It’s a hard call there. Some tanks really can’t tank, or can’t tank as well as other classes (see also: protection paladins). Other times the DPS will start in a little too early and pull because the tank hasn’t had time to build rage and/or agro. And some people load up on +damage and then bitch when they die every other pull. (There was a mage in my guild who did this, as well as complaining about sheep breaks, usually blaming the hunters. After he made the ‘you break it you tank it’ speech I told him ‘I’ll remember that the next time you pull aggro…’ Predictably, and without me even trying to let him, he pulls agro and dies on the very next pull.)
Only often though, the first thing I do in a PUG is play reserved until i can see what kind of a tank he is. My old guild leader, for instance, was a VERY good warrior and tank, I still had to watch myself but I could put a few DOTs on side mobs (so long as they weren’t being CCed of course). Some tanks I can barely put siphon life on the non-main mobs and I’d get aggro. Overzealous DPS is often a cause but I think a lot of it is the skill of that tank as well.
I’ve done this, quite easily even; in fact, the least I’ve done it with is four. I’d like to try and 2-man it at some point. It’s nice for the money, but that’s about it… maybe DE the stuff and turn the Nexus Crystals into Small Prismatic Shards and then turn those into Large Prismatic Shards.
FWIW, prior to BC coming out, I actually saw a video of a Prot Warrior, Holy Paladin, and a Hunter who 3-manned Onyxia. Of course, they were in full Tier 3 and the fight took like 45 minutes (they sped it up significantly in the video), but they pulled it off.
Bah… part of the fun of a PUG is actually playing with under-geared, less-skilled players than I’m use to. When I run a heroic with my guildmates, unless we’re completely goofing off, we can do most of the shorter ones in 30-40 minutes, and the longer ones in about an hour or so.
Being a Holy Priest myself, I like the opportunity to heal an undergeared tank because it keeps my skills sharp and provides a challenge I just can’t get any other way. In raids, we’re never undergeared, and we can always adjust healing targets or tanks to alleviate the healing; in a heroic with an undergeared tank, it’s all about how much HPS I sustain without pulling aggro or running out of mana.
Oh, and FWIW, whoever mentioned it up thread, IME, an unnecessary wipe is almost always the result of over-zealous DPS. “ZOMG, I’m only at 90% on Omen, and I won’t pull aggro until 130%, let me blow my trinkets. …Oh crap…” Just last night, we wiped on Hydross, of all ridiculously easy bosses, twice precisely because of the damned DPS charts, and they weren’t even bothering to switch sides with the tank to keep him from switch forms and one-shotting all the healers. And we STILL almost pulled it out from 20% with only two healers up (got him to about 3% I think). When we sufficiently berated the DPS that going all out isn’t necessary and they were wasting everyone’s time, we killed him and one-shotted everything else.
But really, unless the tank is doing something stupid (like not wearing a shield, using taunts to build threat instead of shield slams and sunders, breaking CC when he shouldn’t, etc.) or the healer is doing something exceptionally stupid (for a Priest, that would be spamming Flash Heal and Power Word: Shield, and not prioritizing the tank, or DPSing when threat and mana are at a premium), it’s not their fault. And, if you DO see them doing that, if they won’t stop, you’re probably better off just dropping group. You can usually still make it with an incompetent DPS, but an incompetent tank or healer will only give you big repair bills.
:eek:
OMG, so no wonder I havent been mounted yet - I’m going about it the wrong way! :smack:
ps anyone on Blackhand or Steamweedle Cartel?
At the time, with the exchange rate for gold, it was about a $650 deal.
Awesome. I’m new to WoW and a Pally 24 on Alleria, and you are the closest thing I have to someone I know on that server. I haven’t heard a peep from anyone in my guild since they begged me to join. Don’t think I haven’t written your name down in case I get stuck 
I think all of us Dopers that play should start all new characters on a server & have our very own Guild with a doper-related guild name.
just a thought
hmmmm, could i sell my body for fake money? 
hmmmmm, could I fake sex for fake gold?
People sell in game gold for real money. A flying mount is 5000 gold in game. At the time 5000 gold was selling for something like $650.
Grrr, I’ve been off WoW for a while, but this comment I just HAD to answer. 
Protection Paladins are basically the kings of 5-man tanking, and until you’ve done a run with a well-geared one who knows what he’s doing, you don’t know how nice it is. When I was tanking for my guild’s random instance runs I challenged the DPS folks to TRY and pull aggro off of me…they couldn’t do it. As long as the healer could keep me up, the DPS never had to slow down, making for ridiculously fast instance runs.
I 3-manned Shattered Halls with myself as a Prot Pally, a mage, and a priest…and we did it faster than any 5-man group I’ve run with.
For the OP:
You haven’t hit endgame yet. There is a lot that remains to be soloed. When the Burning Crusade expansion came out, there were level 70s on our server within a week. It took me a couple of months. I soloed a lot, worked on my tradeskills (in fact, I switched to a different one and went 1-375 on it). Getting a flying mount changes your whole perception of the game. Go back and solo some of the earlier instances – or run low-level toons through for gold. It was a blast running through Deadmines with my frost mage, aggroing everything, and then AoEing it all down.
I went back and started up a priest when my mage hit 70. It seems like every time we put together a run, we can’t find a healer, so I thought I’d build one. I’m having so much fun with him as a shadow priest, I’m not sure whether I’ll respec holy or not (he just hit level 58).
If you’re Alliance, start a Hordie, or vice-versa. It gives a whole new perspective to the game. From the get-go, the starting area’s different, the quests are different, and if you’re doing a new class, that’s all different, too.
If you’re not on an RP server, then go start a role-playing toon. What a difference! The trade channel is actually TRADE, instead of inane chatter by illiterate underage imbeciles telling Chuck Norris jokes and trying to stage naked dance parties. And the role-playing is fun, too.
I have a satellite Internet connection at home, so PVP is impossible (just try PVPing with a latency of 1,300 some time – that’s my average). A lot of my friends really enjoy it, though.
Grind some rep for cool rewards (or just bragging rights).
Explore all those areas that you never visited leveling up. When I started my priest, I went to several zones my mage had never even visited.
To the people blaming instance wipes on the DPSers (or the tanks, or the healers…), it seems to me that all changed at higher levels. The difference between success and failure has become largely random.
A wipe in Scarlet Monastery with a proper group meant carelessness or someone screwed up. Our three stinking wipes last night in Shadow Labs were pure roll-o-the-dice randomness: who got knocked back into whom, what we did when we were mind-controlled, and so on. The first time we heard “let’s have some fun,” our rogue and tank both spun around and killed the healer. The second time we tried it, our tank was at half-health when we were mind-controlled and my mage damn near killed him. He was easy prey when the mind-control ended.
Eh, I’ve found them to be well behind warriors and druids in single-target tanking (lord are they awesome for AOE pulls though). We have a tankadin in our guild and at no point has she been able to beat me on threat-gen. And it’s even worse when there’s CC she’s trying not to break.
Maybe she just sucks though, I dunno, the only other tankadin in the guild raids with the late-night group, so I can’t compare them. I just know that of our four main tanks, myself included, she’s easily bottom of the line as far as agro abilities. (You do not want to get into what I think of her, especially when we were trying to get her keyed for Kara. That was more painful than usual, and for BM that’s saying something.)
The main issue with tankadins is that the threat is directly related to their gear, so if her gear sucks, it will only exacerbate the poor aggro generation from a lack of skill or speed. Also, a decent tankadin should be able to maintain consecrate and not break CC, even in a cramped hallway. Maneuvering the mobs as a tankadin is a lot more important as a paladin than as another class, mainly because of the multi-target abilities.
So yeah, I’ll chalk it up to bad experience, which is really very common with paladins who are trying a tanking role for the first time. I’ve striven to provide a counter-example to the other members of my class.
I hear that’s often a problem with WoW geeks 
(bolding mine)
Only the males. Being a gamer is a great way for girls to meet guys
Well, it worked for me anyways.
Any tank is highly gear dependent. It’s all about how much threat they can generate, how much they mitigate damage, how much stam they have. It’s not accurate to say a Pally tank is more gear dependent than a Warrior. The primary difference between a Warrior and a Pally is that a Warrior is king of single target threat, and Pally is king of multi-target threat. In fact, the more targets a Pally has, the more threat he’ll generate.
When I was working on Heroic Shattered Halls for the TK attunement questline, I tried it with the MT from our guild. We pulled it off, but we had plenty of CC, it was somewhat slow, and even then, it wasn’t easy. With a decently geared Pally tank, we only CCed a couple times, and only then because the healing throughput required to keep him up just wouldn’t have been reliable if there was a string of crits or something. We ran through the whole instance pretty much like this: he’d run in, aggro everything, I’d spam GHs on him, and then the DPSers would AOE them all to hell. We did the whole thing in about 40 minutes, and we had almost 30 minutes to spare on the 30 minute timer. I imagine we could do it even faster now.
Of course, Pally tanks lose their luster after KZ. They just aren’t that useful in 25-mans. In the few fights that recommend a Pally tank, like TW and Al’ar, we can pull of the same task just as well with Holy Paladin in some PVP gear or a Bear tank. It may still be easier with a Pally tank, but their usefulness when they’re not tanking is relatively low, whereas a Holy Pally just switches back to Holy gear and can heal better, or a Druid tank can put on DPS gear, go Cat, and do more damage.
I would totally join if anything started!
Smiling Bandit: Congrats on getting 60! The thread you started when you began playing Wow was the reason I started playing as well, so it’s nice to see you still around! Though…sadly, my character is only 47 (I tried leveling her as a holy priest against all advice to the contrary) to your 60! (I think - gah I haven’t played her in awhile as I’ve been trying out Horde and then I stopped at a RPing server)
I grouped for quite a bit while leveling up, and yes, I admit I’d noticed the blame tended to go to hunters. Mainly pulling wrong etc… I’d only studied up on how a healer should function in a group and I tend to focus so much on the portraits - monitoring health - that I have yet to manage to figure out who is right in cases like that (so I stay quiet).
I wouldn’t say that–druids are the kings of single-target threat (alright, I’ll admit bias, I’m a druid), warriors are the kings of utility. But druids make better OTs than warriors in many situations.
My main issue with a paladin tank really is this–I can DPS (and tank) better than her, so she gets tank duty and I get stuck with melee DPS (I’ve played every possible role in the game, and this is the only one I don’t like). Did I mention we have a ret pally who does better DPS than me? Don’t get me wrong, I like having her around for the fights where she’s useful, and I’ll do whatever is needed to help the raid succeed, I just hate seeing someone who’s worse than me getting the job I want to do.
(Sorry to get off on a rant, it’s just been bugging me lately)