I’m thoroughly pissed and annoyed. I have a 70-level warlock on WoW as my main, but my focus for the last few months has been leveling my paladin-tank, Aruhgulah (Rug, for short). I’ve been teaming with my husband, who has a healer-priest of about the same level (Pocks); the pairing works extremely well, to the point that it’s been scary what we’ve been taking on & winning. I’ve been tank-specced on Rug since day 1 of creating the toon.
One of the issues I’ve been having, though, is finding appropriate gear for Rug. Pally tanks need lots of stamina, we need intelligence (for mana pool), we need defense/block/parry/dodge. Spell damage & mana regeneration are also needed, to a degree. Strength does a pally-tank absolutely no good. A lot of the “tank” gear I’ve seen is geared towards warriors, who do need strength, and the best I’ve been seeing so far for my pally has been stam/intel/spell dmg or stam/intel/mana regen, with almost no defense (save for a few blue drops from the instances I’ve run, and even those seem more geared towards warriors than pallys).
For the last month, my guild leader has been pushing “resilience” in my face, and I’ve been going “uh-huh” and not responding. Resilience is mostly on PVP gear, and is mostly obtained by doing PVP (player vs player). I despise PVP — correction, I LOATHE it, end to end. I will not do battlegrounds or PVP quests. Pally tanks are intended for PVE (player vs environment) and raids, not PVP, PERIOD.
So I’ve been doing a lot of research in the last month or so to try to find gear for Rug, and to find out what she needs to be ready for the end-game PVE raids. I was happy to find a few guides that broke down what was needed into stat-numbers, so I know how to balance the stat-needs, at least. NONE of the guides I’ve found mention resilience; if resilience is mentioned at all, it’s mentioned in the occasional discussion by those who used it to help get the numbers up there, as a last-ditch resort when other gear couldn’t be found/made/dropped.
So I was very very happy to find this set, which is PERFECT (the Righteous Armor set). It drops from instance bosses (Rug needs to run instances to get practiced in high-level instance-tanking before doing end-raids), it has the stam, intel, etc etc etc etc, it offers additional bonuses on the two main spells I use a LOT of. Combining this with a few other pieces (which also drop from bosses in the same instances that this set is found in) should handily get my stats up where they should be. It’s a great all-around pally tanking set.
So, gleefully, I posted the set up in guild chat 2 days ago, doing a general happy dance that yes, Rug’s found some perfect gear, dropping in instances that she needs to run, somewhat easily obtainable for the casual player I am. As it happened, Shiri (a holy/healer pally & the wife of the guild leader) was on, said the gear was “okay”, and left it at that.
Yesterday, the shit hit the fan…over the fuckin’ GEAR.
Me & Brett logged on to our pally/priest team, stressed out over everything going on in real life & needing just to unwind & relax, intending to take on Durn the Hungerer (a major PITA in Nagrand) and beat his ass into the ground, multiple times. Hell, we were going to make a festival (DURN GANK-FEST 2008 LOLZ!!) out of it, and offer our tank/healer services to anyone in Nagrand that needed to take the SOB down. As we were trying to coordinate with another guildie that also needed Durn for a quest, Shiri posted up links to a couple purple pieces she could make, pieces that had lots of stam & resilience & some defense, but nothing else, and offered to make them for me.
I said, quote, “I’ll think about it.”
Guild Leader/Shiri’s husband Frost was also on, and next thing I knew, I was getting subjected to a huge rant about resilience not being just for PVP, how I need it, and what’s needed for a pally tank, and how I’m looking at it all wrong…
…and at that point, my temper broke. I flat out told Frost that I’d been running Rug as tank-spec forever, that I damn well could read the information just as he had, I wasn’t sold on resilience, and I was going to gear & play my toon the way I wanted.
Now one of Frost’s alts is a 70-level warrior-tank, and right away, I got the “you saying I don’t know tanking?” line (as well as “I’m not pushing anything on you”…yeah, right).
Me: “You know warrior tanking. Pally tanking is different, it runs a totally different basis. And from every pally forum I’ve been on, all the guides I’ve read, and the pallys I’ve looked at and talked to, resilience is NOT MENTIONED.”
Shiri: “I’m a pally!”
Yeah. Which ended in another rant about how Frost has geared Shiri for tanking (lately Shiri has occasionally temporarily re-specced her pally to tank, to allow us to run some instances, but she goes right back to healer-spec afterwards) and he knows pally tanks, and all they were doing was offering me free gear to get me ready for Kara faster and he’s getting his head bitten off…
Never mind that Rug has been tank-specced from day one and runs as tank-spec 100% of the time, including being tank/DPS for my running with Brett on our quests. Never mind that I’ve been playing WoW for about 2 years now and am NOT a newbie. Never mind that even when Rug hits 70, even if she’s fully geared immediately, she still needs much more experience instance-tanking before running Kara, and the instances with that gear is what she’ll need to run ANYWAY. Nope. He knows pally tanks and their gear and how dare I say different…
Yeah, right.
I’m looking at the scrolling text, not responding, getting more & more pissed…
…and just logged off without another word.
It says something that Brett, mild-mannered, overly-polite, temper-as-long-as-Highway-40 BRETT, who wasn’t involved in the conversation, who was just watching, got just as pissed as I did and logged too.
It’s starting to drive us seriously mad, because Frost has a horrible tendency to pull shit like this over the smallest thing. We even have a term for it: “Frost’s getting weird again.” Dare to disagree with him or to offer a counter-opinion, or do the smallest thing that he doesn’t like (that anyone else would simply blow off or not even notice), and he’ll take it personally, or start ranting in officer chat.
It’s getting to us. I don’t want to leave, not over something this small, and I’ve got other friends in this guild, but I know damn good and well how much tanks are in demand on our server. We’ve had good people in this guild, who’ve just left, or who haven’t logged on in months, and I have to wonder just how much of that is normal, and how much is “Frost getting weird again.”
Later. I’m getting pissed all over again.
Across The Shadows 