Tank like a girl

I managed to convince someone from my guild that blogging is awesome (and it is), so please welcome Yasura and her ‘heals, smites and prayers‘ blog to the fold! As the name suggests, she’s a priest, and really the pocket-healer priest that’s saved my butt the most. She’s most awesome, and I am looking forward to all her healer stories. Hopefully she won’t gripe about squishy tank too much.

While I am tossing out links, I would also like to mention new awesome tanking blogs on the scene:

• Yakra’s Mirror Shield
• Durnic’s ORLY Factor
• Talldar’s Warriortanking
• Albinobeard’s Defensive Stance

Protection warriors, the world is our oyster!

I split this up, because I tend to ramble a lot (as any regular reader knows already). So, day 1 we killed three animal bosses, but it wasn’t our best raid. Sunday we had Dragonhawk on our list, and more Hex-Lord attempts.

Dragonhawk trash was the smoothest we’ve ever done it. Druid roots went perfectly, we only got adds from one Scout, and no wipe, even in the evil pull with the trolls throwing ball for their dragonhawk. In no time we stood before Dragonhawk, and I slapped on my trusty friend, the Petrified Lichen Guard. Our first try was pretty awful, as the assigned hatcher killer fell asleep or something, and the whole platform spawned. The next two tries were a little bit rocky, and the last try was perfect. Cleared all dragonhawks, went on to kill him, with one minute to spare on the Enrage timer. I can now pat myself on the shoulder and be proud of having successfully tanked dragonhawks without a paladin tank, pre-3.0. Go me!

We cleared up to Hex-Lord, had some real problems with the pull of four mobs, had to double tank them. That was pretty rough. And then Hex-Lord himself. As adds we had the ogre, the wight, the snake and the imp. After much trial and error, we killed the ogre, wight and snake to get CC burdens away from the healers and then started DPS on Hex-Lord himself. I will not lie, it took many tries, 8 all in all, but we learned a lot from them, to respond to the various Siphon Soul effects. On try number 8, our DPS stayed alive, the healers worked their butts off, and Hex-Lord kept siphoning warrior and rogue continuously, yay for him not healing himself. Down he went! And like idiots we all excitedly ran out to turn the quest in, thinking we’d get a quest to kill Zul’jin himself, so there’s no screenshot of the firstkill. It wasn’t pretty, but it’s the kill that matters, right? In that anonymous WWS, my name got butchered to Sifr, and I ate four crushes. Sloppy!

After turning the quest in, we went back in. People repaired outside, things were a bit slow, and I got bored and opened the door. Haha. Funny moment of the day. People came back to face death and destruction, but the silly MT who opened the door lived. So, should you ever be faced with the situation of first going through the door to Zul’jin, expect millions of mobs to come running out of that door. Wussy mobs, but still. Good times.

Then we tried Zul’jin and in our first attempt learnt what happens when only the tank and a healer are standing on the platform. The next couple tries, we tried to deal with the Eagle phase and got him to 46% in our best try. We had a rogue and a hunter, but that wasn’t enough DPS to get him down to 40%. Any advice welcome.

Killing new bosses is exciting, and I met my biggest goal before the expansion: getting to see Zul’jin. Next up we’ll actually have to kill him, we’ll see how that goes. Wish us luck.

I am interrupting useful stuff about the upcoming patch with lengthy stories about personal progress. Rar!

This weekend was another Zul’Aman raid for my guild. We had a great line-up, so my hopes were high to get the first chest again on the first day and progress further on the second day. But some things don’t work out as expected. Our top DPS frost mage had computer problems so didn’t show both days. We replaced her with a warlock who’s not quite in the mage’s DPS range, but better a full raid than not going, right? We start, rush towards Bear, have pretty chaotic pulls with at least one death per pull, and basically 9-man it because the shadowpriest disconnects every single pull. One of the holy priests crashes several times. Nevertheless, we push on, get to the pull before Nalorakk, and I die pretty quickly, because I have two bear riders beating on me instead of just the one I was supposed to tank. In our next try we get the pull down, but again, 9-manned, as the shadowpriest disconnected for the umpteenth time. At that point we only have a couple minutes left on the timer, I call it, and with heavy heart I had to ask the spriest to leave. In we brought the ele shaman boyfriend of one of our girls, who supposedly pulls 650 DPS, which did not quite turn out that way. At least he was enthusiastic, that matters for something.

On Nalorakk I usually tank bear phase, and I still find this boss ridiculously easy to tank. Like for real, this is just easy. And what does he drop? Jungle Stompers. These boots are huge, considering the 3.0 warrior changes, and considering I am sporting Boots of Elusion, which will not be re-itemized for 3.0. I never got the boots from Chess, so the Jungle Stompers are really a big deal for me. You can see where this story is going, right? Yup, right. I lost the roll to the other prot warrior, the one who was wearing the Chess boots. She actually whispered to me I could have them if I really wanted them, but I didn’t want to seem like a sore loser, especially as she used her bonus points to roll on them (we use a bonus point system for rolls that rewards attendance and contributions to the raid bank). Here you can tell that a girl is writing this blog, because I actually burst into RL tears from sheer frustration and disappointment. I really pour a lot of myself into our raids, and a pat on the shoulder and thanks in form of the first piece of tanking loot to ever drop for us in ZA would have been great. ZA is only on our raid calendar twice more, and given the drop tables, I might never see those boots again. And now I feel totally silly afterwards that I did. Silly loot, what it does to people, I say!

So that’s my sob story for the day, I seem to have one of those every weekend now. I couldn’t talk on Vent for a while on the way over to Eagle, because I had to blow my nose and stuff. We actually wiped in the gauntlet the first time, on the Tempest pull, tank death and it was over. Second try went a lot better. We then tried to down Eagle and I still really don’t know why we wipe on this fight so much. I don’t get it. Several times we had tank death, several times we had people too slow with collapsing for the storm. Then the gauntlet respawned and we had to do it again. Then we finally got him down and he dropped a paladin chestpiece. Our invisible paladin was happy and then cried when we sharded the piece.

On to Lynx. The trash I always find kinda relaxing and fun, no big deal. Smooth progress, in we go, and Halazzi is one-shot. How can we wipe so many times on Eagle and just one-shot Lynx? You tell me. Invisible paladin rejoiced again as the plate shoulders dropped. Again.

We usually call it after Lynx, but I am hoping that for our next raid, we can actually kill Eagle in under 5 tries and actually do all animal bosses that day. For realz.

I will continue this ‘exciting’ report of our ZA raid with a follow-up post later today, and there will be no loot sob story this time, promised. That doesn’t mean that I got anything, because it was invisible paladin weekend! Does tanking plate really exist in ZA? I have lost faith.