Pugging, Hostility, and Silliness

I have been working on my death knight, a lot, lately. "Surprise, surprise" you might say... "Another alt"... Well yes, but it's not like that. I'm actually putting VERY serious consideration into making this alt my main. "¿Que?"... You heard me right folks. No this isn't going to be another rampaging post about how bad bears are, cause that's not the case at all. I still have a lot of fun with my bear, BUT, I think they are lacking heavily in the AoE department. Now, in 5-mans I can generally make up for that with the fact that i'm geared to the teeth, and most people in heroics... well... aren't...

Druids are bad at AoE threat. The worst, among the 4 tank specs. Pallies have always been kings, and that's fine. Now, Warriors have come to join the, adding some amazing mobility to the mix as well. Blood & Thunder (which spreads Rend to every target it hits when it's on one target), Thunderclap, Shockwave, lololol, heroic leap, and i'm sure there's something i'm forgetting. DKs as well, have pretty good AoE threat between Death and Decay and Blood Boil all over the place, not to mention all the disease spreads, and heart strike which hits 3 targets just off the cuff (although, admittedly, it shares a rune-cost with Blood Boil).

Bears, on the other hand, have 2.5 aoe abilities. There's thrash and swipe, both of which are on 6 second cooldowns, and there's Maul which i only consider half an aoe ability because it hits 2 targets, the 2nd one for half damage... Bleh. Now, in patch 4.1, they are buffing the damage of thrash and swipe, but lowering it's threat modifiers to compensate... wait what? I have to thrash, swipe, and maul just to keep threat on a few targets, just to outdo my pally offtank's consecrate/hammer of righteousness. And THAT doesn't even always work out well. He still manages to outaggro me pretty consistently in multi-target situations.

Let me reiterate that. They're taking the bear's weakest aoe ability (swipe), cutting it's cooldown in half (3s down from 6), and buffing it's damage... but to counteract the damage buff, they're lowering it's threat modifier. They're also taking our stronger (but still not that strong) other aoe ability (thrash), and buffing it's damage while lowering it's threat modifier. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. If we're struggling on aoe situations, why would they only give us what equates to a cooldown change on our weakest ability? Will it help? Sure, it will help some... but not to the extent that I think Blizzard is hoping it will.

Ah well. Aside from all this, in the process of gearing up, i've been pugging quite a bit to get some heroics out of the way... and much to my surprise i've had a pretty good time of it! I've run across people of all skill levels, good bad, and in between, but the REALLY shocking part is just how NICE everyone's been. And the fact that i've not had anybody leave any of my groups... Well no that's not true. Had a couple people go offline in a VP run I was in, but that wasn't becaues of any failures or anything. I even tanked Stonecore and the healers was like "WTB a group who doesn't fail on Ozruk"... well of course i'd learned that shit the *hard way* when Cata was new so I told him I knew how to tank it... and sure enough I didn't fail on it. He was like "Holy fuck i'm impressed"... Then of course, I go in and fail on the last boss by letting her drop a rock on my nose... sigh. Oh well, we all laughed about it, came in and kicked her ass a few minutes later.

Maybe this LFG call-to-arms shit won't be terrible... of course, i'm only gonna be tanking so i'm coming from a biased perspective. I totally meant to have a picture of my DK to put here, but I don't... So sue me.