Tank like a girl

Out of three possible Opera encounters, I would say this is probably the one best suited for warrior tanks. It requires a lot of coordination from the raid, and good interrupts, plus dispellers.

This is a two tank encounter. If there’s only one warrior tank, she should be on Julianne duty for interrupts. If you have more than one warrior (or none), the better geared tank should be on Romulo.

Assuming you’re on Julianne duty, you tank her normally but pay close attention to her spellcasting. She will cast Blinding Passion a lot, which is a random holy attack with a DoT component that you can just let her cast. If it’s on you, you can spell reflect it (if you’re a warrior). But the moment you see her cast Eternal Affection, you must stop it and interrupt it by using Shield Bash. Ideally, you have at least one more interrupt available, I like sticking rogues on Julianne duty. If you have a second interrupt available, discuss an interrupt rotation. You don’t want to let a heal go through, especially not in phase 3.

 

Phase 1 is over quickly. Julianne is a cloth-wearer and doesn’t have much health. Cue the Romulo tank who has to stand ready to use Thunderclap, Demo Roar or Consecrate to immediately pick up Romulo. It is best to tank him against the wall by the stage entrance. You want your back against the wall to avoid his knockback. He deals a lot of physical damage, so having high armor will help here. If Daring is Purged/Dispelled once up, you shouldn’t have too much trouble. It also helps to have a shaman, druid or paladin remove the poison he applies.

Phase 2 ends with Romulo dead but remain by his corpse. R&J will show up together. Both tanks need to be ready to pick up their targets immediately, by using the usual methods of AoE threat and then start off with a high threat move. You especially do not want Romulo in the raid, he is painful.

Julianne’s health should go down a lot faster than Romulo’s, so it is entirely possible that a DPS stop will be called. If that’s the case, make sure that you as J-tank remain on top of her aggro list, only use Auto-Attack, and Shield Bash her heals. Here’s where having MT frames really helps so that you can closely watch the targets’ health. You do not want them to die outside of that narrow five seconds window. If your raid can time this procedure correctly, those two are very manageable.

Lootwise, aside from the Eternium Greathelm any Opera boss can drop, there’s really only one thing worth mentioning: Romulo’s Poison Vial. If all your physical DPS already has it or are hit-capped, it can make an interesting threat trinket for a trash tanking set.

Setbacks are frustrating, aren’t they? As I mentioned before, my guild has a very light raiding schedule, every other weekend. We are currently alternating between Karazhan and Zul’Aman. My own interest lies in exploring ZA some more. It’s still exciting and fresh content for me. However, our raid balance is very wonky. We have four ZA-geared healers, maybe six geared DPS and exactly two tanks. You see the problem, right?

So while our other prot warrior shall go camping next weekend, we’ll head to Karazhan again. *yawn*

Our dire tank situation is actually quite bizarre, as for our last Karazhan we had, what, 5 or 6 tanks sign up. However, a bunch of them are alts. Alts of our main healers. Who are needed as healers in ZA, of course. My new mission as one of the raid leaders will be to schedule people who actually want to move on to ZA tanking.

Heh, maybe it’ll give me another chance for gearing up my own alt in Karazhan, my rogue.

I am getting excited about my next project: Go go Champion-title! It basically is a concerted effort to get a Gruul and Magtheridon kill, two bosses that my guild couldn’t possibly raid on its own. But apparently they must like me that much after all that we are going full-force, filling the rest of the raid slots with friends from our guild alliance. I should note that even though we have a 25-man raid alliance, few of the girls regularly go. Excited! Now gimme all your advice for Gruul, okay? I have off-tanked in the Highking Maulgar fight once, which was not so exciting. Tanking Blindeye the Seer was not the highlight of my tanking career.