Tanking Realm of the Fae

26 June, 2013. 684 words.

So I tanked Realm of the Fae on my level 16 Bahmi warrior for the first time, using a Reaver/Paladin/Tempest build. (Technically you can queue for it at 15, but I waited until 16 so I had an AoE attack.) I was pretty nervous beforehand - tanking is stressful for me, and I had not seen RotF in about a year, and who knows what they might have changed for Storm Legion. But as it turns out, RotF is just as easy as all the guides say it is, and nothing’s really changed. In fact, it’s actually not a good place to learn tanking, because you can do just about everything wrong and still survive.

I would rate my performance as average, which I don’t think is bad considering the circumstances. I lost threat a bunch on the trash mobs, but a) you don’t have many threat tools at 16, and b) everyone spammed DPS the whole time and rarely waited for the tank. A couple of times I accidentally pulled too much trash, though, because my health dropped alarmingly low.

The bosses were not difficult. They had almost no mechanics to worry about - far less than I remember, actually, unless I’m thinking of the expert dungeon. Trickster Maellow did nothing to me. (At first I tried to taunt his two companions until I remembered they don’t actually attack anyone.) The big turtle Luggodhan dropped slime at his feet, but it didn’t exactly hurt to stand in it. (I moved anyway for the practice.) Battlemaster Atrophinius didn’t do anything to me except possibly a stun. (I read in the guides about a cleave, and I was waiting to dodge it, but I never saw it.) Only the last guy Twyl did anything potentially dangerous, which was freezing everyone in place (I didn’t see any way to avoid it). The whirly floor thing never touched anyone though. Honestly some of the trash encounters were more damaging to me than the bosses.

Next time, I think I will replace Tempest with Warlord, so I can get that ability to pull ranged opponents to you. I’m not at all sure why I didn’t do that to begin with. And I will make some adjustments to my hotkeys - I had a “pull” key that had Soul Sickness and Shock Pulse macroed, but I will change it to just Soul Sickness. Then I’ll change my “threat” key from Grim Lure alone to a macro of the Warlord Pull, Grim Lure, and Soul Sickness.

Pacing is an important part of tanking, I think. I went at what I would call an average pace - I stopped for most trash encounters, in other words, and didn’t skip much (some of that was not my choice though). I also waited until the current encounter was dead before moving on. I’m sure I could have gone faster and chain-pulled multiple trash encounters at a time, and if anyone had asked, I would have, but the party didn’t seem to mind what I was doing.

Personally, I like tanks that find a nice balance between too fast and too slow. Tanks that go “too fast” in my opinion are the ones that chain-pull and don’t ever stop running, which I saw a lot in Abyssal Precipice. Or pull without any regard for how well the healer can keep up. On the other hand, a tank that goes “too slow” spends a lot of time standing around figuring out the optimal way to pull trash. Tanks really shouldn’t stand still too much except during combat, in my opinion. Most of the time, when in doubt, it’s better to just run ahead and depend on the DPS to blow stuff away and the healer to keep you alive.

I actually got two nice tank pieces out of RotF. :) So I think I’ll do it two or three more times depending on how fast I level, until I feel completely comfortable with it, then go on to Iron Tombs, which I don’t know as well. I seem to recall that it’s kind of long.

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