Tank like a girl

Today is Monday story time, and a lot of gushing, as I had an awesome WoW weekend. It was time to re-visit Naxxramas and step it up for some progress. The first raid weekend we had cleared Arachnid and Plague quarters, plus Instructor Razuvious, and I was hoping to push past that.

I had not tanked the Arachnid Quarter before, so there were a few flubs. On Anub’rekhan I really sucked at running from the Locust Swarm. Ciderhelm makes it so easy in his video. I ran around the inner edge of the slime instead of the outer edge that Cider used in his video, and at his end spot, Locust Swarm still had 5 seconds on it. Gah! That was a wipe. The second try I ran past where Cider had stopped, well past the door and towards the other side. Still, four stacks on me, not good. Am I doing something wrong or is it normal to run that far? I will actually go practice running around the outer edge sometime today, to see if that helps. In any case, he went down in the second try.

Grand Widow Faerlina went down in 3 Frenzies, easy peasy. On Maexxna I got owned in the enrage the first try, and the second try also went down, but the raid killed her right after I died. Whew. From there we moved on to the Plague Wing, to the really boring Noth fight. Heigan was a huge improvement this time, we got him in 5 minutes, with only one death and a lot of excellent dancing. On to Loatheb, who went down easily again. I did lower personal DPS this time, only 1415, and did not reach the goal I had set me: to outnumber white swings with Heroic Strikes on static tank and spank encounters. Disappointing. However, what was not disappointing was that the Protector token dropped, and I won the roll. Woot, no more spikey shoulders! I love the model of Heroes’ Dreadnaught Pauldrons. Loatheb further showed me some love by dropping Legplates of Inescapable Death, which will be very sexy for the SBV set I am trying to build.

We were still within our time limit of 3 hours raid time, so we went and killed Instructor Razuvious in two tries. Stupid understudies breaking at inopportune times. That’s where we called it, which meant that we had cleared all seven bosses that we’d already downed on the first day, leaving lots of time for progression on Sunday.

Here’s where the fun begins. Yay for killing new bosses. We started with Gothik the Harvester, who promptly totally bugged for us. I was tank on the dead side, having an okay time, until mobs from the live side started joining us. For no reason whatsoever the live side mobs would run through the wall towards our healers. I ran around like a headless chicken trying to pick up all those crazy mobs, it was nuts. Clearly buggy. Despite that curveball, we got Gothik down from his balcony, and from there it was smooth sailing.

We moved to Four Horsemen from there, with one wipe as my healer and I got separated and she died to a meteor. We learned our lesson and the second time it was just fine. I actually felt it was really easy. We used the swap riders in the middle and drag back to corner method, which worked without any hitches. I thought it was a fun encounter, but it’s not the epitome of perfect execution that my oldschool raider co-worker told me about from Naxx-40.

Military Quarter done, on to Construct! I was excited about trying Patchwerk, because I really wanted to improve on my Heroic Strike execution on this tank and spank fight. The healers did a fantastic job on this fight and neither my bear companion OT soaking Hateful Strikes nor me had any scary moments on him. I broke a personal DPS record on him, doing 1554 DPS, which made me pretty happy. I also finally reached my goal of doing more Heroic Strikes than white swings. 77 Heroic Strikes, only 45 auto-attack swings. I want to shift that in favor of even more Heroic Strikes, which actually were 23% of my total damage, along with Shield Slam. If I look at my numbers I also get very happy about my Deep Wounds spec, 8-10% of total damage with a passive skill is pretty hot stuff. So, another one-shot kill, hooray. We even only had one casualty on the Frogger boss that came next!

Grobbulus came next. I didn’t much care for that fight, because walking backwards endlessly got old pretty quickly. We had one or two raid deaths, but all in all it was a pretty nice one-shot job. Before the pull we decided that this guy is the creepiest boss in Naxxramas. Just look at that needle on him. Yuck yuck yuck. To make the nastiness of the fight easier on me, he dropped The Skull of Ruin which is a very fine shield indeed.

Gluth was next, after a short interlude where a certain MT and raid leader fell off the pipe to be squished to bits in the room underneath. Ahem. I got to do the Frogger boss again and managed to not fall off the second time. Down the pipe into Gluth’s room, where I drove our ret pally crazy by making her kite the zombie chow. She did a fine job, and we got another one-shot kill. An irritating part of the fight was that my taunts somehow got resisted a lot, when the OT and I were trading off to let the debuff expire. Dead puppy anyway!

Only one boss left in the Construct Quarter and Naxx decided to toss another bug our way. On the first magnetic pull of the mini-bosses, I got swapped with our ret paladin, and then Stalagg squished the DPS and healers on that side and came to join us confused tanks on the other platform. Fail. The second try, everything went according to plan, they died together, we jumped (or rather levitated) over to Thaddius, and then we killed him without a hitch. Construct quarter cleared!

Did we want to have a look at Sapphiron? You betcha! Watching him form is as cool as I thought it’d be. The first two tries weren’t so great, as we would always have the blizzard right above the iceblocks people were hiding behind, or we had a person hiding behind a block turn into a block, screwing things up for everyone else. Bad luck, for the most part. Our third try, we finally did it, and got yet another boss down!

All good things have to come to an end, and we had only 25 minutes left for tries on Kel’thuzad. Our first try was pretty bad. We didn’t have time to look at the mechanics of the fight much beforehand, I wasn’t really prepared, and so it was over once KT joined the fray. The second try we did went a lot better, we had him at 25% when a) two of the healers were down, and b) I lost focus and died to a voidzone. Bad Kadomi, no biscuit.

Regardless of that, I would call this an amazing success. Two raids in, we are 14/15, which is probably a testament to how easy Naxxramas is, and yet, it feels like an accomplishment. Who ever says girls can’t play, doesn’t have a freaking clue. I am pretty sure that next ID we’ll clear the place. I won the key to Eye of Eternity and would love to eventually get a foot in that door.