It's all change again, and this incarnation, I’m a Horde Warrior. I’ve pointed out the various features of Warriors in World of Warcraft elsewhere, but the specific one that I had been most anxious about was Threat management. In a group-based MMO the Warrior has one key roll – to ensure that all the monsters spend the fight beating the hell out of him, and not any of the more fragile members of the team. The Warrior has the hit points, armour and damage mitigation to survive this kind of battering, and typically anyone with other functions in the group, such as casting spells, will have a much harder time doing their jobs if they are actually taking hits.

To make this happen, the Warrior usually gets various abilities that manipulate the monster’s AI, and cause them to prioritise the Warrior over any other threats; usually by Taunting, and it’s the skilful use of these that can mean victory, or a total rout in an Instanced Dungeon. I’d practiced this a bit outside, duoing with my usual Shaman friend, but with mixed results. Rather than just getting a ‘Hit-Me!’ button to spam at level one, the various Threat skills take a while to acquire and get familiar with and until perhaps level 15 or so, the Warrior is not up to really reliable agro management in a group.

So I approached my first Instance Pickup Group with some trepidation – unsure of my ability to pull off the rather daunting role of ‘Main Tank’. I’d done ‘Primary Healer’ before and felt as if I’d gotten the hang of that, but the tank role is somewhat more complex than I had previously suspected.

As well as the basic fighting, and the more elaborate skill of holding agro, the Main Tank tends to end up as de facto expedition leader, regardless of who actually has the little crown on their portrait. A significant part of the monster’s initial anger is directed at the first person to hit it – the puller, so it helps the tank tremendously if that puller is him. This in turn dictates the direction of travel, and the pace of progress, which end up being the responsibility of the Main Tank. Pulling itself is a tricky art, based heavily in spatial awareness and knowledge of trigger zones and which monsters will help each other. Add to that the necessity of keeping the other party members safe from direct assault, being patient with unexpected AFKs, keeping an eye on caster mana bars, and yet still maintaining a rate of progress that doesn’t leave people bored, and all in all, leading the expedition is a daunting task, as much psychology as heroism.

I turned up at Ragefire Chasm (lv 13-18), suitably daunted, but signed up anyway – it’s the only way to learn. We got a full group together: Myself as Warrior, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Priest and The Parasite – a Mage. It looked fairly solid; The Big Three roles were covered, and the Warlock and Hunter are two very flexible secondary classes that would do well in a variety of roles, as the situation needed, and both have tank-pets, incase things got too hectic for just me alone. The Warlock, Hunter and Priest were also all in the same guild, implying that they already knew how to work together, which is always nice, and although this was my first go at Main Tanking, I spend far more time than is healthy musing on MMO Game Theory, so at least knew what was expected of me. Indeed, the only wobbly wheel I was concerned about was The Parasite.

One sermon my pilgrimage is teaching me well is that it is always the excitable ones that are going to be trouble. When you are all solemnly preparing to enter The Cave of Doom, casting buffs, checking weapons, preparing bandages, meditating to top up the mana bar one last time, mournfully playing the harmonica and clutching dog-eared photos of loved ones back home, there is usually always one guy there running round in circles, emote-spamming, jumping a lot and shouting ‘gogogo!!!1!!’ He’s the one to watch.

The Parasite was one such, and within a few fights I began to wish we’d just taken four people. I don’t know a great deal about the specifics of World of Warcraft Mages, but traditionally, the ‘Wizard’ type role in these games is usually to stay the hell back, and use whatever movement or mind control powers they have, if any, or failing that, carefully assess the flow of combat, and throw extremely powerful missile spells in to tip the balance or quickly finish off the wounded. This entails a whole art of agro avoidance of their own – not hitting the monster so hard it prefers the wizard to the tank, yet still inflicting the most damage possible. So Crowd Control, or Artillery, depending on the spells available. Either way, they'll be wearing a dress, and a pointy felt hat if they're really lucky, and so should not make monsters angry if possible.

The Parasite wasn’t having any of that, and having seen The Fellowship of The Ring one time too many, was right in there with me, Gandalf-ing it up and giving it what-for with his stick-with-a-knob-on-the-end. I admired his spirit of course, but this kind of foolishness makes the healer’s job extremely difficult, requiring them to chain-heal the Mage just to keep up with his horrific unarmoured damage intake, in turn leaving them too busy to keep me going. This chain-healing makes the monsters more angry at the healer, who then takes a beating and is unable to heal anyone at all. It usually goes badly after that, and it was only through the exceptional skill of our Priest that the whole group didn’t get wiped out there and then.

And so we continued, with me trying to explain about Threat, and Overnuking, and Agro Radius, and The Parasite seemingly ignoring it all. I even had to explain about The Sheep Spell – Polymorph Other. When cast on a target it turns them into a sheep, taking them out of the fight temporarily, long enough for the rest of us to even the odds a bit. Not that useful for soloing, but an invaluable Crowd Control tool. He didn’t seem to care.

We struggled on, working our backsides off to cope with his almost wilfully reckless incompetence, and eventually reached the first Boss, a big stompey demon thing with a sword bigger than I was. I admit being a bit overawed by it to be honest, and was expecting us all to die, but I trusted in the three Guildies to not only back me up as I charged at it, but also to compensate for the Parasite’s ineffectiveness, and to their credit, they did a fantastic job. We won and the looting commenced.

Now I’m still a bit confused as to what happened next. Looting rights is always a contentious issue, and can destroy friendships and guilds in the worst cases. Personally, I’m not that fussed about ‘teh shiney’; it’s nice to have cool stuff, but as long as I’m viable, I don’t really mind, but a lot of people really get heated up about these imaginary trinkets, so Blizzard have put in a very elaborate dice-rolling system to ensure fair dibs. I tend to just pass on it all unless it’s something I really need, so just clicked ‘Pass’, and began plotting out the next pull – a complex five-mob cluster with pets. Then I hear The Parasite go ‘Wooohoo!’, and then ‘g2g cya n00bs!’, followed by a teleport and group-quit.

Somewhat bemused, I asked the Guildies what that was all about, and apparently it turned out that I’d missed out on a really cool and/or valuable shiney. It only had a green name, and the place was aimed at level 16 people, so it couldn’t have been that hot, but the Guildies seemed annoyed about it all, calling him a ‘ninja’ and so on. The term Ninja in this context means someone who gets the loot after other people have done the work for it, but I found it difficult to see how that could have been the case in the strictest sense, since presumably the others rolled random numbers for it as well and lost, and the whole thing is enforced by the game code itself.

I guess I’d have felt cheated somehow if The Parasite had been necessary for the rest of us to complete the Instance, and presumably at very high levels, that kind of behaviour gets people killed, but as I pointed out to the Guildies, in my opinion, the dungeon was now a much safer place without him and his crazy tank-mage antics endangering us all. With one man short, our margin of error was now a lot less, but due to the Guildies exemplary conduct and skills, and my own new-found confidence in my role as leader, we pushed on and cleaned up, completing all our quests, killing everything that needed killing and generally doing much better without The Parasite, than with.

And best of all, the End Boss provided shineys for all…