Tank like a girl

This is my first contribution to a Shared Topic from Blog Azeroth, as suggested by Breana. I really enjoyed the premise of the Shared Topic, so here goes my story.

The idea behind the topic: What’s the one thing you never thought you’d accomplish in WoW?

For me, it’s the achievement of successfully doing 10-man raids within my guild.

When I hit 70 on Kadomi, I changed specs to full protection, after leveling with fury/protection hybrid build. A particularly disastrous Mechanar experience was the cause. Today I just have to laugh at the idea of wiping 5 times on the robot boss. But when I hit 70, we had maybe 5-6 active 70s. Three were very interested in running tons of instances: me, my partner and a priest. We tried to run level 70 instances, and I remember the frustrations of SL runs where Vorpil seemed insurmountable an obstacle. The priest left shortly afterwards, for greener alliance pastures. Summer rolled around, another priest hit 70, and together with her, my partner and I pugged instances. Tons of instances. Some great experiences, some good, some really awful, but we geared up. Soon I was the best-geared tank, my partner the best geared DPS, our healer the best-geared healer. We started pugging heroics and earned our first badges. And yet, that was the limit. Anything beyond that seemed totally off-limits.

I actually researched transferring off to another server, into a European friendly guild for raiding, but then didn’t, because I didn’t want to lose my guild and my friends there. I re-rolled as paladin on a German server because my co-worker promised me I could raid with them. I wanted to get into that damn tower so badly. In the meantime I continued to try and motivate guild members to gear up, to get ready, to finish the Karazhan quest chain. My partner was doubtful that it would ever happen, while I posted a draft of gear requirements for Karazhan.

At about the same time my paladin finally hit 70 and had the necessary gear to hit Karazhan, my guild finally had enough people who were keyed and geared. We decided that we’d brave the tower, with my partner and me co-raid leading, every other weekend. Our first Karazhan weekend was in mid-November 2007, months behind any kind of progression curve. We made it to Curator that first weekend. Every other weekend we would go back, and on December 30 we had our very first Prince Malchezaar kill. We went from a ‘barely breaking 1800 DPS’ raid to one that’s been clearing Karazhan for seven months now and that’s 3/6 in ZA.

We still don’t have enough people for two groups, though we’re slowly getting there. People have come, people have left, and still, we always get our casual all-girls raid going, every other weekend. I never thought I’d see it happen, and I am very happy that I was able to get something like this off the ground.

My guild has another Karazhan raid coming up, and I won’t be tanking, but I promised our up and coming tanks more guides. Here we go with number 3, Maiden of Virtue. This is for the best!

This is a very fast-paced fight, though in reality, it will seem as if it goes on forever and ever. As a tank, it’s pretty much tank-and-spank, but depending on your healer setup, it might require you to be quick on your feet.

Maiden only requires one tank, this means the off-tank has to DPS here. It’s a very melee-unfriendly fight due to the heavy damage from Maiden’s version of Consecrate, Holy Ground. If you happen to be off-tank here, you do your raid the best service by frequently running off the platform out of the Holy Ground, for using bandages. The term ‘Dead DPS doesn’t provide DPS’ applies for as well.

If you are the main tank, you begin the encounter by running into the center of the room, to tank Maiden in the center of her platform. You will keep her there permanently, so that the Holy Ground damage doesn’t hit the raid. You cannot use Demoralizing Shout here, as Holy Ground causes a Silence effect.

If you have a paladin healer in the raid, you really won’t have to do anything but tank Maiden. In the Repentance phase when the whole raid is stunned but those on Holy Ground, the paladin healer should still be able to heal you, if they have cast Blessing of Sacrifice on you. Some of the damage you take will hit the paladin healer, who will break the stun that way and who can then keep you up until the other healers wake up from their stun.

If you have no paladin healer, things are a bit more tricky. One designated healer has to volunteer to move onto the platform shortly before Repentance. The healer will take Holy Ground damage and hence will never be stunned. As soon as Repentance is cast, the healer needs to back off again to avoid taking more damage while still keeping the tank up.

Things can go wrong here. The paladin might be late with renewing Blessing of Sacrifice, or the druid who volunteered shuffled in too late. What now? It’s Repentance and that big chick is hitting you hard, and not in a good way. My advice: put raid-icons on all of your healers and be aware of their positioning in the room. If Repentance begins and all your healers are stunned, you must pull Maiden off the platform, so that her Consecrate will wake up your healer of choice. You have to be quick about your business before you die from lack of heals.

In the image below I have tried to create a positioning that would help with moving Maiden in emergencies. Tank her in the middle, have your designated Repentance healer right behind you, and if your healer ends up stunned, just move back quickly. Equally quickly, move her back to the center once your healer has woken up from the beauty sleep.

If you can figure out how to survive the Repentance phases, and if your DPS gets quick Holy Fire dispels, Maiden of Virtue will be no problem. She has some very nice tank drops: Barbed Choker of Discipline for tanks of all flavors and Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden for warriors and paladins. IMHO those gloves are far superior to the warrior T4 gloves, and they definitely will make a nice piece of threat gear.