Tanking: Protection Paladins

Protection [Prot] Paladins tank through reactive damage.

That's a pretty interesting sentence, so let me explain what it means.

Prot Paladins cause aggro and threat by essentially taking damage. Yes, that's right. By taking damage.

Whilst other tanks have a rage bar that allows them to use abilities that cause monsters to single them out and beat on them, paladins have a mana bar that they use to cause holy damage to gain the attention of monsters and then shield spells that reflect damage when they are hit.

It's pretty fun to tank as a Protection Paladin because you can be surrounded by monsters and know you will kill them not because of anything you are doing but because you know that every time they hit you they will be damaged. Ergo, all you have to do is keep yourself healed and keep those shield spells up and the monsters will both be captivated by your damaging them AND by the threat of the damage that is being caused by them hitting you.

The problem comes when you are playing with a group of people that have no idea how a Protection Paladin functions (and let me tell you - this accounts for 4 in 5 WoW players).

I was doing a dungeon a few days ago with B-I-L who is geared for heroic instances (they're a
harder level of the same maps) so I knew the chances of my dying was fairly remote. But what irked me was when the DPS (yes them again) attacked straight away, casting spells, firing arrows, using pets - without giving me the chance to gain the acquaintance of the monsters.

Politely warning them that they need to give me a few seconds extra to pick up the slack got me a polite "sure". That particular group worked well, and apart from a few silly deaths, we managed to get through the whole thing fairly quickly.

But, of course, MY understanding of how Prot Paladins operate has only come about because I'm now playing one, which means that essentially until players try playing a tank, they will never learn what a tank is used for, or how to function around one.

Time to move on virtually...

And so the guild that I helped co-create back in April 2006 finally came to an abrupt end last month. A lack of impetus coupled with slowing momentum caused the guild to slow down and then... stop.

A long discussion with the mods/officers of the guild revealed that they had slowly burned out with the content of the game, resulting in sheer boredom. Having friends online helped but eventually they had no other recourse but to pull the plug.

Most of the guildies have moved on to other guilds on the same server, others have transferred to different realms and others have just stopped playing MMOs in general.

Meanwhile, I'm now playing on the Oceanic Servers and have created my own guild. This time I'm only aiming for a simple progression guild with mature values. I haven't really put much effort into the creation of the guild and much of the structure has been lifted from past efforts.

At the moment I've decided to go for the Tankadin, a Protection Specced Paladin. So far so good, enjoying myself and my time online.

Burnout

Every several months, I get burnt out from playing World of Warcraft. Honestly, it's a great game but it's just repetitious to the extreme.

"Go kill 10 of these rats" becomes "Go kill 10 of these Giant Ultra-Elite Dragonspawns" until eventually its "Go kill 10 of these Ancient Dragons and bring back their ears".

Comparatively, Asheron's Call 2 was also repetitive but for some reason I enjoyed that repetition. Perhaps it was the feeling that around every corner there was something new waiting whereas in Azeroth/Outland/Northrend, its all the same.

Anyway, as you may have noticed from the title, I burnt out from playing my Level 70 druid. The guild I co-created is still thriving but I just can't bring myself to log in and get involved. So I'm busy creating a mage who is at level 33. I've tried levelling a mage before but got stuck around level 27 but I think I'll persevere with this one; she plays well.

In the meantime, I have finished Puzzle Quest. It's a good game and is a different challenge to normal crpgs. A decent 7.5 out of 10.

After that, I decided to finish off the Neverwinter Night expansions I have and am stuck in Hordes of the Underdark. But that too has become a bit repetitious so I wanted to try something else - a little bit different than your run of the mill crpg.

And lo and behold, I find Fastcrawl. A dungeon game that will last for around 30 minutes. I had a quick go of the demo and like it a lot; I may even buy it and give it a proper go.

And finally, my attention swings ponderously to Dungeon Runners, a free game made by my old friends NCSoft (they also make City of Heroes). Dungeon Runners is no World of Warcraft. It's buggy, slow, and even on my machine, runs like a dog. But its very much Diablo-esque, and a lot easier to jump into than WoW, even though its based very much on that Blizzard game. DR does not require membership subscription but if you do pay, you get to have equipment that's otherwise restricted. I probably won't pay membership rates but that's fine. I just want to play something a little different.

The other big deal is that I don't have anyone to play with. One part of MMO's that I don't get is that they're meant to be collaborative games. I wish they would make a game where meeting people was a lot easier...