Five WoW accounts, one keyboard broadcaster and me.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Four Flavours of Tanking

The Wrath of the Lich King has thrown a big spanner into the works of my multiboxing! Now, after the expansion has been out for two months, the highest level of boxing I have done in Wrath is the Ring of Blood 2.0 in Zul'Drak with me using my Shamans to nuke and heal while I tank. On the other hand I have three level 80 chars that I played in normal single-char play. So what's up?

Firstly, Wrath is so much more fun and there are so many more things to do that for me there is subjectively much less need for boxing to entertain myself.
Secondly, Wrath introduces two features that are not a multiboxer's friend: phasing and vehicles. Some zones have your chars act along and do not phase the group into the same instance. While in a vehicle, /follow is not effective and while for some quests one can work around that and accomplish the objectives with one char and have the others positioned to get the credit, for others this is impossible. Both features are great in my opinion and enhance gameplay for non-boxers, but they are a pain for a boxer.
Thirdly, I have a different sort of pet project going!

My heart in WoW has been in tanking since just after starting to raid back in Molten Core. From then to T5 content I played my warrior tank as my main. For T6 and the Mount Hyjal waves I changed my main raid char to my paladin tank. Now, with wrath introducing Death Knights as fourth tanking class, I got it into my head to sample them all!

First, I pushed my paladin Stephanius to 80 and through heroics and raids. The paladin was and is my main for guild raids. Yet, I then pushed my death knight Tacitus to 80 and got him kitted out in heroics as tank. This week Monday I hit 80 on my warrior tank Ivl and did a bunch of heroics since then. My druid Ægis is still level 70 and I am working his herbalism up. As soon as that is on the level, I will push him through Northrend. This will then give me first hand experience in all tanking flavors!

I expect to take up boxing again once things in Wrath have settled down a bit, but at the moment I am too busy having single player fun! =]

Cheers, Steph.