Having spoken about our attempts in ZA and trying to beat the gauntlet, Cynra from Airee.net commented on the problem when people are only prepared to run certain instances with a Paladin tank (Shattered Halls) or a Warlock (Mechanar) or some other must have class.
At the same time however there are players out there that go out of their way to try things that go against conventional wisdom. These include the rogue who geared themselves unhittable and then went on to tank Illidan and the druid who soloed Onyxia (allowing for a backup to take care for respawning patrols) and best of all the 10 druids who took on Karazhan.
This got me thinking, what's the most unusual way you've beaten an encounter in game and do you get any extra sense of enjoyment from the challenge that comes from going up against an encounter in a way that differs from the accepted norm.
For mine I think I have to go back to the first time we killed Lord Ahune for the Midsummer Fire Festival quest. Accepted wisdom was to take a tank, 2 ranged dps and a good burst melee dps along with the healer, and if there was some AoE then live was good and free epics were yours. However our group was 3 tanks (2 feral druids, 1 prot paladin), a BM hunter and resto shaman.
I'm not going to claim it was an easy fight, and again accepted wisdom was that if you didn't get him down in 2-3 waves you weren't going to get him down. Well the one time we managed it was after 5 waves (which you really didn't want to see) and required nearly every cooldown every class had (possibly more than once).
Whilst we only managed to complete the event once out of the five summons from the group it made a great practice ground for learning what your class can do and trying/having to do different things from what would be considered a standard ability rotation.
So that's my little example, are there any others out there which show there's no one right way to play the game?
Hello world!
3 weeks ago
2 comments:
A joke regarding my perky priestess is that she's a mêlée priest, due to the time that she spent in the Battlegrounds with five points in Spirit Tap despite being a healing priest; the mana she acquired by hitting people over the head and ultimately killing them was hilarious at the time since no one ever seemed to take a mana-less healer very seriously. As a result of this title, I've often "requested" to tank on said character.
To date, I've successfully tanked two bosses in Shadow Labyrinth, a couple of mobs in Tempest Keep, and a slew of other paltry bosses of little note. It's amazing the amount of aggro you can generate when you want to keep a mob focused on you -- even as a Holy priest!
And, of course, pre-expansion I ran with a group of four friends who never had a tank. As a result, we often turned to my huntress's pet to do the job. Before The Burning Crusade, the bird had successfully tanked every five-man instance and has done most of the existing five-man instances in the game.
I'm one of those strange people that go out of the way to create challenges when there are others with me that enjoy doing the same. Unconventional compositions with like-minded people can be wonderful fun and, as you pointed out, are amazing ways to learn more about your respective class(es). This attitude is probably why I got out of my way to PuG heroics despite being a Tier 6-equivalent geared priestess!
Awesome topic idea!
Once at level 60 my pet Turtle tanked all of the trash in Scholomance up to Jandice. Then we hit the rooms full of skeletons which are magic immune, so it didn't go so well. So I am quite looking forward to the tanking pet talent tree.
Again back at level 60 my Shaman Kam tanked all of Blackrock Depths, not including the Princess, that bit was a little too hard. It was quite hairy and I had to use Earthshock to aggro mobs when they ran for the healer, given it was on a 5 second cooldown that could be quite amusing.
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