Dyumedes

This is Dyumedes.

He's been inactive for a while, but back in Vanilla he was pretty much the most famous tank on our server. I knew him slightly - we have some people in our guild who were pretty well known in the vanilla warcraft community such as Mileena and Griffinheart, and these guys knew Dyu and raided with him from time to time.

He's a hard man to get on with - I know another tank on our server who asked him politely for gearing advice and Dyu simply put him on /ignore without responding. Dyu was raidleader and GM of the top raiding guild on our server back in Vanilla, before his job (he was in the army) meant he had to take a long break from the game.

For all his faults (and he was perfectly polite and pleasant to me), Dyu was and presumably still is a top notch player. I remember Mileena telling me about a time when Dyu came and tanked a ZG run for us. She was seriously impressed I remember - Dyu chain-pulled every group of mobs (this was at a time when crowd control was vital in raiding) until they got to the tiger boss. The tiger boss in ZG had two adds which had to be killed within a few seconds of each other and you tended to split dps and use two tanks plus a dps tank on one of the casters. Rather than assign tanks Dyu just pulled them all and - Mileena's voice dropped here to an awed whisper - Dyu tanked everything himself.

This was a time when thunderclap was only useable in battle stance, so you had to stance dance to use it. You had to press shield block every 6 seconds to prevent yourself being hit by crushing blows. Shield wall was on a 30 minute cooldown. Mages and warlocks in raids regularly had to wand for the first few minutes of an encounter to let the tanks get sufficient aggro on a single target. The phrase "wait for five sunders before dpsing" was a dungeon and raid mantra. There was no revenge cleave, no damage shield no threat No Threat NO THREAT!

The reason I've been thinking of Dyu recently is that I've been reading the beta forums and looking at the changes to tanking we can expect. Apparently AoE threat has been hit very hard, and crowd control is supposed to be becoming more important. We'll also have threat decay, which will mean that we can never slack off in our rotations later in the fight once we have a good threat lead. All of these things are going to make tanking, particularly AoE tanking, much more difficult which is something that's being hailed as positive in the game - an end to the AoE dps zergs of the LK dungeons and a return to the more strategic encounters of the past.

While that's all very well, I wonder how far back we really want to go. Do we want to return to the Vanilla days, when even tanking three mobs could be seen as a major demonstration of skill from one of the server's best?