Thankless

Healing's tough. It's not entirely pointless because there is some fun to be had, but from the perspective of a healer, I find there are limits to just how much healing I need to do while still keeping the "fun" factor intact. About 75% of the time, my entertainment depends heavily on DPS (or even my fellow healers) not being stupid heads. And about 50% of the time, these people fail me.

Healers and Tanks have a symbiotic relationship. We each understand that our roles are necessary roles within the whole raid structure - if there aren't enough of either type, well, none of us get to do ANYthing. Some of us enjoy our roles as non-DPS more than we'd enjoy DPSing at all. We're also used to being taken slightly for granted.

DPS thinks:
- The tank's job is to generate threat, so I don't have to pay attention to mine.
- The healer's job is to keep our health up, so I don't have to pay attention to mine.

Good players don't yoink threat regularly. Good players don't stand in the fire. Good players do great DPS without making anyone else's job harder. And good players don't make other people miserable with other various misbehavior (whining for loot, bragging, insulting people, ignoring raid commands, etc). Sometimes a good player will have a bad night, and really, that's alright. But the bad players, for whom every night is a bad night?

Go away.

I love tanks. But I think my standards for who can be called a tank, and who can't, are slightly strict. If they fail to keep more than 1 creature on them consistently, I don't consider them to be real tanks. If a monster is nearly always shuffling it's way past the tank and melee into the casters, and tank does nothing about it (especially if it's on a healer, because healers generate verrry little threat now and I guarantee with a poor tank we're not DPSing to get some threat), that player isn't a tank.

I don't actually have a tank chara--- no, that's not true. I have a couple of characters who can be tanks, and one of them I'm actually hoping to learn tanking on in the somewhat nearish future. I'm honestly a bit afraid to give it a shot with strangers, but there's not a lot of choice. Still. I'm gonna be a snob tank, or I'm not going to tank at all. Tanking is probably the single most important role in the game, because if there isn't a tank, there's no point to having a healer.

Over the years, tanking has been one of the more stressful roles within various games, and it's also been a rather thankless task. People whine and bitch about bad tanks, but you don't often hear, "You did a great job tanking tonight. Thank you for keeping all the monsters off of my face as well as you did, and for stopping those DPSers from getting us all killed."

It's sort of similar to the healing, except that it's more visible when healers pick it up and save the day (because that's what the encounter's about - all of a sudden we KNOW we're taking a lot more damage and our healing stable is being pushed to its limits).

So tanks - I love you. I really do. You have a much better understanding of my pain, and you're performing your role such that you make my own easier. I don't always pay attention to which bosses do a frontal thingie I need to stay out of so I know I give you a heart attack once every several months by not being in the right place, but I do notice and then I avoid that area like the plague, ever-after. Thank you for asking me, kindly, to shift out of the danger zone. Thank you for staring at boss groin or ass all the time. Thank you for doing such a bang up job of keeping meanie monsters off of our 16 or 17 stupid DPS. Thank you for coming to our raids and making them possible. Thank you for not being bitter over the times when I fail you and you hit the floor during encounters. Thank you for eating those big repair bills.

Thanks, tanks.