As you may have guessed from my recent posts, I’m leveling an assassin. Our guild needs tanks, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I put on my big girl pants – well, inquisitor, so skirt – and leveled the crap out of things. Even though it is probably slower, I leveled in tanking spec because that was my goal for endgame with this toon. It is rather fun to know that I’m probably not going to die, no matter how many I accidentally pull. It may take me all day, but with all my mitigation and a healer at my back (first Treek and then Talos), I’m a bit hard to kill.
I’m level 53 now. I am about to hit endgame and I still have no clue what I’m doing.
It’s not so much that I don’t know my rotation. I know my rotation, how to taunt, my cooldowns, my stealth cc, how to position, blah blah. It’s the leading that is causing me panic. I don’t know the flashpoints particularly well and the tank is the one in front. I’m used to being the DPS where I follow the tank and hit whatever the tank has aggro on, and try not to get my face bitten off.
Now I have to learn all these instances. Holy shit.
Thankfully, I have tutors. Three of my former snarkers tank, two of whom have max-level assassin/shadows, and are willing to walk me through it. I like to imagine a devil on one shoulder and… another devil on the other shoulder. And then a third devil on top of my head looking for fleas. Good times.
I queued for a random with two of the aforementioned tanks playing their lvl 55 alts: a healer and a juggernaut smashmonkey. It doesn’t help, by the way, that my health is lower than theirs by a good bit… or that Mr. Smashmonkey is an overgeared aggro magnet.
We got an instance that I fuzzily remembered. Something about rakghouls. I had done this before, but it’s annoying as shit because the trash does all sorts of special things, like exploding or choking you or knocking you back, blah blah. When something will explode at 20%, and you have an overgeared smashmonkey taking its health down in one big stomp, it’s a little hard to get out of the way of the inevitable boom.
Then we got to the cannon part. The cannon! I had forgotten about the cannon. There are waves of disgusting trash that come at you nonstop for a few minutes. I’ve been on the DPS end of this before but not on the tanking end. Now my job was to find where the little fuckers were coming from, gather them in front of the cannon, and let smashmonkey-in-cannon kill them in the face. But not actually let the waves of disgusting rakghouls bite on the healer or the cannon. Easier said than done.
I was glad when THAT was over. I needed a beer or three. The rest was pretty much cake, except I didn’t know where the eff I was going and they had to tell me “no, you go THIS way.”
Apparently, though, raid tanking is a bit easier than flashpoints. I’m willing to try it if we are ever in a serious shortage situation, but I hope it never comes to that. I am far better as a punkass dps following behind someone else who actually has a sense of direction.
