Dependence on Constant Consecration makes us all dumber

With the patch, we'll be seeing the increased effectiveness of Prot Warriors and Feral Druids at AoE tanking.

There has been much rejoicing by the Warriors and Druids and much QQ from the Paladins.

Ok, ok, get over yourselves. Personally, I like the idea of having some additional skills available to a wider base of players. You want to be special? Be special because you're good at what you do, not because you chose to play a class that has an easy button (lol, that's how i win at WWS :-)

Its kinda funny how things have gone lately.

For a heroic dungeon run, is anybody really doing it for "fun" anymore? Or challenge?

In my experience....no.

Sure, we have the occasional drunken fun run, or Don Santos mexican hat run.

But generally, what do you see?

I see things like "LF quick heroic, need 3 badges before tonights raid" or "LF heroic slabs, need for title quest for tonight's gruuls/mags run"

So people are looking to just cruise through the dungeon, blast your way through and get the badges or quest reward/completion or even some actual loot drops for alts that're not fully geared yet.

Many of these heroic groups start forming 60 or 75 minutes hour before raid time, with the full and accurate expectation that they'll be done in time for raid invites which start 30 minutes before raid time.

In this environment, who the F wants to crowd control?

Just consecrate, pull all mobs onto the tank, and who even cares about focus fire at this point. Everybody just kill kill kill and keep moving.

So of course the Prot Warriors and Feral Druids are pissed, and very happy with what they'll be getting to play with after tonight's patch settles down.

I have to look at all this energy with a grain of salt.

Sure, this works now, at this point of progression.

We all over power the heroics like its goin out of style.

Our pallies can easily handle the 7 mob pulls in Heroic Shattered Halls, and our healers can keep them alive no problem, and our DPS just do our normal macro mashing and can burn the stuff down quick enough that there's no fuss.

But what about a year ago (give or take a few months depending upon your rate of progression or date of entry into WoW)?

I'll tell ya, when I first started running heroics, AINT NO WAY you gonna have the pally just try to grab all the mobs.

Even those first two guys at the beginning of Heroic Ramparts, and the one patrolling mob on the bridge.

We'd CC one of the two, wait for the pat to go away, and focus fire the first one down, hopefully have the second one dead before the patrol came back.

And we had to, because (A) the tanks weren't sturdy enough yet, (B) the healers couldnt heal through the damage yet, and (C) the DPS could barely get the first two mobs down before the patrol came back.

So grouping required finesse.

I can barely remember the last time I've chain trapped a mob three times in a single pull. It used to be common place.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that when we first enter some of the WotLK instances, and definitely the level 80 heroic versions, we're going to be reconsidering just how dependent we've become on Constant Consecration.

All those fancy AoE tanking capabilities wont come into the spotlight until we overpower an instance.