Let me introduce myself properly first.
Caelis
I’ve been playing WoW for 4 years now and have been an active raider for most of that time.
My first ever character was a rogue named Caelis which, according to girl gamer stereotypes, is not the most preferred class for a girl gamer like me. Of course, me not being aware of these stereotypes, happily jumped head first into the melee dps role and I have loved every minute of it. Naturally, being a girl, I did go for a sexy male nightelf!
My rogue has been my main raiding character all through vanilla WoW, where I was a subtlety rogue, sapping and sneaking around in UBRS when it was still a 10-man raid, learning the combat ropes in my guild’s first forays into Zul’Gurub, learning about basic theory crafting during Molten Core and Blackwing Lair times, and striving to become a better dpser all the time.
Now, many years and raids later, after having been rogue classleader, general officer, Raid Leader and Guild Master (all of the same guild I started out in as a wee baby rogue), my veteran mutilate rogue is enjoying his old age by only casually going into some raids, to show these “young ‘uns” how’s it’s done to top the dps charts.
Ricah
After having been a dps class for so long, I wanted to create another character, and I wanted it to be a healer! Only…what class to pick? This was somewhere near the end of TBC’s life span, and after having seen the uber awesomeness of shamans I decided that’s what I wanted too. Totems! Healing! Ranged caster dps! Melee dps with tornado’s!
Ricah was born, a lovely female draenai shammy ready to Heal the World! Well…not until level 62-ish. Before that time I leveled as enhancement, only to try my hand at healing once i got to Outland and picked up all the healing quest rewards and drops for a few levels. Together with my DK buddy/guildy who respecced tank at the same time we ventured into outland’s dungeons, leveling our way to Northrend. This was all pre-patch 3.2 so before dual-spec, and before the Looking For Dungeon tool. Now, many months later, she has graduated from alt-status to new-main status, transferred to another server to join a RL friend in an all-dutch guild, and is happily healing her way through ICC25.
Mandorellan
After getting bored during the “after-TOC-but-before-3.3″ period I decided that I wanted to complete the Holy trinity, and level a tank. Since I still had a draenai warrior hanging around at level 60, Mandorellan became my next new project.
Upon reaching Northrend I dual-specced him to protection and started practicing my rotations and priorities on mobs while i was questing. I practiced everything from single target fights to aoe fight, pulling ranged, los pulls, the whole 9 yards. I picked up every tank item I could get from quest rewards, bought a few crafted lvl 70-ish gear, and then at level 71 I felt brave enough to try out Utgarde Keep with a pug. I did fine, learned some new things about aggro happy dps (grumble) and was not quite so nervous for my next run. I leveled Mandorellan almost exclusively through dungeons, only doing those questlines with good tanking rewards. Mandorellan dinged 80 a good 3 weeks ago, after which I went from “wow-finally-we-got-ourselves-a-good-tank” in normal dungeons….to “you’re-tanking-in-thát-gear-you-scrub” in my first ever Utgarde Keep heroic…talk about bursting my ego bubble…
Tanking heroics as a fresh 80 is interesting to say the least. Of course I did my homework first, I had learned all the fights in the normal dungeons, I knew the boss’s abilities from my previous 2 80′s as well, I was at or above the defense cap, bought some BoE’s, gemmed and enchanted my gear with the lower quality gems and enchants….only to get abuse straight away. After that I quickly learned to speak up immediately upon entering the dungeon, “Hi, I’m a fresh 80, please be considerate with your dps and aggro”. If anyone didnt like it and wanted a quick run…up to them to drop group and wait 15 minutes for the debuff to wear off.
I’m proud to say that I have now reached a respectable gear level which is appropiate for tanking Naxx25 or Ulduar10. Im not *quite* ready for ToC10 or ICC10, and I have yet to set foot and actually tank a “Raid”, besides having off-tanked Patchwerk 2x and Sartharion for the weekly raid quest. Mandorellan will happily remain a casual alt-project for now though, and maybe i can find myself a nice casual 10-man guild that likes doing Naxx10 or Ulduar10 the “proper” way it was intended instead of steamrolling the place in ICC25 gear.
I hope you will enjoy reading this blog, and fell free to comment!
