Handicap

In the sense of eating and watching/listening (mostly watching, truthfully) to MLG's HD stream.

Yak yak beastcleave blah blah protwarrior etc, this really isn't the place/blog for that.

I love beastcleave.

Sorry.

What it did do was add a real element of challenge to this fifth run, being another Gnomeregan. Being short on time I was silently praying "Not Gnomer" as I queued up.
Which was folly as that is the surest way in which to get a queue to Gnomeregan, if you follow leading pessimist theories. This one had a few differences;

-Complete lack of even a semblance of a tank. We had a paladin with RF on, but that was about as far as it went.
-"Out of Combat" did not exist as a term.
-Noone knew where we were going.

Try connecting the dots and see what you think the resulting run looked like.
The word chaos springs to mind. And then builds a weekend palace.

The lock went through more VW sac shields than I could count and did not understand the function of single target damage. This was handy because the enh shaman was very proud of his new fire nova aoe, too. The paladin tagged along, and we ran around with the pure, single-minded determination of the truly clueless.

Quoth the shaman when we found ourselves having run to the back entrance of Gnomeregan, "Lol".

And then you realize something that I have known but never offered a lot of thought before. You really, really don't need a tank. This isn't a "With a competent healer, an enh shaman/moonkin/other mid-armor class can tank". The warlock did most of the tanking. We weren't very overleveled, we didn't employ any CC. Pure damage.

Not quite sure what to actually make of this realization though, all it means for me is that when the tank is, hm, to put it diplomatically, "suboptimal*", the run isn't a wash. This is good.

Except during queueing. Think about it. Most of times you queue, you will sit there with that lonely dps blip for a bit, then you get two friendly dps blips joining you and all is merry. Until it gets boring. You consider leaving, perhaps, after far too long in a queue, and then, like a ray of purest light from the heavens, a healer descendeth upon thee. Now you just need the tank. Surely that can't take too long?

If you didn't laugh, bitterly or in earnest humor, or atleast smile, I don't think we're gonna get along very well.

Point is, healers are rareish, but tanks are far rarer. For low level dungeons, as long as you don't have four mages**, tanks really are optional. Why not reflect that in the queue system and make groups without a tank?

Of course, the counterargument is that warrior and paladins and whatnot of the dps persuasion can just queue as tank as well and let the twohanded swings fly.

I wish more people did that.

Until I ding 80, at which point I'll castrate them with my claws.

*Not 2h enh shaman PvE suboptimal. "I like spell pen" ret pally suboptimal.
**Unless they're good kiters. Hmm. This deserves more thought.