“Hey,” said Tirion Fordring as they entered the antechamber. “Is this some kind of joke?”

I’ve recently had occasion to go through my old screen grabs, and one in particular grabbed my attention. It’s of The Hidden Circle in Serpentshrine Cavern, and it was taken by my girlfriend during an attempt against Morogrim Tidewalker.

The big thing to notice is that there are four tanks in the Main Tank frames. A paladin, a bear and two warriors. Thinking back to that level of content, almost everything needed three or more tanks. There were the odd fights that needed one or two, but they were an exception much more than a rule.

THC’s current regular tanking team consists of one of each of the current tanking classes, and these days we can never take more than three of us into a raid. And three tanks is one too many for most fights in Icecrown, the vast majority being suited to exactly two (the same number as are needed in the 10-man versions of the same fights).

If all four of us do get in the same raid, it’ll be because at least one person needs to DPS rather than tank because we don’t have enough DPS signups. And that’s a damn shame. I long for fights like Al’ar where two tanks are taunt-swapping the boss while another two deal with phoenix adds, or for Kael’thas where we all had something to grab hold of.

Instead the limitations of encounters scaling between 10 and 25 players swing into force. In the cases where a third tank is needed, it’s down to lazy encounter design – witness Professor Putricide where tank no.3 has nothing to do but pretend to DPS for phases one and two and most of phase 3, or the “Add one more target to the saber lash” scaling of Marrowgar. Even on the add fights – Lady Deathwhisper and Valrithia Dreamwalker, we’re better off with fewer tanks and more DPS as it’s all about raw damage output.

This can only be bad for tanking in the long run; tanking was already the hardest role to land a regular raid spot with. And now the encounter design doesn’t lend itself to tank scaling, I wonder how long it will be before the number of tanks in the 25-man raid is “fixed” at two, simply because the encounter’s easier to code that way.

Blizzard may have said that they didn’t wany dual-spec to influence raiding, but given the challenges in meeting some encounters’ hard enrage timers, I do have to wonder if that is really the case.

I’ve mostly stopped running random dungeons with Namthe now, except once daily to get my emblems of Frost. On the druid, however, I’ve got plenty of gearing up still to do. And there have been a couple of abusive idiots.

The first, a Moonkin (from my own server, no less, though it makes no real difference) didn’t know what he was doing against Forgemaster Garfrost. Standing out in the AoE, he got killed in fairly short order and then unleashed a slew of curses at me for failing in my duty to keep him up (I should note as well that the tank was relatively undergeared – around 30k HP).

My respose? “You wouldn’t have needed so much healing if you’d LoSed the AoE even once”. The tank backed me up and the guy immediately quit the group. Score One for common sense.

Second fun group member was very shortly afterward. Zone into Halls of Lightning. Buff up. And the hunter immediately lays into our pallytank.

“What the f*** do you paladins think you’re doing, always give me wisdom? Stop being such a f***ing idiot and give me Kings, you c***!”

Charming. And it carried on in that vein for a while. At that point I decided that I’d like to kick the guy. Unfortunately the dungeon timer was still up so we were stuck. So I did the next best thing. I deliberately didn’t heal him. To his credit he lasted a while, but when he finally bit the dust, our warlock asked:

“Res the hunter?”

“Nah,” both the annoyed tank and I replied in unison. A few minutes after that, we kicked him. Good riddance.

Moral of the story? Don’t swear at the people playing your support classes. You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.

Here endeth the lesson.

The big thing I miss is the whole travelling across the world to get to a destination. Even if it’s just being summoned, it feels a lot more epic than being unceremoniously whisked away from wherever you were, and whisked back when you finish.

Of the negative experiences,  there have been two. The first one was entirely not the group’s fault. It turns out that if your world server crashes in a certain way, you’ll disconnect from a shared instance server too. Given at the time I’d just pulled a boss and when I managed to get back online ten minutes later, I could see that there had been a wipe, it wasn’t surprising I’d been kicked by the group.

The second one was caused by Oculus, Destroyer of Pugs. On zoning in, two people immediately left the group. Of those remaining, one hadn’t done it before, and admitted as much. I asked him to listen to my instructions so that we’d get through the last boss fine. The replacement players were happy to do occulus, and had done it before multiple times.

So, after downing the first boss in relatively short order we moved onto the drakes. This was where things began to fall apart. It turns out that the last member of our party also had never been here before, had kept quiet, and was now demonstrating the most Epic of Fails I’ve seen in a long time. He had no vehicle bar. He claimed he’d never used a vehicle before, and couldn’t get off the dragon once he was on it.All the while others were pulling the random flying dragons from all directions. I’ve no idea how they were managing it.

The excuse? “I don’t PvP”. Obviosuly you don’t raid or level, either, matey, given the huge numbers of vehicle quests out there.

Anyway, in the 10 minutes it took us to clear the trash, he’d “discovered” how to unmount. Suspicious. The second boss was a nightmare – I ended up soloing it after everyone else failed to get out of the AoE. Third boss was OK, but not great, idiots with the time bomb debuff running toward the group rather than away from it.

And the fourth… after people ignored my requests to actually get a green drake (I was on red, everyone else on yellow) and ran into the boss without actually checking who was near for a second time, I said a single word. “Bye”. And I ninjaquit the instance.

I’m not proud, but Occulus has a reputation for being difficult and now I see why. It’s not that it’s hard (it isn’t). It’s just that two people unwilling to listen even for a second if they’ve never been there before make things impossible.

I tank to enjoy myself. Hell, most situations I can salvage, like pulling many packs at once in a conventional dungeon (my record so far is five, and I did that knowing full well that everyone was well geared and would cope). But having to sit back and watch as someone who’s never been there costs me 14G every time I die because they know better? No thanks.

Perhaps I’m being overly negative. There have been far, far more good experiences than bad. It’s unfortunate that the bad ones overshadow the good.

Having started my WoW career in 2006, about six months before the Burning Crusade’s release, I never got to see much of vanilla raiding – Zul’Gurub a couple of times, maybe the odd Molten Core pug. On the other hand, I did acquire a full set of Tier 0 gear from the 5-man dungeons (which tells you how much I ran those).  In those days I played a rogue, not the warrior that’s so defined me now. Most of the raids I’ve since seen, with the exception of Blackwing Lair, and one thing sticks out compared to the more modern encounters.

Vanilla raids were rubbish.

The only encounters I’ve seen which were at all difficult (and I’m not talking about steamrollering things 20 levels later here) were the Twin Emperors and C’thun. Tactics were at best necessarily simple to cope with the fact that you needed 40 people to all do the right thing. Even the 20-man raids were the same- there was a little more complexity, but not much (and it was usually of the nuke adds / nuke boss again variety).

Vanilla Raids were ugly

Take a walk into Molten Core, just to the entrance, and look at the trash. There’s lots of packs, and they’re almost all identical. Or, walk into Zul’Aman and screengrab a few of the bosses. Now compare them with bosses in Zul’Gurub. The difference is huge – it’s as if it were a different game!

The same ugliness was what greeted us in the first raid of Lich King – Naxxramas had the same treatment that Onyxia is going to get. The same ugly sprites greeted us as we entered the first wing. The same overly simple tactics that were a challenge with 40 men suddenly seemed so much easier with 10 or 25.

This is why, when Onyxia sticks her flame-wrapped head around the door, I won’t be excited. Of course, I’ll run the raids, but given the makeover Naxx had, I don’t expect anything more than a few million more hitpoints and a tendency to hit slightly harder than a pillow. So while Ony will be back, nastier than ever, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of players clamouring for a chance to beat her again (or for the first time), I fully expect disappointment. Some things should stay in the past. Onyxia, I’m afraid to say, along with all the other pre-TBC raids, is one of those.

Let’s be clear here, I have had many, many good results from pugging 5-mans, in every instance and on both my level 80 characters. Trial of the Champion, however, may as well be called the Trial of the eejit. I’ve had many decent runs of the place, both normal and heroic, but there’s been a few terribad ones too – mostly through DPS players  doing sub-800 DPS, as well as one where the healer, a holy paladin, was far too undergeared. I’ll let the paladin off, though, because after the run, I had a conversation with him about his gear choices – he knew he needed to improve, and wanted to do so.

What took the biscuit, though, was my first trip there on Heroic mode . I’d briefly read up on each boss, but I’ve always stood by the fact that reading up is no substitute for experience, and in general, I’m right. Once I’ve seen a boss, I understand it. Before, I jut have hints of what’s going to happen.

The jousting wasn’t too painful. After countless runs, I still hate it though – there’s just too much going on in the transition to foot battle, especially if the bosses are spread out. It seems like dumb luck as to whether anyone else will get killed before I can round them up successfully, but they’re not too bad once you’ve established themselves.

Then we came to Argent Confessor Paletress. After the DPS went all-out before I had a chance to grab aggro from the Memory of Van Cleef, and dying. Then we wiped, allegedly because “Namthe’s taking 10k melee hits”. Uh, what? Recount didn’t agree, and I said as much. After a second wipe much the same as the first (DPS dying to the damage reflection), our first healer left, and our retri paladin went holy, grabbing another DPS from somewhere. That just about got us through.

And then came the Black Knight. On top of his Frost Fever and Blood Plague, the healer couldn’t keep up, trying to heal through rather than cleanse the diesases. I was also told that I was obviously doing something wrong. I can’t see what that was (and having run it sucessfully since, both as healer and tank, I still can’t.)

The rest of the group, trusting their healer more than me, booted me. To be more precise, they all broke group and reformed, because I was the leader. What they hadn’t reckoned on was:

1. I was utterly, utterly incensed by the abuse directed at me for allegedly repeatedly wiping the raid
2. I was part of the original instance group, and still in the instance

Hell, if I was going to have a wasted instance ID because of asshattery, so were they. While I sat in the instance, they couldn’t enter for more than 59 seconds at a time. They asked for me to leave. I declined. Repeatedly and always politely. I told them that the instance ID was as much mine as theirs, and given that they had elected to leave the group, would they please go away?

The standoff lasted an hour or so before I decided I’d rather do something rather more productive. But hey, if you’re going to piss me off, set me back 80G in repair bills and then just dump me, I’m more than happy to return the favour.

On top of that, there’s what’s going on when tanking. We’ve been working on Yogg-Saron for a couple of weeks in 25-man, and on Sunday he went down, on only the third attempt. I don’t particularly rate the Yogg fight – all it takes is being organised, and once we’d organised ourselves properly, it just fell into place. Unlike other first kills, the third phase just felt like it was a dull grind. Again, the content just feels easier than perhaps I had a right to expect it to be.

So, with most of a raid night left, we headed to see Sartharion, and attempt three drakes. Unfortunately our regular Feral tank is on holiday (and we have no DK tank), so I ended up taking him. Even with 4 pieces of 25-man Tier 8 and cooldown spec, he was still breathing fire at times for more hit points than I had. So, difficult, but impossibly so. Not what I was after, and we went down to Sarth +2, which was predictably easy.

Enter last night – for the first time I took Druziraa into a 25-man raid, and was instantly shocked. Most of the raid lighting up with poisons to cleanse, curses to remove, and that’s not even counting the far-increased complexity of keeping hots up on multiple tanks at once. There’s the challenge that I’m looking for – and because I was somewhat undergeared, it was even more of a struggle to keep up with the other healers. After the cockiness that was accompanying my 5-man runs, this was something else entirely, something to put me in my place and say “You ain’t all that…. yet.”

It’s good to be brought back down to earth sometimes.

Now, I’ve noticed something interesting happen. While tanking, my abilities at staying out of stuff that might hurt me remain unparalleled; however when healing, things are a different kettle of void zones altogether.

Let’s take The Nexus as an example. I’ve run it in heroic mode a few times, and it’s not been too bad – except for the fact that I forget to jump to clear the debuff too often, straining my own healing even further.

And then there’s the Four Horsemen. I won’t say I was an unmitigated failure at the back of the room, but I seemed to be far too slow to react when a void zone appeared beneath me, even when I wasn’t casting, as well as seemingly having lost every ounce of sense as to where to stand so that I was only in range of one of the bosses.

And there’s the thing. When you’re spending 90% of your time staring at a little black box which contains pretty much all the information you’ll need about the entire raid, it’s easy to miss things that happen outside it. It’s a matter of where the focus lies, and while it can improve with practice, there’s always going to be an inherent delay while things like casts finish.

So, when you wonder why your healers seem to spend longer getting out of AoE, it’s not because they’re inferior. It’s merely that they have a different frame of reference, which encourages tunnel vision. Sure, it can be broken, but it’s always there. Give them a break – they’re staring at their unit frames so intently so you don’t have to.

There comes a point in every character’s leveling career whereby instance levelling begins to get ever-more difficult. Not because the instances are too hard (they aren’t), but because the number of people willing to run those instances slows to the barest of trickles.

I’ve hit that point with Druziraa – halfway through level 79, and there are four instances I want to run. Halls of Lightning, Oculus, Caverns of Time: Stratholme, and Utgarde Pinnacle. They give me XP, they give me loot that will be useful when I start to run heroics in half a level’s time. Unfortunately, this is where the demand for instance runs seems to peter out. Nobody wants to run the plain old 80 instances and I spend a lot more time in LFG advertising my presence than I did a couple of levels ago.

However, I’ve had enough practive to get the hang of click-casting now. I’m still not 100% there, but definitely good enough that I can keep everyone alive without too much hassle. For the odd thing (Innervate, maybe, though I really haven’t had much cause to use it) I’ll go back to the old ways. Soon my healing spells won’t even be on any action bars, removing the temptation altogether.

Healing, enjoyable as it is, isn’t what I enjoy the most though. I’m still very much a tank at heart, and as such a lesson learned while healing isn’t a good lesson unless I can apply it elsewhere. And in this case, while my unit frames are staying as they are on Namthe (Grid’s displays just tell me too much I don’t care about, and aren’t pretty enough), Clique has come with me, for two abilities in particular:

• Intervene
• Vigilance

Mousing over a raid-frame and shift-clicking to intervene to someone seems a lot easier than trying to find them to click in whatever’s going on on-screen, especially if they’re out of your current camera angle. Similarly, ctrl-click on a unit frame to change the Vigilance target on the fly during a fight works particularly well, for those times when your main vigilance target isn’t doing as much threat as your expected, or is dead. It feels a lot like the original design of the Vigilance talent (akin to Hand of Salvation) and isn’t nearly as disruptive as I’d thought it might be.

My raiding UI has changed somewhat since the last time I posted it over a year ago; sometime soon I might get around to a post discussing why it’s changed, and how it’s helped me.

And there’s the rub. Because we’re 25-man geared, we were afforded the opportunity to screw up far more than we otherwise would have. Things like missed interrupts on Iron Council, me forgetting to equip my frost gear on Hodir until the split second before it was too late. We still one-shotted him, but I’m sure that healing would have been easier on me if I’d remembered what I was doing in time.

Thorim was a walkover – we killed him on our second go; Freya too was a fairly straightforward encounter, her trash taking longer to kill than she did.

So, after a few hours’ break, it was back to Thorim again, full of expectations of a kill. After all, the main difference was that we had more people, right? Then reality showed up to provide a much-needed kick in the arse. Much like Yakra had done once before, I’d forgotten just how much more forgiving 10-man Ulduar would be to those raids who were almost entirely geared up in 25-man Naxx gear with a fair bit of 25-man Ulduar gear thrown in there.

Of all the attempts in the evening, we got as far as Thorim’s balcony a grand total of once. The most frustrating thing about the fight is not knowing what’s happening to the other group, in the arena – all we can see are the steady stream of raid frames turning black. It’s hard to offer suggestions when you can’t see anything of what’s going on.

So, next week, back to it. Will we down Thorim? Of course. Will it be a pushover? Hell, no.

The first time we took a look at the trash in the Antechambe of Ulduar, we wiped. More than a few times, in fact. There were runes to stay away from, Baron Geddon – style blowings up of people and, well, general carnage. Maybe not so much of the wipings with Ignis’s trash, but getting to him too was a challenge. Now? It’s a foolish raider that gets himself killed on trash. Somewhere between the first week and the second, something happened to Ulduar. The trash got easier. And the bosses got easier too. XT-001 had his enrage timer extended, as did the Assembly of Iron (massively, in fact).

The question I have to wonder is – why? At a time when hard modes are being buffed, why make normal modes easier? It’s not as if they were excessively difficult. The Hidden Circle are a country mile away from hardcore and yet we made some good progress in the first week.

In the second? The only trash to cause us major issues was Auriaya’s. I’m somewhat disappointed that things have been nerfed so swiftly and brutally. I’m aware I said this before, at the release of patch 3.0, talking about the Black Temple, but this time it’s only a week since the content’s release.

There’s still a challenge, but how many more stealth nerfs are going to sneak through?