Tank like a girl

This weekend, I switched from BigWigs to DeadlyBossMods, just so I can say I have tried it. I liked many elements of it, but still am kinda peeved that you cannot move the boss health frame unless you’re actually fighting said boss. That’s just poor design, you should have a test mode for all bars. I actually made an Auriaya video that I need to cut and render, and I am ashamed of my UI, I tell ya, ashamed!

One of the features of DBM is that it plays the voice from Big Bad Wolf to run away whenever you need to. Which seems to be a running theme in Ulduar as tank, because there are very few moments you ever stand still. Tank and spank? Not very much! So far only XT-002 Deconstructor and Kologarn had their tank and spank moments. But I ran and ran and ran on every single other boss we tackled this weekend.

Daughters of the Horde are now 8/13 in Ulduar in our 3rd raid ID, which is excellent progress. I am not counting Algalon, that’s out of reach for us casual scrubs, and that’s fine. But we’ve only done 18 hours of raiding in Ulduar and have killed 8 bosses and gotten the first piece of T8 for one of our raiders (grats, Sawyer!) so overall, I am very happy.

On Saturday, we did all the mandatory bosses to get to Hodir, with pretty decent success. We had a few new people in the raid, so Flame Leviathan took a lot longer than he really should. We wipe on trash, that was our running theme. Also, we charge on the ramp and then fall through Ulduar. There’s not much underneath Ulduar, I will say. FL himself proved to be no problem, and same with XT-002 Deconstructor. Kologarn is really no big deal for us at all it seems. More of a big deal is the Auriaya trash, we had quite a few special moments there. Imagine 10 girls yelling ‘Don’t touch the balls! Squish the balls!’ Haha.

I managed to snag the two first pieces of Ulduar gear for myself. The pretty amazing Mark of the Unyielding off Kologarn, and Archaedas’ Lost Legplates off Auriaya. I am very torn on the latter. I would have to give up Essence of Gossamer or the Valor Medal of the First War to be able to wear them. Above all, I would have to give up the 4 pc T7 bonus losing the pants. I could swap in my T7 helmet to keep the bonus, but it’s inferior to the Tempered Titansteel helmet. Decisions, decisions. What do you other tanks reckon, are they worth swapping gear for or should I wait until Hodir gives me my token?

We had Auriaya on the second pull, and then just like the previous raid, wiped our way through Hodir trash to Hodir himself. I had made myself two pieces of Icebane, belt and boots, and had farmed normal Halls of Lightning until Loken finally dropped Seal of the Pantheon. That took freaking forever, I have no intention of going there again for a while. We used a single tank, me, and the second tank went for a DPS spec. On Saturday, we got him to like 60% in our best try. We had problems with healing the raid through Frozen Blows.

On Sunday we headed straight through to Hodir and I tried my best to pull very slowly and carefully. It took a while, but we managed to not wipe at all, so that’s worth it for me. It reminded me of slowly having to pull through the ballroom in Karazhan, careful not to get adds from any snowdrift. Then back to Hodir. First few tries were shaky again, but on the third try we nailed it. We stacked the buffs better (zomg, Stormcloud), people moved (for the most part) and pre-HoTing for Frozen Blows seems to have worked quite well. Collective Twitter advice for the win.

 
Instead of trying to tackle another Keeper, we went back to kill the optional bosses we skipped. Razorscale went well enough. Our first try was problematic, the second try we got a helpful strategic tip from Drebian, a mage from a guild we’re friends with, and we got it easily the second time then. Unfortunately, Ignis didn’t work for us at all. I did just about every adds tank mistake in the books: broke roots, had a system crash, after the system crash my G13 didn’t work so molten constructs were just sitting rooted, accidentally targetted Ignis and kept taunting him off the MT while my add ate the healers, and so on and so forth. Many deaths in the crotch pocket, and all in all not very satisfying. Because we were getting frustrated, we did Assembly of Iron instead. After initial issues with the pull, we finally got it. I had an off-day, I think, my interrupts often did not land, and it felt like I should work on hit rating because Shield Bash missed quite a bit. Life as only interrupt made for sad times. Still, we got it, and in the last frantic moments of Stormcaller Brundir’s life, I managed to interrupt Lightning Whirl while finding my Iron Boot flask in my bags, to get that achievement, hooray.

 
All in all, it was a mixed bag. The joy in taking down yet another boss in there, paired with some great mobility on Hodir, followed by some of the weakest tanking I have done in a long time. But you can only learn and grow by looking at your own mistakes critically and working on fixing them.

As next decision, I have to figure out how we can kill Hodir on the first day, and which Keeper to pick as second target. I am tied on either Freya or Thorim. Both require sharp DPS, but I don’t really know which one would be best to tackle. Any advice welcome.