To boldly go where I do not go very much

Getting in a rut, doing things your 'usual' way, tends to create dark corners in your skill areas.  You end up missing some successes and a lot of opportunities.  The worst thing is, you never even know they exist.

A couple of months ago, I decided to take the opportunity afforded by Blizzard to create an 11th character that arrived with the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion set for World of Warcraft. [Great news for players who have 11 characters on a realm: Altoholic addon added support this week for an 11th column in its characters Grid view!]

I have been a WoW user/player for quite a while.  Most of my high level characters (80+) are casters; particularly cloth-wearing casters — warlocks, mages, and priests.  Along with those I have a fair number of hunters too.

So the vast majority of my characters are used for fighting other characters at range, not up close and personal.  I do have a  level 85 rogue, a level 85 paladin (tank and DPS specs), and a level 85 enhancement shaman.

In the back of my mind, I was kind of bothered by the fact that my exploration of the classes in the game was therefore kind of incomplete.

So I decided to create a 'kitty' (feral druid) buttressed by my oldest, most seasoned characters on my original realm.

That kitty is now level 60 now.  For the 2nd or 3rd time since I created it, its XP (experience) and thus level has been frozen.

At level 60-84, freezing XP seems to result in your efforts to queue for a BG futile, as you basically sit in the queue forever most days you try to do a BG.  That problem goes away the moment you unfreeze your XP.

However, getting into dungeons is no problem at all when you have your XP frozen.

Tanks get into dungeons really, really quickly.  For some reason, probably because they have to know the dungeon layout pretty well in order to be the de facto point man and generally need to know a little about the bosses and various fights' mechanics, there has always been a shortage of tanks for as long as I have been playing WoW.

My kitty has been getting most of my gameplay in 2013.  This week, most of my time spent on this character has been in 'tank' (guardian) spec; especially in dungeons.  I have been getting into dungeons really quickly.  Being able to get into dungeons fast has helped me improve my gear very swiftly.

I heard somewhere that tanking as a druid, which means in bear form with the bear spec, is difficult.  For me, so far it has not been difficult.

On this druid, I have employed my fairly decent skill at writing WoW macros to reduce the need for my fingers to fly all over the keyboard.  From the start, I took advantage of this to create DPS attack macros.   When I dinged 30 and bought Guardian spec, I wrote some macros which I keep updating so that I can tank pretty easily too.

This works very well.  I have also started using a very handy web site as a resource; Maps For Tanks, in order to get acquainted quickly with a dungeon I want to tank next.

That, combined with a little study of Dungeon Journal that is built into the game, the Atlas addon, and perhaps watching a YouTube video with a run through of the dungeon, gives me high confidence that things will go smoothly and quickly.  Tanks that get lost or die a lot are, somewhat fairly, called "fail tanks".  Knowing what you face and where to run to next after each fight makes the whole run very fun.

Consequently, I am getting familiar with dungeons much more quickly and in more depth than I did before.  Since Cataclysm came out a couple of years ago, you gain XP so quickly [unless you freeze it] that you generally just see each dungeon a time or two until you reach level 80.

Since I am currently frozen at level 60 and not have excellent sets of gear tuned for each druid form; kitty, bear, and caster — I am going to try something I have done little to none of in the game.  That is, I plan to do some raiding of dungeons designed for the character's own level.

Intrinsically, I want to explore the content of these dungeons and face their challenges full on.  Extrinsically, I want the battle pets that you can win as a reward in them.  There are a bunch of new combat pets that you can only get as drops in raids.

Also, I feel like the experience of running dungeons in a party as opposed to solo, or simply questing alone and doing some battlegrounds, is really enriching.  You are part of a team.  You pick things up about the environment better.  You can complete the runs faster.

So that is my game plan at the moment; to boldly go where I have gone little, if ever, before.