Finally tank something of some significance.Follow

Heroics down. Found a couple healers that arent morons and suddenly heroics became a cakewalk, at least the ones ive been doing. Neato. Unfortunately killing the bosses in heroics just isnt all that cool. TBH the bosses are generally easier than the trash, though i have only done a handful of different heroics, i try to stay away from the Shadow Resist instances.

Ive been sneaking into some Kara runs as OT, which blows quite frankly. when not OTing you are a complete waste, so it was less than ideal, but id get some gear and get some badges. Finally this weekend the kara MT had to leave and a replacement was needed, and they were foolish enough to put their repair bills in my hands.

Illhoof, prince and netherspite got facepwnt. wewt.

Illhoof was cake more or less, though i could tell my gear was less than stellar when all my healers were OOM near the end. Prince punsihed us several times with infernals, once because i nubbed out and ran too far away when an inferal landed on me, and once because my opening threat was horrendous for some reason. bad luck.

Netherspite was more of a challenge as several members didnt know what was going on with beams, and ffs i didnt know all that was needed to "tank" was just the act of standing in the red beam. I assumed i still had to toss up some damage. And seeing how in phase 2 they put me in the green mana sucking beam i was OOM before my turn to tank the second time around. I was all confused. Got it figured out, next time wil be smoother.

It was fun, very exciting, and luckily it was a guild run so the people werent all harping on my noobiness.

I figure if i can do those 3 i can handle everyone else. nightbane might be challenging, maybe, but doubt its as complicated as netherspite.

It was a great feeling being the recipient of all those heals and keeping those big bad monsters in my face.

There is the main appeal of being a raid tank. You are the sole body standing between an oversized beasty and unquestionably gruesome raid wipe. :)

QFT

My gf bought me this T-shirt from Jynx that has a Warrior in Tier 6 gear all shot up with arrows, and his DPS standing behind him. At the top of the picture it says "Tanks ..." and under it "You're welcome". I love that shirt :)

EDIT: yea, Nightbane wasn't as hard as I expected him to be. Even if you can only muster 1 Priest for Fear Ward, or even no Priests, it's not too bad. You may very well take a crushing or 2, but like said if you can take Prince's phase 2, you can take what Nightbane dishes out. Hardest thing is the transition from flight phase to ground phase. It's not bad with a well timed Exorcism though, just don't hit it too early *looks away*

Edited, Mar 11th 2008 5:30am by Maulgak

He has an aggro wipe. People still debate when exactly it happens. Just nail him with an Exorcism the instant he actually picks a target and you should have no problems. Hit him too early, though, and you might hit him before the aggro wipe, and he will go running away from you anyways.

EDIT: It also helps to drop a Consecration when you're able to pin down where exactly he's landing. That will also help with establishing that initial threat.


Edited, Mar 11th 2008 2:47pm by Ialaman

i hated tanking nightbane. his hits are rediculous even when fully uncrushable. that fight i step out and let the drood do the tanking...his 45% dodge and consistent mitigation tax the healers alot less than my spikey tankadin.

if i bring in my frost mage, i use the W/E to round up the skele's. then i stick him on nightbane so as he is landing the W/E is #1 target instead of a healer.

you pick up a diff beam than red? we've only dont him 2 times and i've always just picked up red we have 6 peeps picking up diff beams 2 per beam and everyone is on stand by incase someone goes down.

Somewhat off topic, but I'm curious. You had heroics down before Kara? I tried heroics first and got my *** handed to me, with the acception of heroic Ramps. I was told to not even bother with them and head straight to Kara. I did significantly better, I thought kara was going to be a problem, its really not. I've tanked everything in there except for prince, they let the warrior do that.

I was just wondering how you managed heroics before kara. Like i said, I got owned in heroics with the acception of ramps. And kara was easy stuff. I don't have resist gear either so I didn't even attempt SL or anything.

I haven't tried any after I was told to do Kara. And now I have quite a few pieces upgraded so I should be able to pull off some of them. I have the 490 def and uncrushable, which i heard was 103.5% avoidance for us? At first I was told it was 102.4 like warriors, THEN I heard tankadins *cant* get uncrushable. Then thats when I heard 103.

I completely went on a pointless rant. /end. :) thats all, was just wondering lol

Ah, right on. With HS and Redoubt I'm set, 134 I think..And I'll try those out for starters, thanks bud

I understand that, I was just saying with redoubt, i have 134. Without it, I have 104. :)

Grats! I'm in about the same situation as you are. :)

Kara drops have been really tough for me though. In the last 6 runs, the only prot drop has been the NB shield. (Meaning, I'm still in blues, heroic epics and eng, goggles.)

Tanked Midnight, Moroes, Illhoof NS and NB so far. Wish I'd had the chance to try Prince but no clue how much harder than NB he is, if he's actually harder.

Personally, I think NB was pretty easy. What really psyched me up was: Fully epicced Warrior MT wiped on the first 6 attempts, all before NB hit 80%. Two of the tries, NB landed and he died instantly, before he could get any heals. We were about to skip and come back another day, when I asked if I could give it a shot. People were dubious about letting me try, but the MT/RL said to give me a shot anyways.

So, I had SoL/JoL up, and went at it... got him down to 6% on my first try ever tanking him, then we wiped because somehow I lost aggro for a moment, and NB went to munch on a mage or 2. (When I say somehow, I mean Omen showed me as top of threat by a large margin on everyone's screen, but he suddenly decided the mage looked tastier.)

I think everyone was psyched that we could pull this off, since this was the lowest we'd gotten him to, that night. Next attempt I used a higher threat rotation, had about 680TPS, and we downed him... and his shield dropped. :)

At this point, I was really really happy, since all the previous runs, they'd have me sit out, then bring a t5 tank in to specifically tank NB. On the one day he wasn't available, and I was allowed to have at it, I pulled it off!

/endrambling

So... yeah. I know exactly how you feel, grats!

I'm just wondering now, how much more it'll take to be able to go for ZA. Currently, my guild only lets ssc/tk fully geared people go for runs. :'(

ZA has 2 major factors involved:

1) It starts off around prince level (this is Bear and Eagle) and scales very sharply from there. I've got a guild full clearing SSC/TK and most of MH and we all hate the Zul'jin/Hex-Lord fights. ZA goes from 4 decently simple bosses to a cooldown popping DPS race and an exercise in reactions and fight management.

2) Timed runs are the order of the day. Everyone wants the extra loot and to get that you need to take a geared run through the place to even stand a chance. You wipe once and you can start kissing chests goodbye.