Tank like a girl

My guild’s current progression, if you can call it, is sitting firmly in Zul’Aman. That’s where the real challenges lie for us. On Saturday we started, and I had been hoping to make a serious attempt at the first chest. We chose Bear for that, but sadly we weren’t even close. Nalorakk’s second lookout pull was started when I wasn’t with the group yet, half the raid wiped on it, and then we wiped three or four times on the pull before Nalorakk. We had 3 hunters in the raid that were all struggling with trapping the Medicine Man. The other was chain-feared, which worked nicely. We really need to get a mage in there, sad but true. Nalorakk himself proved no challenge, the only challenge was the rolling for the hunter shoulders that he dropped, as we had three hunters.

Onwards we moved to Eagle. Our warlock died very early in the gauntlet, and so did our holy paladin, but we somehow managed to push through, warlock and paladin ran back and we made it, albeit slowly. Akil’zon himself hated us, people died, it was chaos and it took us five tries to get him down, including a second clearing of the gauntlet. In the final try, everything finally worked very smoothly and he died. He dropped Mojo-mender’s Mask, which our paladin took, and it might be the most ridiculous looking thing I have ever seen.

We didn’t have any problems with the Halazzi trash and soon enough we were standing in front of the Lynx himself. Again, we needed a couple tries to warm up, but on the fourth try he went down. All in all, not bad, we can kill the first three now, in not too much time. We definitely need to work on our execution on Akil’zon and Halazzi though, to reduce the time we need.

As our raid weekends are always two days, we went back in yesterday, with the plan to learn how to kill Dragonhawk without a paladin tank. Our first problem was the trash. No druid, no mage = scout hell. We had super chaotic pulls, and wiped several times on two bigger pulls. The one where they throw a ball at the dragonhawk, and the pull just before Jan’alai. Trapping really doesn’t work so great in that area, it was a mess. In any case, we made it to the boss, painfully, but we made it.

I had been shopping for this day, for the Petrified Lichen Guard, and I put a Felsteel Shield Spike on it. I wore my Darkmoon Card: Vengeance, ate my Stormchops, was as ready as you can ever be.

We spent 13 tries on Jan’alai, our best had him at 39%. In that try, we had gone for the slow approach of egg hatching, which left us with one side cleared and the other untouched. He was at 39%, we tried a DPS stop, but then the tank went down and it was over. We always hit the soft enrage, so healers had somewhat of a strain to keep the other warrior up. I saw she got crushed a lot, but given his increased attack speed, that’s probably one of the risks. So we changed our strategy. We needed to hatch the eggs faster, so that we could focus on the man himself. In all attempts from there on, we would clear the first side in two hatchings. Let me tell you how sad-making that is as tank. I didn’t feel I did too great a job, but no one died from the dragonhawks, so that’s good. According to WWS, the shield, shield spike, Stormchops and Darkmoon Card all procd quite a bit.

However, our problems with the second side are immense, I could use some advice there. It usually went to hell in a handbasket once we switched sides. What usually happened was that just when about 10 dragonhawks were hatched, Jan’alai would use fire bombs, the fire wall would go up, and the hatcher happily hatched every single egg and we couldn’t do anything about it. This happened several times in a row. Would you slow down the hatching at this point and hatch the eggs a lot more slowly? I think that’s what we’ll have to do to avoid situations like this. I am not sure.

The good thing is that we went home feeling better about not having a paladin tank and that we think we will be able to do this eventually. Despite the countless wipes/resets that we did, no one was in a bad mood, and we all felt we learned something from it. Next time we’re gonna get you, Jan’alai, even without a paladin. Once we can get the second side hatched as well, we’re gonna rock this.

And still, all night I dreamt of dragonhawks, chasing after them in my dreams.