Tank like a girl

After my QQ post last week one shouldn’t believe it, but I love my guild. I really do. We have tons of fun girls in the guild, everyone’s helpful, and we have some very skilled, great players.

On Saturday, I forgot to take killshots and I always take great pride in taking those. But I just forgot. So Normanitee, our really excellent resto druid volunteered to draw us a killshot in MS-Paint. And today she posted it, and it’s just so much win. Click on it, you know you want to.

And that’s why I love my guild. Thanks Norm, you rock!

After my massive round of QQ from a couple days ago, we did indeed have our very first Naxx raid upon us. When we raid, it’s Saturday/Sunday, for 3 hours each. We started with the spider wing, and after one test-try where the kiting didn’t work as expected, we got Anub’rekhan down the second try. Grand Widow Faerlina proved to be fairly easy as well, with our only problem being that the last worshipper died too early, whoops. Our bear MT died, got a battle rez and picked up again. In any case, that was a oneshot, albeit a slightly messy one.

Maexxna took three tries until we got the positioning just right. Initially there were tons of range issues, that room is pretty huge. Once we had the positioning down, it seemed fairly trivial. Arachnid Quarter complete, yay. That was one of my raid goals (as I usually set the goals fairly low) and so that was very nice. Healing-wise, I am a bit competitive by nature and thus I felt I didn’t do so well, but I assigned myself to raid healing, and there weren’t a lot of death. I just get way too easily bored when healing.

From there we moved on to the Plague Wing to test the waters there and one-shot Noth the Plaguebringer. Yay for Cleanse Spirit spam and Chain Heals. This fight really felt as easy as they say, no danger of wiping. I wish I could say the same about the dance champion Heigan who was our next target and end of our raid for the day. In our best attempt we had him at 35%, before things went to hell. I was pretty upset at myself because I felt I set a very bad example as raid leader by always dying to the dance pretty quickly. Thanks to watching Ciderhelm’s video, I now know my mistake, I always ran too far into zone 4 and then never caught up when running back. Lesson learned!

The next day dawned, and our most awesome retribution paladin informs me that her boyfriend Skaze is sick and will not be able to fill our main tank spot. In TBC, Kaylexanna was one of our top healers, she went retribution for leveling and stayed retribution because she kicks ass at it. She’s our only DPS who breaks 3k DPS without any Naxx gear. Hax! Nevertheless, she offered to go holy, which meant that all my QQing about not tanking was for nothing and I actually was able to fill the tank spot. Hallelujah! We then quickly ran H VH and then H CoS for some missing badges for her healing shield and my T7 gloves and lo and behold, this was my first successful tanked attempt at the timed run! It was very close. We had like 6 minutes left right after Chrono Lord, and the Infinite Corruptor was heading back to the portal. I had kited him down the street to give us just a little bit more time, and whew, it worked out. The two guildies in my group both already had the drake, the two PUG guys both didn’t have epic flying and were kind enough not to roll, so it defaulted to me. Huzzah!

Just a bit later it was time to head to Naxxramas and try this Heigan thing again. Our first try was just as messy as our previous tries, as we also had new people in the raid, and then, well, then we killed him, in possibly the most maddening and epic raid fight I was ever in. Pretty early on we lost a couple people to the Plague Fissures. Then I must have made a huge mistake, because most but not all of our casters got hit by the disease and died from it. From that point on, we had four people left standing. The two tanks, a paladin healer and a shadowpriest. We danced it. We danced and danced and danced. I felt like I was going mad, running back and forth, back and forth, all the time. Eventually, Heigan’s health was at 0% when he teleported, with very little health left, and I told those last ones standing to proudly perform our last lap of running. That jinxed it, everyone but me died. The DoT from our dead shadowpriest does the killing blow, Heigan dies, and just a moment later I die on top of him, from his disease DoT. Now if that’s not epic, I don’t know anything.

From there we moved on to Loatheb. I died on the first attempt because the healers were still getting used to their limited capabilities of healing, but the second try we nailed it. I was pretty happy with my performance, given my gear level 1.4k DPS is not bad at all. It could be more, but I definitely increased my Heroic Strike use. My use of Concussion Blow wasn’t that hot, but all in all, I felt I did very well. Tanking, how I missed thee!

I had decided to try the Death Knight wing next and so eventually we ended up at Instructor Razuvious. While I do appreciate that you do not need to bring priests for MC to the 10-man version, it felt awfully gimmicky. Us tanks had some issues figuring it all out, had some bad luck with the mind control breaking right when I was supposed to taunt, but when we finally got it, we got him down. The OT’s understudy died early, and so I tanked Razuvious til he went down, kept alive even when Bone Armor was down by the magic of strong healers.

We paid Gothik a visit, the healer on the live side died early on, and we just wiped it from there and called it. Next raid I hope we can finish both Spider and Plague wings on the first day, leaving us a lot more time to work on Death Knight Wing the following day. 7/15 on our very first raid weekend is not bad at all, I would say, not bad at all. And I got to tank. This made me so happy, I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day.