TankSpot - Blogs

We Started With Just A Notion

Aaesop — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:10:11 GMT

Count the fingers on one hand....
5, at least I hope!

5 years ago if you said "Paladins are going to tank." You'd get laughed at and flamed right out of whatever chat channel, or forum you were in.

Bump ahead to BC. If you said "Paladins are going to work equally effective as Warriors as Maintanks." You'd get flamed into the dirt so bad.

Notice I didn't put the word "Druid" in there anywhere, that's because in PreBC and BC the Paladin was nearly always compared to the Warrior. To this day even, the Warrior is the measuring stick. The "You have to be this tall to get on the ride." albeit less pronounced. The Warrior has and will always be the standard of tanking performance and what toolsets are necessary to be successful.

Many people in Lich King aren't the people that were tanking on a Paladin through BC or maybe even PreBC. A good portion leveled one in this expansion and took up tanking. Others may have been the token Holy Pally with a Protection set of gear in their bags to pick up add waves in Hyjal, or Murlocs etc in SSC.
Some people were merely offtanks relegated to eating a cleave where damage is spread among the people it hit, or there for a needed aggro swap.

I have always been someone, starting from day 1 when I decided on prot Pre Bc, that I was going to make Main Tanking work for me. Find a way to do it, and provide some facts that I wasn't a hazard to the raid group, and just as good as my Warrior comrades.
I was the first to be a paladin that Main Tanked many bosses on my server. A champion in the early days of BC that a Paladin was a great choice for Prince in Karazhan. "We don't get screwed over in second phase, no crushing blows!"
Showing how easy Leotheras was with someone like me, a simple Avengers Shield meant he'd come right back to me the instant he was done in Whirlwind, and within Hammer Of Wrath range, you couldn't pry him from me even if you had all the buffs and elixers in the world.
Bubbling on Mag fights during cave in, we took no damage, no shield wall required.
Can't tank Gruul cause of the damage, and because of the silence? Watch me..
Reliquary of souls phase where your resources caused you damage? Easy fight, just spam righteous fury and you took little damage.

And so on through the rest of the raid dungeons.

At any rate, what I was trying to get at is... I like many other passionate tanks, spent my time trying to prove my spec. Trying to show the wow world "yes I can." There was a real hatred from the start towards Protection Paladins. Did it lessen? Sure but there were still masses of people that didn't take you seriously, and many more that certainly didn't think you were a capable Main Tank.

But now as I've been reflecting on how WOTLK has gone and its impact on me and the rest of the Protection Paladin community, I'm pretty much amazed, and pleased. There's a great many of Pallies that are still barking at blues that we need "this" or "that". I only wonder if they knew how it was back then, compared to then and now, I realistically have no complaints.
Vegeance was always a touchy thing in the back of your mind, "If this stack falls off..." or how about no shield wall! No shield slam ability, a cast time on Avengers Shield. Eating through water like it was a job in heroics if you weren't chain pulling.
I see things like Hammer and our Shield Slam and I think "If we had this back when..."
We've came far, very very far from where we started, no doubtedly we've become the tanks we are today, because of diligence and hard work poured into making things work, a great core of people that told the Blues what was really up, and what we really needed. It set the course for our widespread acceptance we have now.

In some ways, we might have made it easier for Death Knights. Their abilities mirror Warrior/Paladin in spots, but in others, they're completely different and the idea of a plate wearer tanking with no shield is completely different lol. In the sense they came into the game at a time that it was alright to have more than just a warrior in the seat.
Who knows, people may have accepted them anyways.

If you had to ask me if I felt we needed more change, I'd tell you that I've seen enough of it that I could never complain again, unless they took it all away from us.

Some people are just odd

DwarvenTankard — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:28:47 GMT

So there is this guy in my guild that I think takes himself and this game way too seriously. He doesn't seem to have a sense of humor at all. And when he tells a joke people either blow him off because it wasn't funny or they took him seriously and got offended!

So we are putting some attempts in on 25 man Heroic ToGC and he requests that everyone puts their vanity pets up because he is having trouble targeting snowbolds.

I'm sorry I thought it was the funniest thing ever and I'm totally going to re-use his serious request as a joke all the time!

"Damn sorry I couldn't get agro because I was targeting vanity pets!"

Off to lead a Naxx25 PuG...

Pitstarter — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:11:55 GMT

Am I insane?!

Well as it turns out, playing the long game I have volunteered myself as an add tank on Heroic Anub and need to get the unhittable set together. Having a scramble through the dusty bags in the bank I have a couple of bits and bobs already and a kindly worded begging ticket to a GM might get another item returned to me (doubtful but no harm trying).

But there's no escaping the fact that I need to drag my hairy dwarven ass back into Naxx 25 for some drops, namely:

Wall of Terror (we dont' have access to Alg or Hodir10 hardmore - yet!)
Burdened Shoulderplates
Fleshless Girdle (if Razorscale doesn't oblige)
Gauntlets of the Disobedient (if IC don't oblige)

Then it's off begging to get ourselves into UD25 for some other drops. Which might prove difficult, since UD25 seems to have an aura that inhibits our raiders ability to perform, when we can do fine in our other raiding content.

However the thing that scares me most is the thought of leading an unknown number of randoms I have never met through the raid instance. Not to mention that guildies are excited and want to bring their freshly dinged 80's in for a loot run. I may need to be a bit heavy handed with the guildies since I would want the lynchpin parts of the raid ie tanks, healers, kiter for gluth, mind control for Raz all covered by guildies preferably on their mains to minimise chances of someone in our guild messing up and making us look stupid. Not to mention that if I fill the raid with guild tanks or folk on their capable alts, we won't hear complaining about getting those items if they drop. I fully intend on making it clear from the outset that these drops are reserved, but no doubt there will be the mandatory 800dps Death Knight that will whine about it. Everyone will be given the option to leave group before we start if they are not happy.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I am really not cut out to be a raid leader. I know the mechanics of most fights but it's the micromanagement I struggle with. At the moment in work I am working on macros I can use to explain the basics of each fight, since I know there will be one person who has never set foot in naxx all her wow life and is a veteran member who emigrated to Austrailia but still hangs around with us.

I really hope that we at least have the majority of the run filled with guildies so we can run a tight ship, possibly make a good impression and maybe even an applicant or two into the bargain.

Now, where did I put that J�germeister? I'll be needing a shot of courage for leading this tomorrow night!

From progress kills to farm ...

Shortypop — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:17:21 GMT

... can be a rocky road. In my experience while second kills may not take quite as long as firsts they can be more frustrating and more depressing than firsts. Not that I'm saying that killing something twice moves it from "progress" to "farm" but a clean second kill is definitely a big step forward.

Last night we went into TotGC (25man) 3 shotted beasts - anyone who complains about Sunwell Radiance Version 2 - please go and tank heroic beasts, where randomly not avoiding the hit immediately before impale seems to cause certain death, unless you've got CDs available. The other thing I've noticed is that as soon as I get paralysis-debuff (I'm on acid worm) before he burrows, everything spirals out of control very quickly, we split our melee (8 in total last night excluding the tanks) onto both worms and with careful positioning avoided getting me paralysed - but still 2 wipes before downing them wasn't bad.

Jaraxxas took a few more tries (4 wipes) before we got our second kill, I was on DPS duty and our pally tank took the adds, something he hasn't done in heroic mode before, that and the high number of melee were probably largely responsible for the wipes. In the end we even got the 360 pain spike achievement, as the last portal wasn't killed fast enough, mainly due to some dead DPS and everyone trying to kill Jaraxxas - he must have been under 3% when the portal spawned.

Next up was Faction Champs, and after our fairly easy first kill last week I was not entirely sure that lightning could strike twice. We didn't have the holy priest (first time ever I think) but still we stuck with a similar order: "squishiest" healer, warrior, rogue, DK, hunter, other healers, casters. Our poor RL (who is ill) gave himself the task of babysitting the tree (banish and fear) and kept it up for over 7minutes! We lost 2 deathknights (one of whom was battleressed) but it was still a one-shot! One trick that works really well for us is to do consistent damage on their pets, this time we put all the hunter pets on the cat and it means, due to their AI, that their healers spend a lot of time healing the pets and not the people, this means that despite not perfect shutdown on the holy pally and tree, we can afford to kill 1 healer and 4 dps'ers before the other two healers. For example last night 70% of the trees healing went on pets and 40% of the pallys :D

As our RL was ill and not up to progress wipes on Twins and with an hour left of our raid we headed out and back in to TotC normal. Despite an enraged Icehowl (who decided that little gnomes were too good to be left alone) we one-shotted all the bosses; we even nuked the Faction Champs tree first as our RL couldn't face more CC. We tried a different tactic on Twins, with 4 groups (2 melee and 2 ranged) by each of the portals, the idea being the ranged all swop to kill shields and the melee stay on their mob, moving, changing colour and changing back again when needed. I thought it went very smoothly and was a lot less confusing than the soaking strategys (not the doorway one) that require a lot of changing colour and positioning. Aparently there are videos showing this strategy for heroic mode, so I think we might give it a try next time - Reez if you're reading this go to bed and sleep, we need you better by Sunday.

All in all it was a good night, despite healers complaining on normal Twins and others that they had nothing to do! Shorty got a trophy and has bought her tank helm and also got the heroic cloak drop from Jaraxxas (our MT got the heroic monstrosity chest and our pally a new non-heroic neck), Shorty's pally sidekick also got his heroic Justicebringer.

In other news on Wednesday night I attended our usual 10man swip through VoA, Ony and TotC - getting Ony's head (thanks Nor!) to help towards my unhittable set. Afterwards I tanked TotGC 10man for the first time in several weeks, we one-shotted the first four bosses and then took 5 wipes on Anubby, but still finished with 45 tries left. This week the guild is aiming to run two 10man TotGC groups for the first time and the gear and trophies earned will definitely help in gearing us for Icecrown. Shorty was spoilt rotten in her run, getting a tank mace and shield (from Anubby and the tribute chest)!

Customer joy.

Aliena — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:38:58 GMT

http://www.cunda.de/Shop/HtmlStart/start.html
This is where I work. It's a disgustingly huge 7 story department store in the middle of Hamburg's shopping mile and basically I usually do the till on different floors. Basically I just help out where they need an extra person! Customers are strange beings, though. Especially old people find so much to complain about and think just cause you're scanning what they buy you absolutely must know where every single item that can be found in that 7-story building is located, preferably with sizing information and item number memorized. I am very sorry, Mrs. M�ller, but sadly I do not know the 11 numbers of the code of the jacket you just brought me that's missing its price tag because you probably ripped it off and left it somewhere. Nor am I able to tell you where precisely "shirts like this but without the label on the back and a size bigger" are located because chances are, we don't have any. How about you go look and let me get back to scanning this customer's items.

Third floor is the worst. The tax free computer AND the customer service is located there. Basically every customer is sent there that people on the other floors didn't have the nerve to deal with. And most of the time they're extra pissy cause they had to walk up 1/2/3 floors. Oh, sorry, of course I mean take the elevator/escalator. Not like people walk, these days. So much exercise, it could kill you.

It does have very entertaining moments as well though. Especially the underwear floor. Oh, the stories...

The effort you put in...

Aethelas — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:26:38 GMT

The effort you put in sometimes does reap the reward you're after.

I've been struck ill with a ghastly flu making me miss out raids for nearly a week. I won't go into any details about that, I just wish you all to not get into touch with it. It sucks, I've never been ill for longer than a couple of days now it's been more than a week.

Yesterday night I knew the regular 10 man team would be short a tank if I didn't show up. Since the doctor said I could take as much aspirine as I liked (within reasonable confined doses, mind you!) I figured I'd go and give it a shot.

So there I sat, under two blankets with the biggest, warmest woolen sweather I had. Drinking tea with honey - oh and I had a scarf around my neck because that feels so good when your throat is sore... Tanking against knowing better.

The first hour was quite okay. We breezed through normal Trial of the Crusader, for me it felt like some sort of dream. I tanked half detached and mechanical. Had a few minor slip ups but all in all not too bad. By the time we'd done Onyxia (10) and started heroic mode it felt like the aspirine was losing its hold on me. I gritted my teeth and held on. I wasn't going to let my team down, we were going to do this!

We managed to reach Anub'Arak with only two unfortunate wipes - one on Jarraxus and one on Twin Valkyrs. Especially the latter could have been prevented (it would have helped if I had actually noticed my valkyr go for our mage but hey... I am ill, I'm allowed a little slip right? ;) ). Either way we've had one messy and one really good try where we wiped at 3% on anub'arak...

So we gave it one more and at 5% the raid started to unravel, just a little too much healing - one burrowed add getting his shadow strike off and there we went. But somehow, as the tanks went down people nuked on and gave us the messiest kill ever (just our warlock standing!)

Pay up time:

A tribute to Mad Skill.

Wow!

Now this is something I expected to only reach when we were allready halfway through Icecrown Citadel! Either way I can only say thank you to the 13 ish other people that put in the time and dedication to pull this off on their 'free' nights. We're not the world's best, fastest or whatnot, but we've proven we got skill a plenty for such a wonderful ragtag band of adventurers. Thanks a lot guys! Now let's go back and get me that sword next week!

Aethelas

Tanking accomplishments

Scotch — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:02:48 GMT

I've always enjoyed those fights where I feel I've made a difference in the success of the group. Most of the time I run instances and I know that any competent tank could have filled in and it wouldn't make any difference. But some runs, you get lucky - and by lucky I mean you get incompentent players.

I got on late one evening and most of my guild had already run the daily heroic, which was Azjol-Nerub. I needed some Triumph badges at the time for my final badge upgrade so I pugged. (I went ring last, but thats another discussion for another time).
Pally healer, Mage, Hunter, DK, and myself - Pally tank

First boss was easy - dps was a little low, but no biggie. If you can do the first boss no problem, the rest of the place is normally easy. But that is where the fun started.

We had a hunter in the group who managed to fall off the bridge walking to the second boss. Fortunatly for him he landed in a spot where he didn't aggro and after the start of the encounter he was able to reach us. But still nothing that special, but it forboded what was to come.

Two bosses down. The tanking trinket dropped, which I remember fondly dropping for me the first time I ran the place. Always liked this instance - think the mage picked it up as a pvp piece.

We approach the final boss.

I run a ready check - everyone says ready.

I state in chat - Pulling!

I run in. The healer runs in. The DK runs in.

The door closes.

10 seconds later the mage says - "It won't let me in!"

Fortunatly the healer and myself outgear the place, I think "no problem - 3 man Anub!"

We clear the first phase quickly - he burrows.

We kill the first wave of adds easily - 3 man is pretty easy.

Anub comes back - he leaves quickly - We're going to do this!

One more set of adds - We kill them!

Anub comes and goes - down to 25% - Final add phase coming!

Then, the problem. During the second add phase, the spiders that spit poison come out. This normally isn't an issue as they don't attack until they get into the room. But as they entered, our mage and hunter friend were bored. They decided that they wanted to dps the adds to help out on the way in. So they did. This led to their death. This also led to them attacking our healer from range, without me being able to taunt because they were behind the door. After they killed our healer friend, the quickly dying DK and myself were able to kite the guys into the room. The DK fortunatly was able to hurt them enough for me to finish them off. I'm almost dead with the poison ticking on me - I LOH - I cleanse like crazy to drop the poison - but the poison did its work - I'm almost dead...again. Now I'm alone at 5k health with Anub at 25% life. And no LOH

I pop a health pot. Then I make a mistake. I stand in too long for a pound - the magic of Ardent defender saves me. But now I'm down to a Bubble and I have almost no mana. At around 10% life on Anub I bubble and get of a weak holy light - then back to dps. I manage to dps him down and end the fight at about 1k life.

The group was impressed that I was able to drop the guy solo the final 25%. I honestly love those fights as its rare to get challenge doing something as mudane as the daily heoric.

Chase gear...part II

Scotch — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:38:12 GMT

I return after a long hiatus from writing...and want to post about the same topic I last posted about - Chase gear. Gear you look for and just never see drop. In my last post I mentioned the fabled Shermaner Great Ring. I have a new piece that replaces it.

Pride of the Eredar - tanking cloak from Normal 25 Jaraxxus

I don't believe it exist. My guild has cleared it every week we've been able. Not a single cloak. I'd be ok if it dropped and another of my guild tanks won it. However it just won't drop. I think we DE'd two of the drops from Jaraxxus last night. Yet still sitting at 0 cloak drops...tear.

But in better news, the other remaining drop I was looking for - Satrina's Impeding Scarab dropped and I won it for a default bid - so I only have one piece left to chase.

I think I'm in love with my healer.

Sillybones — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:27:27 GMT

Hi guys and gals,
After several years of tanking, I rolled a shaman because.. well that class is freaking awesome and it is THE most underplayed class on my server. Which leaves me wide open to all the healing mail gear i come across.

This transition from tank to healer was major. I felt so out of control! I no longer had the ability to control mobs and boss encounters the way I could with my tank. But this transition allowed me to gain a different perspective of these encounters. And I have realized I'm in love with my healer. Healing is such a rush! Especially in a raiding environment. I used to argue that tanking is the most important role in a raid, which its still pretty important. But healing by far dwarfs it in intensity and overall importance.

I mean with out health, the raid cant go on. And healing is so hard that, it takes two, probably three healers to make a 10 man raid successful. And let me tell you that those healers better be good.... or else.

The major reason I gave up tanking for my guild was, everyone wanted to roll a tank. So I stepped down as MT to let others get some of the spotlight. And I kept hearing that our healers weren't cutting it. So I decided to roll a healer and try and fill this gap in our core raiding roster.

Quickly I learned that our guild lacks great healers. For months I was banging my head against the desk wondering if it was my tanking that sucked. Why can't we progress! But since my transition, I've learned just HOW important a good healer is, and how THANKLESS the role is. LOL.

I got to admit that healers get no props for a job well done. The healer just stands back and keeps the tank alive. This simple role will AMPLIFY how good or bad a tank is. Keep him alive, and sooner or later you'll see how good he can hold threat or position mobs/bosses. All the while you're keeping everyone alive, but rarely do you get recognized for this. I mean it is your job after all.

But out of all my experiences as a healer, I've come to gain pleasure in knowing that: It may be the tank who gets all the glory, for being Dcapped and having 40k HP. But i'm the one that kept you alive.:rolleyes: Teehee.. Brings a smile to my face everytime. Thanks if you actually read this far. :p

Riding a Wave of Confidence

Khue — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:00:26 GMT

It all started with our 25m Heroic Beasts kill. I am not going to lie, we paid for that kill with repair bills and pot purchases. 94 attempts later we finally get the pay off we needed. This was a week ago. Whether it was a fluke the first time or not remains to be seen but our subsequent kill seems to prove otherwise.

While finally having the right mix of people from the guild be online and recruiting key positions we were lacking seemed to make the overall difference, I can't help but thinking kicking the door down on Beasts gave us an intangible in the form of confidence that we didn't have before.

After that first beasts kill, 25m heroic bosses have been falling with relative ease. We downed Jara the following major scheduled raid day, and put the faction champs down in less then 4 pulls. Now as 258 level gear starts steadily streaming into the guild, kills should be getting easier, margins of failure should be getting smaller, and overall execution pressure should be relieved.

Our server rank is 13 to 16 depending upon which site you use to measure progress. One point the other officers and I use to rally the guild however, is the fact that we get done our progression in less then half the time others have committed. We raid only 2 nights a week for 3 to 4 hours.

With Valks on the plate for Thursday officers have scheduled a strat review for this evening. I have already started to look to Anub strats as I feel he is just around the corner for us. What it would do to our overall realm/world rank if and when we down Anub I have no idea, but I definitely like the prospect.

OMG it has been a long time

Corrin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:38:54 GMT

I haven't posted here in ages.

Since that time, I am still primarily a healer but I now run as MT/OT on a 10-man team in my guild. I begged my wife to return my druid to me and I love druid tanking now. Admittedly, it is "easy" but I do it well and it is different from paladin or warrior tanking.

I have been complimented by many of my guildies for my tanking and I am semi-seriously considering switching to my druid as a main for the next expansion.

Show me a patient DPS'er

geros — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:15:54 GMT

... and I'll show you a a tank alt / offspec.

Isn't that how the saying goes? I'm a pretty huge exception to that rule. I'm terribly impatient at DPS. It's not that I'll go nuts at the start of the fight and never give the tank a fighting chance. I'll give them time to get a decent lead on threat but it really irks me to hold myself to significantly lower TPS than I could be putting out in bearform myself.

Perhaps it's just that I can get away with 5+ seconds of aggro in most situations that hasn't taught me to be more considerate. Maybe if they made cower not suck it would be easier to be considerate as well! In any case I find it very helpful to keep around a pocket pally for hand of salv in addition to my pocket traumabot and pocket hysteria. I've got quite an entorage now.

Gankers are pathetic

Durandro — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:38:12 GMT

Firstly, this isn't about how much I hate world PVP. World PVP is fine. Someone around about my level wants a piece of me? That's fine.

What riles me up is the blantant (and often repeated) killing of lower level players. For seemingly no reason whatsoever. There are no rewards for mass murder. And there can't be any kind of satisfaction from one-hit killing people, can there?

Then again, knowing what some of the internet population is like...

However, I hit a bit of a breakthrough just now. Was doing the pre-quest walk around in CoT with my 66 Orc Shaman. Right at the end, a bunch of alliance 80's flew in, and two of them instantly ran up to me and killed me. My reaction?

Just a sigh, waiting for the Priest to get off my corpse, hitting reincarnate and finishing the quest.

It's still pointless. It's still stupid. It's still boring and skilless. But at least I'm not angry about it. I'm just filled with pity for these people.

Personally I'm all for a redesign of the honour system to remove rampant ganking from the game. While alot of people will scream in horror, Dishonourable Kills need to make a comeback. Or just an outright stop to attacking players 6 levels below you.

Balancing that, of course, would be a new debuff added to players who attack higher level players (or even heal higher level players, perhaps) that makes them 'fair game' and open to all attacks for a certain amount of time.

Being able to quest without fear of level 80's proweling the world searching for cheap thrills would greatly enhance the quality of PVP server playing, and would force gankers to either pick on players who actually have half a chance of defending themselves, or picking on players their own level.

But then, these people are cowards. So they'll probably just quit and complain.

It's Cataclysmic!

Pathis — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:06:50 GMT

I haven't posted here in a while, but I figured it'd be nice to post random musings about both the game and life from time to time again. Of course, after looking at my previous posts I will definitely be altering my writing style a bit.

Back on topic, I didn't really see myself coming back to the game after I quit a few months before Wrath's release. That all changed the day I saw the information about Cataclysm released. I was soon nerding out with Caulle, the GM and MT of my old raid, about how amazing everything looked and sounded like. It was at that point that I figured I should probably level Pathis to 80 just so I'm ready for the next expansion. That's where it all began again.

It took me maybe a week to cap Pathis, which was surprisingly easy in my opinion, as I wasn't playing that much each day, but simply had the luxury of outgearing most quests due to Sunwell epics. Discovering I had more free-time than I previously thought, I somehow ended up in Trial of the Crusader 25 with , my old guild which I had joined just as a Casual. They were having roster issues at the time, so I was more than willing to help out and see what Wrath raiding is like.

Suffice it to say, I was pretty useless damage-wise due to still being completely in level 70 epics. I did manage to only die once on non-wipes, which is not too bad considering my HP was sitting at maybe 20k buffed. I ended up spending my free time farming ToC normal and Heroic until my gear was somewhat respectable, and it wasn't too long until the guild warmed up to the idea of me raiding with them once they saw my skill level.

At this point, I wasn't that shocked to find myself handling recruitment again, as Caulle knew I understood how to handle the job, and again I wasn't surprised to see that shaman were still the most in-demand class for raids. Thankfully, the recruitment issues were relatively easy to solve with only a few additions to the roster. Lucky for us of course that these recruits have so far turned out to be quite remarkable, which is always a welcome alternative over discovering the player bought the account the previous week.

Of course, simply recruiting won't solve all the problems. If you read my old posts regarding Chaos and Sunwell, you'd understand when I say that recruiting a lot of players is nothing more than a stop gap solution. The way a guild is operated has to be constantly evolving, and that's another thing Chaos is currently dealing with. There's nothing bad about it, and in fact it's a positive since most of the time adjustments result in a better experience for both the officers and the members.

Anyways, I think that's a big enough wall of text for now. I'd talk about how much different Fury is now as compared to before, but the only variation is I sometimes get to have an instant slam and now I'm walking around with two two-handers, so there isn't really much of a difference. I'll try to keep my blog updated regularly, hopefully with smaller posts to boot!

Famous last words

Shortypop — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:38:17 GMT

This morning's blog was meant to be about my trials and tribulations over the weekend of installing and setting up Grid exactly how I wanted it, but the events of last night threw all my plans (and I suspect our RLs plans for the next while) off-track. I will still blog about Grid, complete with some screenies but let's start the week on a high note.

On my drive into work this morning I was contemplating various titles for this blog that ranged from "What a night" to "Totally unexpected". But before I get to last night I need to mention our first Freya+3 kill on Thursday night and the fact that with a change to a macro I'm back happily heroic striking!

So .... last night it was a normal run through TotC, which took us 50minutes and during which we lost 3 people to random deaths and one-shotted everything. Shorty got her second Trophy and promptly bought a new set of shiny tank gloves. Having got our second HM beasts kill on Thursday we re-convened after a short break at Jaraxxas.

We'd gotten several attempts in on a previous week and I was quietly confident that we would be able to down him. Unlike last time I was tanking adds --- those infernals are a pain! -- six wipes later and he was dead! So were six guildies, but all in all I feel it was a very repeatable kill.

Now comes the crux of this entire blog, with 50 minutes left of our raid night our RL summons the horde faction champions - resto druid, resto shammy, holy priest, shadow priest, hunter, rogue, warrior, DK, mage and ret pally. After a cute little two-line speech that went something like "This is going to take us a while, don't get disappointed or frustrated" a minimum amount of cc rotations were given out and we were off ... to our deaths.

Take 1: Decision made to kill rogue and then hunter .. just over a minute later and they were all still standing and we are well on our way to wiping!

Take 2: Lasted over 4 minutes with one dead rogue on their side and regular deaths on ours.

Take 3: We decide to change over to killing the holy priest first (not actually 100% sure what caused this decision), we manage to kill him before everything unravels pretty quickly.

Take 4: With just over 10minutes left of our raid time we pulled again, our feral druid dies within the first minute but is soon followed by the holy priest. Rogue, warrior and ret pally all follow, with vent quiet apart from requests for dispels and the occasionally "who's next?" - I'm not sure exactly when but eventually someone asks "How are we doing this", a quick glance at my UI shows 24 of us still standing! A few seconds short of 9minutes after the pull they are all dead and we are ressing our only casualty (the feral druid).

Unlike on Jaraxxas and most other progress kills, you could definitely sense the complete feeling of disbelief on vent that with less tries than either Jaraxxas or hardmode beasts we had killed a fight that I am sure most of us were secretly dreading!

Next up in terms of progress kills are Vezaxx and Twins, but for now I hope you'll forgive us if we remain a little shellshocked at the events of last night!