Ul...du...ar?

So I hear we're going to have this new dungeon, and maybe it's going to be called something like...Ulduar?

Maybe?

Bueller?

Not that I don't love Naxx.  It's pretty much a giant pyramid-shaped loot piñata in the sky.  Malygos isn't bad, apart from me not having much to do during the second phase and getting vertigo from the diembodied floating after he's dead and while 25 people swarm one bitty object to get their badges.  (BTW, Blizz--enabling the raid leader to distribute badges instead of having to pick them up manually is...well, maybe not the best improvement in the game, but yaknow, it's up there.)  

Sartharion is cranky, but his 3 drakes are kinda funny.  You just know they've been sitting there underneath that giant tower for eons, sniping at each other like an old married couple.  One's griping about the others leaving the toilet seat up, while Sarth can't pin down which of them keeps leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube.  

I still would like some gear from some of these places, so I'm not in a huge hurry, but Ulduar is starting to feel a little like Christmas.  Make Tenebron, Shadron, and Vesperon like Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, singing about the new epic [Hula Hoop] they want, and you get...

Well, okay, it made sense in my mind, but hey it's almost 3 am and I'm still awake, whaddya want.

Oh Lord...

I have a suggestion for all those folks not of a tank class or spec: if you want the tank to tank trivial trash mobs in a certain order, at certain coordinates, at a certain time, and in a certain manner, and you are not one of my guild's raid leaders...please exit out to the character screen, select your character, hit the "Delete" button, and type "DELETE" into the confirmation box.  Then, go create a warrior on another server and learn to tank things yourself.

I have been in some boneheaded PuGs before, but I usually get through them.  I have witnessed healers deliberately pulling mobs, hunters backing into pats, mages and warlocks going all out on a target when it's still halfway across the room from me, melee trying and failing to be tanks themselves, and pets gone wild pulling bosses when no one has any mana.  Not even me, har har.  

But this last Heroic A-N PuG I did really took the cake.  First, the DPS is unconvinced I can tank this.  I politely point out my gear consists of a mix of H Naxx pieces and even two pieces from the heroic in question.  They remain unconvinced.  I mark the spellcaster for shackling, not because we really need it but because I'm in a PuG and I usually use the first couple pulls to see how competent my DPS is.  I pull.  Immediately the shadow priest goes BERZERK.  He starts screaming in all caps how I'm not targeting the right mob first, and I don't know what I'm doing, I have to pull the mob back 1 foot or it's all wrong, and when he (predictably) dies, he and his guildie start screaming in all caps that it's a wipe.

Now, Bel and I have been on heroic PuGs where the DPS has died halfway through a boss, and we've still taken the sucker down.  Beating down the pull before the first boss room of H A-N with one lousy spriest down is not exactly frightening to me.  I'm sufficiently geared where even my lousy tank DPS is enough to get us by on such pulls.

Needless to say, with the two of them losing their heads, screaming about me being an idiot for not pulling the mobs 1 foot further back (and even when I pulled them back, they kept screaming that I was doing it wrong), they managed to wipe us.

I had a client once who was so goshdarn nitpicky that she would dictate where things went down to the individual pixels.  She once told me that the whole project was ruined unless the flame effect on a graphic was moved seven pixels to the left.  Nevermind that the 7 pixels amounted to maybe 1/4 millimeter.

I understand the virtue of being detail-oriented--when it matters.  Good tanks are hard to come by, and every one of them will tank heroic trash slightly differently.  Especially those who have gone toe-to-toe with much bigger, scarier things.  Sure, if you want to take down trash mob X first instead of Y, go ahead and let me know, in lower case letters, calmly, and before the pull--I'm accommodating.  But don't abuse your poor tanks by being a "seven pixels to the left" kind of micro-manager.

Blizzard Downloader

I sometimes picture the Blizzard Downloader like some kind of masked petty bandit.

BD: /vanish
BD: /sneaksneaksneaksneaksneak
BD: /pickpocket
Me: My bandwidth! It's gone!  Wait, what's that blue thing in my system tray?  HEY!
BD: /slashes a blazing B by swordpoint into my router, cracks a bullwhip in the air, catching the nearest wall sconce, and swings out the window into the night, to distribute my precious bytes among the impoverished populace.
Me: Who was that masked man?

I would draw this out, if a) I had any drawing skill and b) what little drawing talent I had didn't resemble XKCD so much.

No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition...

...or a female tank.  I've debated whether I should have been a female dwarf instead of human.  I don't know if that would somehow lessen the blow or make peoples' heads explode.

Gimli: It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. 

Aragorn: [whispering] It's the beards. 

Gimli: And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no dwarf women, and that dwarves just spring out of holes in the ground! 

Eowyn: [laughs] 

Gimli: Which is, of course, ridiculous.

Full disclosure: I have no beard.

It can be pretty funny to listen, and even watch, peoples' reactions the first time they hear you on Ventrilo.  Especially when you're usually paired up with your healer spouse.  They assume that my husband's me, and vice-versa, till one of us IDs ourselves over Vent.

The other day, we were in a department store picking up a gift for someone and the clerk noticed my husband's priest t-shirt.  So he starts chatting him up about the game, not paying more than a clerk's usual level of courtesy to me as we finished the transaction.  I smiled at my husband and said fondly, "yep, he's my healer." Took the clerk a couple seconds to realize it, but he quite literally did a double-take and said "wait, you're a...a tank?"  I just smiled sweetly.  "That's...wow, yeah, that's a role reversal," he stammered.

It's interesting to see people make judgements about others' personalities based on the classes they choose.  It's also interesting to see people use a very limited list of personality traits when thinking about certain classes.  Maybe people think of tanking in terms of its bloodthirst and recklessness.  Maybe people associate it with being a glutton for punishment with no fear of getting hurt.  Maybe people associate it with leadership, or protectiveness.  They probably recognize the challenge it presents to players' reaction times, their ability to anticipate and head off problems, and their situational awareness.  And maybe people don't think of those traits as being very feminine.  Not that they're directly trying to be judgmental, or chauvinistic, or condescending.  There's just something about tanking that doesn't strike people as appealing to women.

I have a priest, and in TBC she was definitely a healer.  I liked the "mission critical" aspect of healing, as well as the challenge of good situational awareness, reaction time, and anticipation in a certain kinship with the way I feel about tanking.  I'm not sure where she'll end up (I love the synergy in the shadow tree) but I'm looking forward to dual specs more for my priest than my tank.

My point is there are things that attract me to being a healer too.  But not the way that tanking is attractive to me.  I've healed alongside my husband, and have found that people accept me as a healer almost as a matter of course, and they don't accept my husband as a healer any differently than me.  The only time he gets strange reactions is when people find out he's the healer and I'm the tank.

If someone's surprised about a female player choosing to be a tank, maybe they need to examine better what the classes in WoW have to offer people, and appreciate that in a game this big, a lot of people have different definitions of fun.  Maybe some of the traits of that class are more feminine than you might have previously thought.  Maybe some of the traits are more masculine than you thought, too.  Maybe your female tank has different reasons from a guy for enjoying the class.  Maybe it's not a gender thing, but rather an individual thing.  Much as it can be funny to see or hear a visceral reaction of surprise when they see a girl wearing a warrior t-shirt or hear a female voice announcing "Last Stand" over Vent, I'd much prefer that we reach the point where folks are as unsurprised to hear a female tank over Vent as they are a male healer.

Great Mod: Annoying Buff Reminder

What's small, consistent, annoying, and remarkably useful? Annoying Buff Reminder.  You can get it here: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7201.html . 

Designed for all classes, ABR is a simple mod that pops up a box when your self-cast buffs run out. Don't you hate it when you're soloing, and forget to cast Fort or AI on yourself? Isn't it frustrating when you realize you've gone the last 10 minutes without a weapon buff? Levelling a shaman is annoying enough as it is. :P

Of course, this is particularly useful for tanks and was designed at first as a warrior mod. Shouts are such short buffs that it's too easy for them to fall off, yet they provide sufficient benefit that you really don't want to have any downtime on them, whether you're raiding or just questing.

If you're soloing or grouped with no other warriors, just install the mod and leave it as-is. It will remind you when you have no shout up, but you have the rage to cast one. If you're grouped/raiding with another warrior, you can use a simple command to have it remind you for a specific shout. /abr cs reminds you to cast Commanding Shout, and /abr bs reminds you to cast Battle Shout.

Also built into it is a reminder for Victory Rush. I find this useful for questing with others, because I don't always get that killing blow, but when I do I like to make use of my free damage burst. The VR reminder can be a bit annoying though, not because of the mod per se but because Victory Rush is the single most guaranteed way for me to die in this game. Maybe I'm OCD, but I get this pathological urge to make the most use of the things lit up on my screen, regardless of their impact on my health and well being.

I only have 100 HP...but...but...must...use...Victory Rush. Charge! *SPLAT*

The Single Point of Failure: Biggest Monster Your Guild Will Face

The single point of failure: the biggest monster your guild will ever face.

Guilds are by their nature volunteer organizations. The vast majority of officers and leaders don't get any kind of compensation for their efforts, aside from perhaps guaranteed raiding slots. Some roles within the game lend themselves toward being executed by one person at a time (tanking chief among them). So it is almost ludicrously easy for guilds to unwittingly riddle themselves with weaknesses like a bloc of swiss cheese. These weaknesses can be thought of as single points of failure, and your guild lives or dies based on what it does about them.

A single point of failure (SPOF) is anything which, if it breaks, the whole system comes crashing down. Some systems are designed with a single point of failure on purpose. Some include single points of failure as a necessity. Whether SPOF is completely unavoidable in a volunteer organization is debatable. However, I believe it is more important for a guild to recognize its SPOF, eliminate them wherever possible, and manage those it cannot eliminate as best as possible.

What are some examples of a SPOF?

• a guild with a very strong leader, whose officers feel incapable or unauthorized to make decisions in the GL's absence.
  
• a guild with an officer who has taken on so many key roles that the rest of the officers would feel lost without him/her.
  
• a guild with one raid leader, and the rest of the leadership is either incapable or completely unwilling to raid lead.  
  
• a guild with one person designated as "main tank" either formally or de facto.
  
• a guild with one person designated as a class leader, either formally or de facto, without whom the rest of the people in that class cannot figure out their raid role or gear.
  

Think about your guild right now. Think about the people in it. Is there anyone in that guild you would feel lost without? Do you shudder to think what would happen if any particular person quit the game, moved to a different guild or server, or couldn't log on even for some of the guild's raids? Is your guild leadership so top-heavy that nothing happens without a leader's direction? Those people are single points of failure.  

This touches on issues such as knowledge management, system design, and good old-fashioned human resources management. However, I'll try to cover those kinds of topics later.  

Once you've identified a SPOF, what do you do about it? How do you handle that guild leader who feels the need to micromanage every aspect of the guild to the point where everyone is dependent on him/her? What do you do about that go-getter officer who does everything because no one else is willing to put in as much effort? What do you do about those people who have assumed certain roles like raid/class leading and tanking, and either by design or by happenstance are the only people anyone thinks can do their jobs?  

A volunteer organization lives and dies by redundancy. Any good leader will build in as much redundancy in that organization as possible. This alleviates burnout, which is probably the number one killer of good guild leadership. It also means that your guild is stronger because it is more adaptive, more responsive, quicker to adjust to a changing raid situation. No guild should be so dependent on one person that the rest of the guild cannot make decisions without him/her. No guild should be so used to any one voice calling out direction during a raid that they don't know what to do if that voice is replaced by another. No guild should be so used to any one tank that they cannot kill bosses if another tank is tanking them.

This means that a guild has to be willing to consciously train some redundancy into the guild.  People have to be willing to take on each others' roles, and the guild leadership has to be okay with giving up some control to each other and even to the membership.

If a guild takes a serious look at its SPOF and determines that some cannot be helped, then the guild has to come to grips with the fact that it is not a stable guild. Every effort should be made to minimize the effect of burnout, and train others to take the place of any one SPOF. But if the leadership is unwilling or unable to do this, the members of the guild should be aware of the fact that the guild is not a stable one and could fail at any time. Of course, this is not a healthy way of doing things, but reality dictates that even if people are perfectly aware of their SPOF, doesn't mean that they are always willing and able to do anything about them.

That leads me to a discussion of SPOF and tanking, specifically. Most guilds unfortunately make the severe and frankly, boneheaded mistake of elevating one tank above the others. They ignore that that tank has been made into a single point of failure in favor of the view that it behooves the guild to put its best gear in one place, that that person will give the guild the best chance for success against a new, bleeding-edge boss. All that the guild is doing in this case is trading short-term gain for long-term stability. That tank will eventually leave the guild, or game, either temporarily or permanently. How much you depend on that person's tanking will determine what happens to your guild when (not if) they leave.  

Of course, there are other ways in which it hurts a guild to elevate one person as the main tank above all the others. I will discuss those later, but for now, I will close in saying that every guild needs to take a hard look at itself and determine, through discussions among the leadership as well as the rank-and-file members, what the single points of failure are in the guild, and what the guild should do to alleviate them.

Introductions...

I took up my sword and shield in the original closed beta of World of Warcraft, and never looked back. The warrior class attracted me from the start--something about standing toe-to-toe with death and emerging victorious wakened some ancient bloodthirst in my veins. Or maybe I just didn't want to deal with casting times and pushback for my abilities.

Tanking is my first, second, third, fourth...you get the idea...love of the game. I have a priest and a hunter in the way of alts, and have attempted to play other melee classes, but nothing has held my fascination like tanking has in this game. Still, I try not to be just another tank. I have tinkered with my spec, using hybrid specs and even occasionally a more DPS-oriented spec for my tanking. I consider myself an open-minded pragmatist, consistent with my INTJ personality type, and thus I am willing to take the road less traveled if it seems like it will get me where I'm going.

I started out on Whisperwind, and eventually transfered to Azuremyst due to my work schedule. In my tenure on Whisperwind, I was a guild officer who took on several different roles: raid leader, recruitment officer, forum admin, complaint department, etc. I was also a tank leader, and took it upon myself to train several tanks in the art of main tanking. I have some strong philosophies about tanking, which I will share in this blog so I won't discuss them in this post. I have tanked the bulk of the major content released for WoW, and look forward to new challenges. At the same time, I'm confident in my skills and know that there is no content that will be released that I could not handle tanking.

My character stubbornly remains an engineer in the (probably vain) hope that the profession will someday reflect my own personality, which is drawn to tinkering. Of course, my love of sparkly things (like any good raven) led me to the jewelcrafting profession, which has fortunately turned out to be more useful than engineering.

As far as real life goes, I'm in my late twenties, female, married to my best friend and healer Belenos, and friends with a fun little group of folks who put up with me despite my bad sense of direction and my tendency to ramble. I've been an avid gamer since my childhood, back when girls were made fun of even more than they are now for playing games. I do wish that gender had not been such an issue when I was growing up, but real life doesn't always work out the way we wish, and even in WoW it is more of an issue than I'd like it to be. I have a background in IT and management, which comes into play in my company as well as my time in WoW. I consider this game not only a fun thing to do but also as an interesting crucible for studying human interaction and management.

I consider myself a writer as well as other things, and have been known for marathon, "War and Peace"-style posts in forums and emails. I love ancient stories, and decided on my character's name based on the role of the raven Norse mythology. While CorvusMelori is my longest character name, my other characters' names are Latin as well and even more unpronounceable.

In my spare time, I enjoy starting land wars in Asia and going against Sicilians when death is on the line, watching Mr. Radar while drinking coffee, flying casual, and taunting stuffy English knnnnnigits a second time-a.