Monk Week: Tai's post

Day 17: In Front of Me

Oh Tuesday Maintenance Day, why must you thwart my screenshotting plans and lead me into big long rambles about my favorite characters? (You have been warned. The big long ramble is below. Fear the ramble.)


Tai's Story

     No, this isn't Tai's in character story, though there is one of those too. Rather this is the story of how I ended up with a level 90 Mistweaver almost by accident.
     One of my best friends and favorite WoW players had left the game for a while toward the end of Cataclysm. I fell heir to the guild she'd run and those of us who still played soldiered on for a while. I started rerolling a few characters on a new PVE server with a higher population for a change of environment. And then one day that friend decided to come back, with a new account to just start fresh. I was ecstatic. She leveled a Mistweaver on our old server intending to main her.
     Next in the plans was leveling a druid, and I had a prot pally on another server that we intended to cross realm with so she could level resto. But then I left town for a week (with no net access), and when I came back she had decided she wanted to level a new prot pally. Her old main had been one. On a whim I looked at my roster with the low level Mistweaver that had never been leveled and I said: Hey I've been meaning to try a Mistweaver. I'll make one to level with you.
     So I made Tai on the new PVE server and we grouped up by battletag to start leveling. When we hit 15 we started queueing up for dungeons with vent up. Here's a confession: I can't heal. I tried playing Tiuli as resto in a few dungeons in Cata and it just felt like full blown panic to me the entire time, people died, I was fail and it just made me not want to do it any more. I'd tried a few times on low level healers, but the first dungeon queue usually saw them respecced as dps if not entirely abandoned. I fully expected that after a dungeon or two I'd find out that I couldn't heal on a monk either and he'd respec into Windwalker and that would be that.
     But I had underestimated my friend's prot pally. I had underestimated monks, and maybe I'd underestimated myself. Healing was fun! At least it was when I had a tank I was talking to in vent who'd listen when I said I needed mana and not blame me if she ran off without me and died. We took our inst-queues and we ripped up through the levels, a couple dungeons a day. After a while she decided to transfer Os over to Tai's server and we got a few other friends to sign a charter so they'd have a guild to live in. And we kept leveling.
     We'd complain in vent when the dps did silly things, when the hunter wouldn't turn growl off no matter how many times he was asked. And then one day after the rest of the run had dropped group we went to pick up one more more sanguine hibiscus so we could both finish the quest. We two-manned down a pack of mobs to do it. The off hand comment was made. 'You know I bet these two could just two-man these things.' The next day we tried it. It was not only possible, it was fun! We had to work twice as hard, we had to really stop and think about mob mechanics and how to pull. I had to pull out all of Tai's utility to keep us alive.
     That was around level 60. We stopped queueing altogether and just started two-manning dungeons we could get quests in. We hit 70. Sure enough we could still two-man the Northrend dungeons. At level 80 we tried Forge of Souls. It was only after we'd finished it that Os' player realized it had been the heroic! These two characters could do anything together!

(In Dalaran while leveling)

     We did a few quests and some crafting to get our ilvl a bit higher and then started walking into Cataclysm dungeons. Couldn't do Blackrock caverns without a third because of a mechanic on the last boss, though we were able to do the rest of the dungeon two-man. Throne of Tides was easy. Stonecore took some thinking the first time but the second time we laughed the whole way. We hit 85. There were less dungeons we could level in in Pandaria, but we managed to two-man the Temple of the Jade Serpent shortly after getting there and then switched to questing and taking down rares. Things that had been awful and deadly on some of my other characters were just fun challenges with Tai and Os. In Dread Wastes we managed to pull about 12 of those mobs that fear and some of the blade flurry ones and then run into one of the big elite giants that pats up and down. But in the end it was Tai and Os who were left standing and hey... our quest was done.
    Shortly after 90 we went back to Temple of the Jade Serpent in Heroic to see if we could. We did. We did Warbringers. We've geared up and though I'm still trying to get better at healing big groups of people on Tai (rather bad healing habits from just worrying about the two of us for a while. lol) I'm still loving it. I love playing on him and healing on him. Still not sure I can play a resto druid but I feel like I know what my monk can do. I haven't been afraid to queue for dungeons all alone as heals on my lower level Mistweavers because I feel like I know what I'm doing and that, it turns out, is at least half the battle.

     Here's Tai and Os on one of their semi-weekly Kara runs in hopes of mounts and pets for Os and transmog gear for Tai.(Because there's another awesome leather set I want to put together for him.)
     Their guild is level 19 and counting and a few of my other favorite WoW buddies have rerolled to live in it with them now. Tai and Os finished their Glorious Achievement the other night, next they'll be working on the rares on Isle of Thunder and when the commotion dies down some we're hoping to get a chance at taking on the challenge of two-manning some of the nastier rares on Timeless Isle. So that's Tai's post for monk week. The rest of the monks will probably have to share theirs.