Tank like a girl

This weekend I reached another personal milestone and earned myself the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. In our second Malygos raid, we managed to defeat the bastard in 9 painful tries. We had 3-4 tries where I learned how to tank phase 1, as it was my first time tanking it. It does take some time to get used to it, and I struggled through positioning and aggro management. It was the closest I ever felt to tanking a boss like Nightbane, where threat after the landing was a persistent issue. It was back this time. Eventually, phase 1 just clicked, we had the sparks in perfect control, I strafe-kited him without much problem, and our two priests healed perfectly. Ciderhelm’s video makes it look easy, but it takes a lot of focusing to keep up on threat against the DPS boosted raid plus you have to keep an eye out for sparks yourself. My tip: use the time in the vortex to locate the sparks, and if you happen to be in range of Malygos, keep building threat, you’ll need it.

We faltered in phase 2 once, again due to aggro issues and people being in different bubbles. But that was just once, phase 2 is relatively easy. Charge one Nexus Lord, Heroic Throw the other, move to the current bubble and watch the Deep Breath timer. Once the Nexus Lords were down, I flew up to slap sunders onto the scions, to help the physical DPS girls.

Of the nine tries, we made it to phase 3 four times. The first try was just testing the waters, the second one we failed to beat his enrage timer. The third time everything went great, everyone was alive, stacks were up, things looked good. Bam. The Wyrmtalon drakes apparently got bored and left to see a movie. We all fell to our deaths. And not a fluke, because our sister-guild alliance side did Malygos-25 the same day and had the same thing happen. Very aggravating! But at that point, it seemed like we had figured it out. We killed Malygos with 35 seconds left on his timer. Close, but good enough. I did notice that it’s not that easy to keep stacks up as I thought it would be, I let mine drop off at 10 stacks, which I find somewhat embarassing to admit.

Unfortunately, drops were disappointing. Nothing anyone could use, and no Barricade for me. Maybe next time. I did enjoy the fight as tank overall and would love to do it again. I am not sure I would be able to successfully 2-heal it, unless joined by a Holy priest or druid, because shamans are kinda useless during the Vortex.

Next day was full of frustration for me. I healed in Naxx-10, and though I generally felt very solid on healing, I managed to eff up all my exuberance by switching to Kadomi for Thaddius, for a shot at the Repelling Charge. Yet again I missed the jump and spent most of the fight on a platform, waiting for the right time to jump again without killing anyone. Tonight I will head to Naxx to look for the ledge that lets you not do a jump, so this won’t ever happen again. Blegh. Of course Repelling Charge didn’t drop, so now I have to farm Seal of the Pantheon so I can actually wear frost resist gear for Hodir.

Naxx went so great, I thought this would be our second one-day clear, but then we hit a roadblock at Four Horsemen. No one had done the fight in the back before but one of the tanks. Our first tries didn’t work, so I decided to head to the back. It still took us three tries, and that was the end of our raid. We only managed to clear four wings in our allotted time, after one-shotting everything else. I was really disappointed. But you know, next time we’ll have more people who have done 4H in the back, and we’ll go back to one-shotting them. I think my biggest failure as raid leader was that I did not manage to keep the cheerfulness up. I was so disappointed that I think it was audible on Vent. I should have kept the high spirits up, but I was tired. Something to improve.

In two weeks, we’ll head back to Ulduar, and then I’ll take a break from raiding. We’re moving to a new apartment in another town, so it might be til early August until I get my broadband up and running again. I will try to prepare a couple blog entries so you won’t have to miss me too much.