moroes, as a couple of tanks are needed for that fight. For Maiden, the next boss in the instance, only one tank is needed. A second Prot Warrior would be pretty much useless in that fight - negligible DPS and no additional utility. A Prot Pally though, can be quite useful in off-healing and Cleansing.

Just to clarify, if all you are ever going to do is tank raid bosses, then a Warrior is the best choice, However, if you, like me, have many interests in WoW, then a Pally is probably a better choice.

What’s all that mean for us?

There are a few implications for us. First off, since Pallies do front-loaded damage, it’s sometimes hard for Egwene to keep up. If I pull a mob, judge my seal, and refresh it, all the while auto-attacking, the mob can be halfway dead by the time Egwene can get a spell in. I probably do close to 50% of the total damage done in our group. That may not seem odd, as there are only two of us, but if I were a Warrior tank, things would be much different.

This is mostly because the mobs die very quickly with two of us. On longer fights, against elite mobs like (the sadly nerfed) Mor’Ladim, Egwene pulls ahead of me in damage by a good margin. Against regular mobs though, with the shorter fights, I stay pretty close to her.

Having this experience of playing WoW as part of a duo has really shown me how much WoW is geared towards the solo player. Every single non-elite mob in the game is designed to be killed by one player of equal level. In fact, lots of classes can handle multiple mobs at once. It’s an interesting design choice by Blizzard. They could have easily chosen to design the game so that players had to group up in order to kill anything. That would have made a remarkably different World of Warcraft.

The Path to 40

Even though we just hit 30, we’ve still got a good number of quests left to do in Darkshire. Enough, I think, to hit 31 and maybe 32. I think we’ll stay there for a bit, finish those up, and then move on to Stranglethorn Vale. I think I remember there not being a ton of quests available right at 30 in STV, so that should work out well.

I’m very excited about getting into Scarlet Monastery (definitely one of my favorite dungeons ever) and I think we’ll head to Desolace too at some point to pick up In The Name Of The Light. Other than that I think we’ll probably stay in STV and Arathi. With the 2.3 XP changes, I doubt there will be much need to do more than those two zones.

Final Thoughts

Even after playing WoW with Egwene for a number of months, I’m still not totally sure why she enjoys the game. Case in point: when I transferred McGraken to Shandris, I told Egwene that I would be able to run her through some dungeons now and get her some really good gear. Her response? “Oh… OK. I guess if you want to that’d be alright.”

Wha-huh?

If someone told me that they just transferred a 70 to my realm and they would be more than happy to run me through any and all dungeons to get all of the gear that I could ever want, I’d be pretty stoked. Egwene… not so much. So it dawned on me that I’m not sure exactly what she enjoys about the game. It might be just the Tailoring and Cooking. If I kept her supplied with Silk and Bear Meat, she might be happy to just stay in Stormwind all the time. Maybe I should get Critline for her and tell her that I’ll give her 5G to spend on Tailoring supplies every time she sets a new Frostbolt crit.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea…

I leave you with this

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