My Damage Dealer goes tanky again
Noob Tank Journal entry #2
After the Spindle 1 debacle, the next day I can play, Blessed Crucible is a daily pledge – a dungeon Red hasn’t done yet. This time I’m queuing her as a DD though. Perhaps there may be time for a tank run with Lilith afterwards, but I want that skill point for my Werewolf Redguard first. A random player in zone approaches me to suggest we queue together so we can get a group faster. I accept and we get in pretty fast.
My random zone chat acquaintance seems to be in his CP 200s, yet suggests we kick the healer for being CP110, but I object that he deserves a chance and I don’t remember the dungeon being too hard for a low level character. The tank is high CP.
Red goes into werewolf form right from the start and presently embarks on a killing spree through the dungeon to try to stay in that form for as long as she can. She also does some 60-70% of the group’s damage and we blaze through everything until the last boss. Where the tank reads the scroll of Glorious Battle. Then the dying starts. And it’s not just the lowbies either.
Honestly, I’d forgotten how fast the lava eruptions on the last boss move in Hard Mode, and how much damage it does. And while a werewolf can do crazy damage when it can safely stay glued to an enemy’s backside, it has very little time to react to bad stuff spreading from said enemy. When that bad stuff is a one shot kill, well, a dead DPS does no damage at all. So after the first wipe, I decide to stay in human form, where I can at least do some meager damage from range with my bow. I tell people to evade the lava and the healer to heal from range so there’s more time to react. Of course, I then fail to follow my own advice and Red dies, quickly followed by another wipe. At least the team is communicating… Third attempt and the other DD requests we give up on hard mode. That seems to give us lots more time to avoid the lava, but the healer, who at least does what I said, dies anyway having no idea what hit him (presumably the red ranged AoEs that are placed on the ground from time to time?) and we manage to wipe again.
By this time the tank has had enough (he probably wants 2 keys from hard mode anyway) and leaves the group. Despite this, the rest of the team shows some spirit. We all agree that we just need some more practice – they’re low CP and I’m on an alt I haven’t played that much. Unfortunately we are now short a tank, yet I’m impatient for another try. So I offer to tank until we can get a new one and the group accepts. I slap on Red her tanking setup (that failed so miserably in Spindle I) but keep the Werewolf ultimate and proceed to taunt the boss. And I don’t know if it’s because we’re not on Hard Mode or that this final boss just doesn’t deal as much damage as the one in Spindle I, but I’m able to hold my own, with potions and some assistance from the healer – who now seems to have learnt something and is staying alive more. Slowly, we start to whittle the boss down with our one DPS, who is commendably able to kill off the intermittent adds (who need to die so we can break the boss’s shield ; though risky, I decided to draw the boss to them so it’s at least obvious where they are and they can be AoEd down).
And then suddenly, I look up and there’s a real tank in the fight. The replacement tank we queued for. I can only imagine his surprise getting into a dungeon and finding another sword and board player already taunting the boss. In the confusion, we overtaunt, and the boss goes on a rampage for 15 seconds. Somehow we get through that too and get the boss back under control.
Unfortunately, I’m still in tank setup, doing maybe 3k damage. This is of course where I engage my Werewolf ultimate. In tank gear my damage output is rather unconvincing, but it’s still a lot better than it was in human form, when my skill bars were all about damage mitigation, healing and the like. At the same time, I’m now on tank health, which means I’m not getting one-shot anymore. With some blocking and healing, I can survive in the lava for at least a bit, and I can quickly position myself where I can keep melee attacking. So it takes a while, but in the end it seems the “fake tank” build wins the day where the meta glass cannon failed. (I wish I’d checked and screenshotted my Combat Metrics stats but I didn’t. I tested it on the dummy afterwards though and got about 14k DPS as Werewolf in my mediocre tanking gear – that’s a dummy though; it was obviously lower than that in the dungeon.)
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever before felt so happy just to see the final boss of Blessed Crucible go down – and finally pick up Red’s skill point!
I can only hope the last-moment random tank wasn’t too unhappy that we ended up with only one Undaunted key…
Icehair's Stuff 