Heroic: Heartbreaker, An offtanks perspective
Posted 05-22-2009 at 01:25 AM by Darksend
Days behind I know but we spent all night tuesday working on 4tower Flame Levi and battling lag all night (could not even kill the heart because of 5 second globals)
Wednesday was a mish-mash of trying different setups to see what worked best then we lost people to DCes and computer explosions and had to call it after a couple of sub 15% enrage timers.
Finally got him tonight though. My job was to offtank the sparks that spawn in phase 2. For those who do not know in hard mode in phase 2 XT spawns adds called life sparks from every person who gets a light bomb.
Let me just say it is the most nerve racking thing I have tanked since Muru. It was pretty intense. We juggled with the idea of having our DK (one of our 3 main tanks who usually is the one DPSing while me and the warrior tank) spec unholy and do the adds since they did not have a COE or equivilent on the sparks and it was really hurting. After we finally killed it tonight he confesed the reason he did not want to do it is because he did not trust himself doing it and he did not want to wipe us by doing something stupid (such as taunting the boss, which I somehow managed to only do twice in 3 hours of attempts believe me thats a REALLY REALLY good thing if you knew me).
I commented while we were wiping several times it felt like the muru door, and believe me I was just as bad at this as the muru door.
For one, it felt like taunt was bugged. On a specific case when I was actually watching it was acting more like challenging shout in that it would freeze the warlocks and my threat and when the debuff wore off I would lose agro and it would go right back to him. Luckly they die so fast if you lose agro sub 40% they die before it can get to them.
Two, before I could even target them they would melee the person they spawn out of. Most of the time it was healers who probably had some hot or something rolling and pulled agro from that. It got confusing when it happened to the same warlock 3-4 times in a row. People with the light bomb MUST WORK WITH THE OFFTANK and drop them in a good spot and start moving immediately.
Which brings me to three, people not paying attention and running directly through me to the "drop spot" and getting themselves killed. When the spark melees someone anyone in melee range gets hit for a "shock" ability which hits decently hard. Luckily this stopped happening when we changed our strat but it was still quite annoying at times.
Four, the lack of druid's burst threat is magnified 10 fold in this role. I hit it with a crit maul and a crit mangle as soon as it spawns and a caster still rips it right off me. I got so frustrated and I broke the cardinal rule of tanking. I began to doubt my abilities. After the kill one of the warlocks commented that I was barely tanking the sparks at all and he was so right. It was literally they would spawn ild hit it twice it would run away and when it got 1/2 way to the group i would taunt it back. In retrospect this probably cut down on the healing I needed significantly. but as I said before if they were in melee range of me at 40% i stopped caring because if someone pulled it would be dead anyway.
I have never had a more frustrating or nerve racking time as a tank in all of wow besides muru that even compares to how I felt tonight. All night i just kept thinking "PLEASE DO NOT TAUNT XT BY MISTAKE" over and over in my head. It was extremely scary and never not fun and it really pushed me to the limit.
Excelent work blizzard
Wednesday was a mish-mash of trying different setups to see what worked best then we lost people to DCes and computer explosions and had to call it after a couple of sub 15% enrage timers.
Finally got him tonight though. My job was to offtank the sparks that spawn in phase 2. For those who do not know in hard mode in phase 2 XT spawns adds called life sparks from every person who gets a light bomb.
Let me just say it is the most nerve racking thing I have tanked since Muru. It was pretty intense. We juggled with the idea of having our DK (one of our 3 main tanks who usually is the one DPSing while me and the warrior tank) spec unholy and do the adds since they did not have a COE or equivilent on the sparks and it was really hurting. After we finally killed it tonight he confesed the reason he did not want to do it is because he did not trust himself doing it and he did not want to wipe us by doing something stupid (such as taunting the boss, which I somehow managed to only do twice in 3 hours of attempts believe me thats a REALLY REALLY good thing if you knew me).
I commented while we were wiping several times it felt like the muru door, and believe me I was just as bad at this as the muru door.
For one, it felt like taunt was bugged. On a specific case when I was actually watching it was acting more like challenging shout in that it would freeze the warlocks and my threat and when the debuff wore off I would lose agro and it would go right back to him. Luckly they die so fast if you lose agro sub 40% they die before it can get to them.
Two, before I could even target them they would melee the person they spawn out of. Most of the time it was healers who probably had some hot or something rolling and pulled agro from that. It got confusing when it happened to the same warlock 3-4 times in a row. People with the light bomb MUST WORK WITH THE OFFTANK and drop them in a good spot and start moving immediately.
Which brings me to three, people not paying attention and running directly through me to the "drop spot" and getting themselves killed. When the spark melees someone anyone in melee range gets hit for a "shock" ability which hits decently hard. Luckily this stopped happening when we changed our strat but it was still quite annoying at times.
Four, the lack of druid's burst threat is magnified 10 fold in this role. I hit it with a crit maul and a crit mangle as soon as it spawns and a caster still rips it right off me. I got so frustrated and I broke the cardinal rule of tanking. I began to doubt my abilities. After the kill one of the warlocks commented that I was barely tanking the sparks at all and he was so right. It was literally they would spawn ild hit it twice it would run away and when it got 1/2 way to the group i would taunt it back. In retrospect this probably cut down on the healing I needed significantly. but as I said before if they were in melee range of me at 40% i stopped caring because if someone pulled it would be dead anyway.
I have never had a more frustrating or nerve racking time as a tank in all of wow besides muru that even compares to how I felt tonight. All night i just kept thinking "PLEASE DO NOT TAUNT XT BY MISTAKE" over and over in my head. It was extremely scary and never not fun and it really pushed me to the limit.
Excelent work blizzard
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