Smores over Felfire

I know I’ve been harping on the LFG changes for a few days now, but this’ll be the last one directly about it, I promise.

I spent a decent portion of the weekend on WoW, specifically on my paladin tank, because I learned something crucial to this toon’s development. There is a mighty MIGHTY shortage of tanks in the Whirlwind battlegroup. I mean, I sit in the LFG queue for 5 seconds tops before I’m tossed into a group. No, I’m not exaggerating, I had someone sitting no more than 4 feet away from me and she heard me, repeatedly, never get beyond 5 seconds before WoW popped the “you’ve found a group” window. Furthermore, most of the dps I pug with are so very sick of waiting that they’ll happily run at my breakneck speed through the heroic (I think the median run-time for anything not scripted, like VH or CoS, is around 20 minutes per instance) and we’ll leave the healer sobbing in the corner ’cause I’m agging everything my shiny-ground-agg-maker will let me. This strategy is so effective, by the way, that I’m currently sitting on 3 pieces of t9 gear and I’m within 3 badges of a 4th. I clock in at around 12-15 badges an hour and by this time next week I’ll very likely be more geared on my paladin than I am on my warlock, which frightens me on a number of levels (But I don’t WANNA tank! I wanna deeps!).

The primary reason I got so much gear for the paladin is actually rather simple:

1) I run the paladin when my S.O., a bubble-priest, is around, and when you have a tank AND healer pre-grouped, the median wait-time for LFG is around 3 seconds. She knows how quickly I pull and compensates accordingly (read: If I’m within healing range, I likely need heals ’cause I agged the room… again…). When the healer AND the tank are both on the same page, the DPS can blow through their mana/rage/energy/runic power and before you know it, we’re standing over Loken saying “Um… what just happened? I remember buffing at the entrance, then there’s this 20 minute panic-and-pain filled blur… now I have 6 more badges and I don’t know how- Oh hey! Loken’s dead!”

2) I hate waiting for a group. As the warlock, the median wait-time is around 10 minutes, which is enough time to do 2, maybe 3 dailies, get stuck in a group where the other 4 run into walls most of the time, get 6 badges after about an hour, then repeat. Given a similar amount of time on my paladin, I’d probably pick up a piece of t9 in the same span of time.

So how do you, someone who loves their DPSer, get the same turnaround time as the tanks and healers (median healer-LFG-time is just under a minute, by the way)? The answer, as you could probably guess, is to group with a healer/tank. You get to piggyback on their preferential treatment and THEY get a dps who knows which end of a dagger/wand to hold. Assuming you don’t have a favored tank/healer to roll with, the alternative may make you a little quezy: dual spec as a tank/healer (assuming you’re not a warlock/mage/rogue/hunter. If you are, see the “piggyback” option). You don’t have to be amazing, you just have to be good enough to keep the tank alive. If the dps acts stupid, let ‘em die, your job is to keep those who passed the “is it your ass or a hole in the ground ” test. Why roll a healer/tank on your beloved meat-grinder? Because badges don’t care if you use them for that dps trinket when you earned them as a healer.

Also: no waiting.

I hate waiting.