Tanking Mag…

I Main Tanked Magtheridon a little while back, but didn’t make a big deal over it. The run was crummy in the end. We ended up with a lot of pugs, Morg had to leave due to thunderstorms after the first couple attempts. We had a problem with healers healing me, as in I had ONE healer actually healing me the first attempt. Then my game crashed on the second attempt. Then someone didn’t click a cube the third time. Then a Paladin got all pissy because people were being anal about buffs. Then one of the cube clickers didn’t know you had to stand still when clicking the cube (@morghand, that would be Bardo ) so people got irritated and someone took his cube clicking spot, then someone else didn’t want to click anymore because he was afraid if he screwed up everyone would be a jerk to him too. So finally FINALLY we got him after 5 attempts.

Personally I’m all for calling off the whole 25-man thing unless we can reliably get 25 people from our guild and trusted others who we have run with before. One or two pugs is okay, but not what, 12 or whatever we had that night? I’m all for including everyone in the runs, but I would rather tell 3 people they can’t come tonight than have a gimped run just so 3 extra people get to feel special. I’m a good raid leader aren’t I?

It’s just rough transitioning from a 10-man guild to a 25-man guild I guess.

Anyway this post degenerated into a rant and I’m sorry. In the end this post was supposed to be about what it was like to tank Mag. I think this about sums it up Morg:

So I’m the poison tank eh?

So Morghand has informed me it’s time we crack into SSC. Fine by me, we’re basically farming everything we can do at this point, time to see something new. Now I know all about resistance gear being vital for certain bosses, and the first boss, Hydross, needs a butt-load. Two tanks with as close to, if not, max resistance are needed for both Frost and Nature. So apparently Morghand has decided he’s to be the frost tank and I’m to be the nature tank. Works for me, as far as I understand it he has the harder job.

Problem is the resistance sets take a lot of mats, so we’re enlisting the help of our guild. I even made this nifty little sign:

Sadly though I get the feeling Morg and I are mostly on our own (with the help of the other officers), which is a shame because ~50 primal life and shadow is going to take a while by my lonesome. ;_;

Warcraft Character Auditor

http://be.imba.hu/

This is a fun little site that looks at your character and using fancy equations and such, measures your gear to give you a readout on such things as: what’s not enchanted, what items/gems you have are low quality, and what raids you could perform well in at your gear level.

For example I scanned Blackavar and it told me that my cape was unenchanted, he has one low quality gem (a +9 vs a +12 stam) and that currently I could be tanking the beginning of BT and Hyjal quite well. Anhydrous is doing even better, being able to take on mid range BT and Hyjal, approaching Sunwell territory.

Is the site accurate? Well it’s certainly biased in some areas, and is entirely reliant on the armory being up to date and you being in your best set of gear. I like it though for the fact that it will show you things like how much more Hit Rating you need to cap, or if you’re over the defense cap how much you can take off in favor of stam or dodge or some other stat.

Another nifty little Armory crawling tool at least.

Thanks Morghand for another time waster for me.

And I used to be afraid of you?

Finished up Ithirn’s “gear up” Karazhan run last night. We just had chess, Prince, and Netherspite left. Now I was nervous and excited to tank Prince for the first time. Every other time we had gone this far Anhydrous was needed to heal or dps or whatever so I couldn’t bring Black. I was afraid of course because I had, on many an occasion, seen our druid tank take one too many crushing blows to the face in phase 2 and be reduced to a smoldering pulp before my heal was done casting.

However, I was not prepared for this.

That’s it? Granted this isn’t phase 2, but still, 2500 damage is the best you can throw at me? I mean, yeah I outgear you and all, but still. We ended up with terrible infernal drops at the beginning so a lot of dps died, but we kept on with it. Eventually it was me, 2 healers, a mage, and a hunter left. We burned him down though slowly, I even helped out with executes towards the end:

Speaking of executes too, we tried a new strat on Netherspite. One of the people for the blue beam died so I took over. Dear lord does that thing buff damage. At the end I took the full 60 stacks and went to town with Executes.

11,239!! Plus shield slam crit for 3190! Best part was in my tanking gear there was no danger of dying from taking 60 stacks since I had 16k health. Even with no heals I could have probably survived at least the full duration. I may use that strat more often.

So, why do witches burn?

Because they’re made of…wood?

May I introduce Booty Bay Bootleggers new Tree Dood Ithirn!

He’s all kinda fancy with his Hots that keep me alive:

With Battle Rez at the ready:

Now I see the secret weapon Jessika has! Seriously I never knew how good a resto druid was before. Our guild is and always has been seriously lacking in that department and we’ve always had to rely on the kindness and skill of pug trees. Plus Ithirn is an alt of Morghand our MT, so he knows all about fancy things like LOS for heals and being my anchor for the pulls in Curator’s room. He did a great job even if we do give him a hard time a lot so hopefully he gets geared up nice and quick!

On a completely different note I tanked Nightbane for the first time tonight. Holy cow level does he hit hard! I knew it was bad from healing it, but I was severely under prepared for exactly how much of a beating I was in for from a 10-man boss. I did well on the stance dancing though, it’s easier than I thought it would be and I only missed one (Will of the Forsaken for the win!). However I got one super embarassing screenshot I’d like to share:

Now to delete that from my harddrive forever. >_>

Mag is still kinda easy, Gruul…not so much.

So we did a Mag/Gruul back to back thing tonight. It didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. I got to dps on Anhydrous, which was a plus, but sadly we did not have Capable Cube Clickers. 3 of us had it perfect, the other two…eh. I did find out mag has a GIGANTIC hit box so I could dps and stand guard at my cube:

Took us three tries and we barely scraped by on the skin of our teeth:

After that was done we snuck on over to Gruul to get him down again. Had some pull issues on High King, but got him down easy enough. Gruul was kinda tough tonight. It was new for me as melee that’s for sure.

I was used to being ranged and when he throws you up in the air I was always in a good position prior to that. Now as melee he just kinda chucks you wherever. Sometimes I was by my lonesome, other times I was tossed right into a big group of healers.

It was kinda sucky all around though. Tanking, dps, heals were all decent, people were just getting shattered a lot. And tanks were dying on silences. And the omen was sketchy on showing threat properly for some people. Plus we were tired. I like the idea behind doing them both back to back, I just think we need to have Mag down quick so we’re pumped up for Gruul or else we won’t get him.

And Morghand, we all blame you by the way for not coming tonight. Clearly this was our issue for not downing Gruul.

Hex Lord is now…De-Hexed?

So we made it back in before the reset on Zul’Aman and took a stab at the end bosses. Anhydrous got to go as we only needed one tank, and even more so I got to DPS! It’s been so long I forgot where all my Enhancement gear was. It was a nice change of pace though.

Malacrass is a tough fight. It’s a lot like Moroes, CC the adds and kill them one by one:

It was fun though since it’s very important to interrupt his heals and purge, so I had a lot of utility. Was second on DPS too which I was impressed with considering I was a little out of practice. Took us about 5 tries or so, but we got him:

That’s me in the middle by the way. I kind of like the blood elf look on me.

Mag is a Pushover for the Former Ruler of Outland

Seriously, Magtheridon is probably the easiest boss we’ve killed in a while. We downed him for the first time last night. It was almost a one shot, one of the cube clickers missed on the first attempt. The second time was near flawless. I can’t believe we never tried him sooner! I took some pictures too if you want to see my epic cube clicking!

First we killed easy trash:

Then I tanked this easy boss guy thing:

DPS rushed in and murdered her:

Then I stood there and did this:

For 10 minutes. Sometimes I ran up and renewed Demo shout and TC for morg:

That was about it though. Oh well, at least I got a belt out of it, but yeah Mag, seriously dude I expected more from you.

And Morg, we can switch spots anytime on Mag if *you’re* bored.

The Kitty Hits Hard…

Back to Zul’Aman last night. It’s been a while since we went, and even longer since I tanked. Made our way over to Akil’zon first, where I broke a new health record for myself:

20,034 health! Last time I had that I was in Alterac Valley and Balinda had just died. Sadly there were some connections issues with our mage and he ended up wiping us the first time, we got him the second time but sadly missed the timer. Oh well, this place is hardly on farm. Next up was the bear. Changed it up a little and I took the bear form for the first time.

That dot is very ouchy:

We downed him too though after a couple of tries. My game crashed in the middle of one of the attempts, royally screwing us of course. >_< That was all well and fun though, but I was most excited to try Halazzi again.

Last time we did him with me as tank we couldn’t get past 50%, so I was hoping we could down him while I was on deck (I went ninja just to be sure we downed him). Took a couple tries, and there were some scary moments (notice Bootybank with the 152 health):

Actually two scary moments. This one I was very proud of. Basically what happened was Bootylicious went down and I picked Halazzi up. Now if you haven’t tanked him before he does an ability called Saber Lash which does ~19k damage split amongst the tanks in front of him. So I popped Last Stand and with my 25,849 health I manged to live through two of those.

Thankfully we got him at that last second. A little sloppy but it was fun. We’re still not really up to the task of getting the rest of the bosses just yet, but we’re moving through it little by little. Now we just need to get the timed loot on a regular basis.

Mmmmmm, crispy bear butt.

It looks strange now…

Dez over at Will Tank for Healz! made a good post about spring cleaning her blog and I decided to take her advice as well. When I made mine I picked a fancy looking theme that I liked and went with that. I liked the custom image at the top thing and with the powers of photoshop whipped something to go there in a few minutes. However I have since discovered that I have no side bar for things called “widgets” to go on. This is unacceptable! For sooth!

So anyway I picked a new one. I might change it later, but I kinda like it now. Plus I have widgets!

Widgety widgets.