Nostalgia reborn

I’ve been playing the Cata beta for more than four months now and it occurred to me that I haven’t really felt compelled to post anything about it in this blog until now. Not that I haven’t been terribly, terribly impressed with everything I’ve seen so far. It’s that don’t see any point in writing just to report things if I don't have anything unique to say about them, and my most common reaction to new things in the beta of “oh my god holy shit that is so fucking cool” isn’t really that interesting or original.

What I did think was interesting was going into Stonecore on my fresh Druid template and finding I couldn’t hold aggro on anything. That all my best abilities had five hour cooldowns [any tank will tell you six seconds is an eternity when you’re losing mobs left and right] and that -gasp- the only way we were going to progress was to coordinate, CC and focus fire.

It’s a paradigm shift, all right. Suddenly a great crashing wave of nostalgia broke over my shoulders and I was back in The Botanica, looking at each pull and working out what CCs to use and what combination of abilities I would need to use to gain initial aggro on the mobs I needed to tank. Back when holding aggro on multiple mobs [if you weren’t a Paladin] was something you had to work for.

I remember the patch when Roots was made to be usable indoors. I remember thinking how fantastic it was to be a Druid tank, now with two CCs, one of which was going to get me threat on the mob in question. And then I never ever got to use it because any trash pull with more than two mobs devolved into AoE spam.

I predict Cataclysm is going to be a great time to be a tank. Now just make it live already, dammit.