The Cranky Old Gnome

I read a post over at Armaggedon’s Coming today that got my passions inflamed.  To sum it up, Gnomeaggedon makes the claim that the Gnomes need to retake Gnomeregan to escape our Dwarfish and Human oppressors.  He talks about how we are relegated to the smallest, dirtiest areas of Ironforge and Stormwind, and how we are mostly treated as an afterthought.  He accuses the Dwarfs and Humans of “receiving some sort of Alliance Refugee Assistance Payments, keeping it for themselves to fund their exploration and war efforts while the Gnomes sleep rough on the streets and get relegated to corner shop owners.”

And you know, it’s hard for me to disagree with him.  It may be because I have my own theory on what actually happened in Gnomeregan.

Read more to find out about the great Gnome conspiracy of our day.

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In my last post I talked about a very unfortunate Culling of Stratholme run that went south because Arthas bugged out.  But I got to thinking and I realized something.

Arthas is the worst tank ever.

Well, ok, maybe not the worst ever, but he’s not exactly going to be front running any top-rated guilds any time soon.  He does lack some serious skills as a tank.  He runs off all wily nilly, giving no thought or heed to his group mates, pulling mob after mob without waiting for anything.  And even when he does give a ‘moment to clear your lungs’ he doesn’t actually give you all that much time, and half the time he doesn’t actually stop–he pulls the closest zombies, often keeping you in combat so you can’t eat or drink

It got me thinking, what exactly makes a bad tank?  I’m sure everyone has run across a few doosies, each tied to unique and often very entertaining stories.  But in each story there was something specific the tank did or didn’t do that caused the disaster.  So I asked my guild mates to see if they had any insight on what tanks do that make them ‘bad’.

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So last night I was running Heroic Culling of Stratholme with my guild.  As luck would have it CoS was both the regular and heroic daily.  We had a solid group together, although one of the dps had never been in there before.  I suggested that we try for the timed achievement as I still haven’t managed to get that darn drake on my main.  Our healer was a little nervous about it, but she’s way to hard on herself.  She’s actually a freaking fantastic healer.  But, I didn’t want to add extra stress to her life, so I suggested that we just give it a shot, as a practice effort, but not as our primary goal.

For the benefit of the dps who hadn’t been in I made a very thorough run down of what would happen (maybe it was a little too thorough, I have a tendency to go into a little too much detail).  Everyone knew what was going on, and I was fairly confident we could do it.

I started the first pull and everything was great! We flew through the instance.  I don’t think I’ve ever gone through it that fast.  We also got really lucky in that all the mobs spawned right there in that first area, so we just bounced back and forth between them.  We got the 2nd boss down and still had 10 whole minutes to get to the boss.  Well we headed for the inn and waited for Arthas to show up.  And waited.  And waited.  After about 3 minutes I was about to go find him when I saw him running down the road.  Well, 7 minutes..it’s gonna be tight, but we can still do it.

We get to the 3rd set of dragonkin when, Arthas decided he was going to tank theses mobs and I could go to hell.  I don’t know if it was a bug, or if I was just getting really unlucky taunt resists, but I could not pull the mobs off him.  So of course, he gets himself killed.  And then he just refuses to respawn.  By the time he does, the time is down to 4 minutes.  And despite our best efforts, we just didn’t make it in time.

So in the end, what should have been a flawless and easily accomplished drake run ended up being a disaster because Arthas is a jackass.

Oh well.  There’s always tomorrow.

But as a side note to my complaining about Arthas, I want to compliment my guild mates on doing a fantastic job.  Especially our healer.  She rocked the hell out of that instance.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

I ran out of time last night before I could finish this post, due to my weekly raid schedule.  I knew it was coming, but I got distracted by that ‘new blog smell’ and kept tweaking this theme or that format instead of focusing on finishing that post.

Anyway, to continue my story from yesterday…ah yes, fate having other plans and all that.

I had been so determined to become the most annoying Gnome in all of Azeroth.  But with a trial account, I couldn’t even whisper people.

To be honest, I’m still not really sure what ultimately made me decide that it would be totally fine to buy a regular account just to annoy people.  I’d like to think by that point the annoyance factor was really just more of a justification.  In truth, I was already completely hooked.

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