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Bossing around Randoms
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Bossing around Randoms

Posted 05-20-2008 at 02:33 AM by Sprot
I'm not usually a big fan of bossing people around, but yesterday evening me and a friend wanted to find a group for heroic Underbog - daily, and friend still needs reputation. Lo and behold, LFG states "tank & DD for heroic underbog needed". Whee - we join up. So we had
Warrior tank (me)
Feral Druid (my friend)
Warlock, Mage, Priest

I'm usually wary of PUG healers & DPS, with people I know we usually run without any CC, but it depends on the healer & DPS synergy. After inspecting the priest, which was around 1900 +heal, I decided to try for no CC.

I state a kill order, specifically state that I might sometimes mark for CC, but usually not, and off we go. The first three-elemental-pull (which is tricky for undergeared groups), warlock gets nervous and banishes one, then re-banishes right as we drop the second elemental.

Next pull, mage keeps trying to sheep one of the Sporebats over and over again, even though it wasn't marked for CC. Shortly after, when killing the first Bog Giant, the Warlock's Felguard adds a three-pack (2 elementals, 1 sporebat) when the Giant is around 30%. I was at full health, priest at 85% mana, so I mark one elemental for banishing and start tanking the other two mobs. The mage starts chain-sheeping, the warlock panicks and runs circles, the druid panicks and taunts a mob off me, the healer panicks and starts crosshealing, forgetting me. Wipe. Nobody touched the Bog Giant once the adds came, had everyone stayed focussed we would have handled that without problems.

So I started bossing around. Stay focussed, don't worry about CC, I will state when I want CC, just DPS, etc. It took a while for them to start trusting in my multi-target-tanking, but by the end of the instance we were rocking the place. We ended up never using CC, I died at the black stalker, tribute to the low DPS, but they managed to burn him down, so we survived.

Conclusion
As tank, you have to judge all the situations in regards to your group setup, and if you're sure that things will work out, boss around! It made the run so much more enjoyable for everyone. Of course, don't overdo it, but set the record straight at the beginning of the instance, everyone will have more fun.

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Comments

Old
Telling randoms in pugs to not CC is always weird for me. I know they just want to do a job and help the party, but they often don't understand that it can lead to more chaos when CC is broken/resisted/etc. You don't want to come off as a god-complex tank that thinks he just "doesn't need it", you just want the run to go smoother and that can often mean forgoing CC and just dpsing down one at a time.
Posted 08-01-2008 at 03:22 PM by ratman ratman is offline
 
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