I was also a jerk pug tank

One of my recent finds on the Blogosphere is Righteous Defense, obviously a tanking blog.

His most recent post was titled "I was a jerk pug tank", which tickled my funny bone as I had done something similar this past weekend.

I think it was Friday and I was doing the random heroic which dropped me into hHoL. Don't remember the party other than there was a rogue in it. I'm known for having a bad memory, so sticking out in my mind is either a tribute to your skill or a tribute to your utter lack thereof. As one might guess from the title of this post, it is the latter...

The rogue managed to pull hate off me on every pull up to the first boss. I'd mark targets, and then I'd lose on of the secondary targets. I dunno, maybe they were going after secondary targets b/c they'd live longer so they'd lose less combo points since of course the tank would taunt it off them. By losing less combo points (possibly also using Rupture), they'd get more DEEPS(!) on the meter, which is (of course) all that really matters.

We went right at the first intersection and cleared to the far right corner. General Bjarngrim was coming down the ramp, the lightning debuff gone. By this point, I had already noticed that the Rogue was being stupid, so I resolved not to taunt targets off them anymore unless it was the main target in the first few seconds (I put out enough TPS to hold threat off of anything but decently geared Hunters and Warlocks, both of whom have an aggro dump anyway...). I mark the two adds as the priority targets, then pull.

So we start killing, nothing special, and the first add goes down. Then by halfway through the second add, I see that Bjarngrim is at half health. Hmmm... Well, not hard to see what happened. After the first add went down, the Rogue decided to prioritize his position on the damage meter over doing the instance as a team. So about the same time as i notice this, I notice that the color around the Rogue's life bar has turned yellow, indicating they are getting close to pulling aggro.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't crack a small smile as I knew what was coming and decided to stick to my guns in letting him die.

So the yellow glow turned to red, and Bjarngrim turned on his new friend. There was a good two or three seconds which was more than enough for me to react (as I had shown earlier in the instance) as Bjarngrim tore the Rogue to little pieces. Meanwhile, the rest of the party finished off the second add and then moved on to the boss, easily defeating him.

Afterwards, nothing was said, I quickly rezzed the Rogue and we went on our way. Not surprisingly, the rest of the run was smooth, and the Rogue either spammed FoK or stuck to my target like glue.

Maybe I could have dealt with the situation in a more diplomatic manner, but I like to imagine that this really hit home the point that each person is responsible for their own survival on some level and it's not the tank's job to make up for their lack of control or desire to max out their DPS over being a part of the team.