EgoTank took pity on my distraction this morning and allowed me to use a portion of one of his posts from the boards to fill my Thursday slot this week.

Hey, it was that or nuthin today. Plus, the man refuses to admit that he’s a damn fine writer, so I try to incite the Egotistical Legions to goad him into writing more as often as I can.

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No, you don’t need heroic gear to start Karazhan. I didn’t have a single piece of heroic/badge gear before I started tanking Kara. You don’t even need heroic gear to do the easier heroics. You do, however, need to be able to perform your role in a fairly competent manner. Heroics can be a good test in some ways, but they’re mostly just heroic for the healer. If a healer can cut it in heroic slave pens without ridiculous amounts of CC, then they can cut it in Karazhan. If you want to test a tank’s ability to hold aggro in short duration fights or a dpser’s ability to actually be on the right target and not spam AE at inappropriate moments, a normal 5 man can suffice. If you want to test a tank’s ability to maintain a high tps over both short and long duration fights, a healer’s ability to not run OOM at the 3 minute mark, or a dpser’s ability to maintain an acceptable level of damage output and threat control, then yes, the raid environment is really the only place where one can test those things.

That does not, however, diminish the fact that the most important things are shared between raiding and 5 mans, heroic or otherwise. That being the ability to work as member of a team, the tenacity to not give up or get upset after the first bad pull or unlucky wipe, and a mindset that doesn’t involve “I’m just here because I need X item”. Sure, you can wipe your way through 5 mans without those traits, hell you can even wipe your way through Karazhan if you’re overgeared enough.

At the end of Karazhan though there’s an intersection. The turn off just doubles back and leads to where it started. The road that keeps going has a big fat neon sign like a full saberlash to your face, and it says “NO SUCKING BEYOND THIS POINT”.

Karazhan is not the start of the training course, but rather the end of it. The start of it was way the hell back in Deadmines when you were wiping on Vancleef on your very first character because the tank couldn’t hold aggro on the adds. Everything that was there to learn in every instance from then till now applies to raiding.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 and is filed under General Info, Soapbox, ~ Aensu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.