The Weekend of Radhja

I’m the luckiest tank evar!

Never had I imagined I’d actually get as many good tank drops as I did this weekend. I’ve been QQing about the severe shortage of decent tank drops a lot lately, having my only upgrades coming strictly from [item]Badge of Justice[/item] in the form of [item]Unwavering Legguards[/item] and [item]Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx[/item], but not much else had come my way, and I was on the verge of “retiring” my MT to begin leveling a paly tank for the fun of it simply because I felt like I’d hit an invisible ceiling with Radhja. Skill can carry you a long way, but if you can’t pass the gear-checks in a given instance, you’re gonna sink (unless the majority of your party is vastly over-geared)

Well, this has been my weekend of redemption, and it all started with another Karzhan PuG.

Radhja PuG Philosophy

I’ve made it a point to throw myself into as many PuGs as possible lately for no reason other than to enhance my ability to predict when thing are going to go wrong. I realized exactly what it is that a good tank brings to a fight – Order. Without a tank, the mobs are running wild and smashing everyone’s face in – especially in Heroics and 10-mans. There is such a tiny margin for error when it comes to these types of raids, and most players refuse to participate in a group they are mostly unfamiliar with, depending onstead on the “norm” of their guildmates to smooth out the ride. However, as much as I love a good guild run, a PuG group does so much for teaching a tank how to burst aggro, multi-tank, and when to pop CDs to survive the coming onslaught.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy pugging everything, and my repair-demons are reveling in my financial misery. But the skills you adopt with the extra effort make things like a Kara-PuG go quite smoothly.



And that’s exactly what happened.


On Wednesday night, me and some random raiders (and a friend or two who suckers me into the run) started a fresh Kara run, and things were going to be EZ-street for me. There was already a decked-out Prot warrior in the group, and all he wanted was NB’s chest. “Cool”, I thought. “I’ll get all the other drops”

Well, we cleared everything up to Opera without any fuss, one-shotting everything. It was a good group, but it was a bunch of kids with the classic Gear > Skill attitude, and started bustin’ on me cause I was using S1 shoulders to OT. Well, the MT leaves after Opera (irl issues), so I assume the role of MT and we head to Curator.

In the 20 minutes it took to clear to Curator and one-shot him, they’d pissed me off by repeatedly bringing up that I was “a nub prot war waring s1 geer, lawl!”, despite the fact that we didn’t wipe once. So, I bailed on the run cause I wasn’t about to put up with these kids while clearing to Shade.

And I’d thought that was going to be my KZ run for the week. I was irritated, but w/e.

Well, two nights later (Friday night), the healer that was in the party and I decided to collect a new group and see if they had finished KZ yet. As it turned out, they didn’t. So, I grab all of my closest unsaved friends and get inside. Vent was filled with good vibes, laughter, and a genuine sense of “I know what the hell is going on here”. I had such a good feeling.


NIGHTBANE
We start with Nightbane, the “hardest fight in KZ” just to see how we’re going to fare with the rest of the instance. We were all familiar enough with each other to know what to do, so we make the pull.

First attempt was a fluke, unfortunately. Everything was going fine until a Charred Earth forced the caster camp to move up against the inner dome, which cause a healer LoS issue, resulting in my health dropping quite fast. Too fast, in fact. I just died.

We all knew it was a fluke, so we rez’d and tried again

We consider this fight a one-shot. We downed him without losing a single party member. (Well, we DID lose one, but he was BR’d during 3rd flight).

And lo and behold, I finally get [item]Shield of Impenetrable Darkness[/item]. Score!

After that, we were so psyched about finishing the rest of the instance. We start heading to Shade, laughing the whole way.

Shade of Aran
One-shot. What can I say? No tank loots here, but the druid OT snagged some nice leather epics (and two random BoE leather epics on the way… his lucky night, too)

Chess
I’ve always loved the Chess game, despite its obvious difference from a “real” game of Chess. I can’t recall being in a group that’s ever lost a game. Free epics ftw.

And what drops from Chess? None other than [item]King’s Defender[/item], at long last.

Everyone’s shocked at this point, and we all play an extra game of chess for the hell of it. (We ended up killing King Laine for the hell of it… didn’t know you could control the Horde!) We ended up having to replace a Warlock at this point, but no big deal. A 15-minute intermission was in order to revel in my first time dual-wielding King’s Defender and Sun Eater… and even though I didn’t have Mongoose on KD yet, I still screen-shotted the hell out of it.

PRINCE MALCHEZZAR
We practically skipped our way to Prince singing about our victories so far, and taking bets on who was going to be first to dir on Prince’s infernals cause we’ve never had good luck with them in the past.

As customary to my raids, I insist on positioning the raid along the far-left wall, and tank him 40yrd from there. (see my previous blogs for my reasoning to this position).

P1, no problems
P2, no problems (with careful managing of my CDs, of course… I don’t think he landed a single CB, for once. At least, not one that I or my healers noticed)
P3, infernals begin raining from the sky like mad, and I finally had to make one adjustment of about 10 yrds to avoid getting burned.

We one-shot’d Prince. It was crazy.

And lo and behold…

[item]Helm of the Fallen Defender[/item] drops!

With only the OT to roll against…

Radhja rolls 68 (1-100)
Tranz rolls 60 (1-100)
Radhja wins the roll!

(the OT informed me that he was going to pass the helm anyway, but the roll was customary)

So, in a single KZ run, I picked up:
[item]Shield of Impenetrable Darkness[/item]
[item]King’s Defender[/item]
[item]Warbringer Greathelm[/item]

Best. Run. Evar!

And to add sickening to the already-sweet night of raiding, my luck continued on throughout the weekend. We won every AV game I participated in, AV was the daily for 6 DAYS IN A ROW (insane!), and every mine I came across dropped a Blue Gem of some sort. I even got a random BoE blue ring design (sold for 250g), and I’ve already made the money to get +10 Stam on shield, Defender’s Glyph and +18 stam metagem in helm, and Mongoose on KD.

I don’t think I’m going to “retire” Radhja, afterall.