Tank like a girl

After that somewhat disheartening AQ40 visit, I had a much more successful Sunday, when we blazed through ZA in record-time, scoring all chests for a change. The third chest got us one of the strangest rings I ever expected to see in a raid, Signet of Eternal Life. Lots of stamina, but resilience? Our paladin took it for arena, but still, buh?

I actually did not tank this time, as I was still sick and felt like facerolling again. Besides, I wanted to see how well my moonkin does now. In a fit of sickness, I actually didn’t wear any hit gear, or I would have done better, but I broke 1k DPS on Nalorakk, which is very nice.

That was the first guild raid where I wasn’t main-tanking. I feel like I am maybe hogging the spotlight too much. The tanks did just fine without me. The only real difference that I saw was the other warrior not being anywhere near my damage output. She was at the bottom of the charts, where I usually end up being 3rd in ZA. This inspired me to another post about prot warrior DPS, sometime later this week.

Loot-wise everyone but the druid tank scored something. The warrior tank got Ancient Aqir Artifact, which is pretty neat but not high on my priority list. The only thing I really still want from there is the shield off Dragonhawk. Which he’s never dropped for us. We got Arrow-fail Chestguard for the third ID in a row. One more chance for me to get the shield, then I think we’re done with TBC raiding.

After Zul’Aman, I had the tank itch that DPSing can never fulfil, and as H OHB was the daily, I grabbed a guild group and off we went. Besides, I needed to give my new Executioner enchant a spin. Zomg, it’s so bright, it burns! Looks very cool though. Only two of us had ever been to H OHB, the pockethealer and I, and I never managed to complete it. It went very well, though we had one wipe. The last wave of dragonkin hit me with 2 mortal strikes for 4k each, and then I was done with fairly quickly. The second time I used Intimidating Shout and all was well. Best part about the heroic? I was number one DPS and did 31% of the damage, haha. Glyph of Revenge, how I love thee.

I need to mention that at the beginning we killed Don Carlos, and I won Don Carlos’ Famous Hat. So fashionable that I need to add a screenshot. Oh Model Viewer, why dost thou forsake me still!

Two heroics left to go that I have never done, Crypts and Mana-Tombs. Shouldn’t be any problem whatsoever. I will definitely get my heroic dungeon achievement done before the expansion. I know that a lot of you are raid tanks by passion and do little else, but for me, the heart of the game is 5-mans still. Everything I know about tanking and pulling and responding when the going gets tough I have learned from 5-mans.

Despite the name of this post, this is actually not fully about the zombies and the scourge invasion in-game. Fooled ya, didn’t I? Though I feel I should express my opinion about them, and do my usual Monday morning rambling about stuff I’ve recently done in-game. I played around with being a zombie a bit in phase 1 of the event, thought it was fun and very different and then went back to my regular playtime. However, I also read stuff like wow_ladies, and it was quickly becoming apparent that people either LOVE this event or HAAAAATE it. There does not seem to be any middle-ground. What got me most is the argument I have seen used by the haters over and over: the event stops them from doing the important things they need to do in-game. Like grinding, and trick or treating. Sounded like some people have a job instead of playing a game, which I thought was extreme.

I do however understand people with lowbie characters who are upset about griefing and that’s clearly gone on. Zombies bring out the little kid in most people, the annoying brats who just want to disrupt other people’s gameplay and defend it as fun.

Other than arguing about the zombie event, I spent most of the weekend tanking some more. I finally feel that I have a good handle on things, and it’s really possible to just blaze through heroics now. I am trying to finish the heroics achievement, because that’s one that actually matters to me, as opposed to most other achievements. I still have quite a bunch left, as the only ones that were retro’d in were the ones I did for the Trials of the Naaru quest chain. I’m about halfway done.

As I am running more heroics now, I accumulated quite a few badges. I finally broke the 100 badges mark and was ready to buy Sunguard Legplates. I then changed my mind, because I didn’t feel they were a huge upgrade to my Unwavering Legguards. Or rather, I am not fighting the kind of bosses until 80 where the avoidance bonus of those pants would matter. Instead I blew my badges on Sabatons of the Righteous Defender as way superior threat upgrade from my Boots of Elusion. I hadn’t realized how awesome all the former paladin prot gear is now for prot warriors as well. These boots used to have spell hit on them in the past. I’m happy about the change, more gear options are good. I blew the rest of the badges on a Crimson Spinel and an Empyrean Sapphire for the sockets of the boots. As bonus, I am now looking very Amani-style, with all the ZA-style badge gear and ZA drops I am wearing.

Yesterday we blazed through ZA, but we only got three chests again. Seriously, you guys who got bears in the past, hats off to you, even on ezmode we seem to be too slow. We had 1 minute left before pulling Halazzi, which wasn’t really sufficient. Do you guys loot the bosses or do all of the looting after all four bosses are dead? A lot of people got very nice upgrades yesterday, which was pretty nice to see. Nothing for me this time, but that’s quite alright. The only stuff I am now still looking for are the shield and maybe the axe off ZJ. Executioner finally dropped, so it’s time to get my King’s Defender enchanted with that.

After ZA we hit Karazhan, to check out the new Scourge invasion boss. Okay, vampire blood elfs. I always had my suspicions about those crazy loons, I tell ya. The boss himself was…different, and to my shame I kissed the floor when he was at about 35%. I think by the end of it we had only half of the raid still up. Those red balls of doom are nasty business. Also, really stopping DPS during the blood siphon thing helps with people staying alive! The rock star guitar axe went to our ret paladin, who rocked out for us, and we all enjoyed the cute widdle bat everyone in the raid gets as reward. Along with two badges, that is. Fun stuff. I bet Karazhan has lots of rooms where you could slap new bosses. How many of us have actually explored Medivh’s quarters e.g.?

What have you guys been up to? Fun with the zombies? Pissed off about the event? Raiding triumphs? I want to hear it all.

Guess what, I still live! I got a couple mails asking where I was and what was going on. All’s fine, but I was hit by RL and also spent hours tuning my UI and playing WoW too much. Strangely enough, all the changes brought something about that I didn’t think would happen: blog ennui. Or maybe even WoW ennui.

I am really torn at the moment. On the one hand, the new protection warrior is amazingly fun. It’s just awesome to play. On the other hand, other classes got hit with the nerfbat so hard that I outperform them so much that it makes me feel bad. What the hell happened to warlocks?

I tested my 5/3/53 spec in three heroics. I first went to Slave Pens and Underbog with a group of fairly low DPSers from my guild, and was number one on DPS by a big margin. I then went to Heroic Shattered Halls with some of the best DPSers in my guild, and I was a close third. Zero CC on all runs, and in Heroic SH, all three DPSers AoEd away.

And then I went to Zul’Aman yesterday. Name’s Sitta in the anonymous report. Even when we were sloppy, we just bruted our way through it.

I am joining the ranks of people who are disenchanted with the current state of raiding. The Zul’jin kill wasn’t satisfying at all. I couldn’t even enjoy seeing Lynx and Dragonhawk phases because everything was over so fast. I hope Matticus is right and that things will get more challenging again, because ezmode WoW is kinda boring. I am hoping for kickass delivery in WotLK and stuff that you won’t just blaze through. I heard that the Northrend 5-mans are all really easy, and that’s already a turn-off. I feel extremely powerful now, and I want to get into epic fights again. I cannot be alone with this sentiment. Maybe I am biased. The other half’s main is a warlock and she is very very unhappy. That rubs off. I don’t blame her. I loved what I saw of the new affliction tree, but if you were a dedicated high DPS destro warlock before, the changes are very disappointing.

 
On the flip side, I made out like a bandit in yesterday’s two hour ZA extravaganza. We got three chests, but had only 8 minutes left for the fourth, so we stopped rushing after the third. First chest scored me Pauldrons of Stone Resolve and third chest got me Signet of the Last Defender. Given recent changes, both pieces of gear are extremely awesome. I feel a bit guilty because the other warrior passed on both which was probably brought on by my big QQ session a couple weeks ago.

Give me your opinion, warriors and all other visitors alike. How’s life been for you since the patch? Too OP, too boring, or just right for you guys? Enlighten me.

Yes, it’s finally happened, my curse has been lifted, my crocodile tears were worth it, the loot gods were gentle with me. In a way. The beauty gods laugh at my foolishness as I am permanently forced to /chicken now.

But let’s start at the beginning of my weekend tale. Saturday we set out to mess with the animal bosses and get the first timer. At my side as off-tank was my partner, who so far had only warlocked it up in there. She’s an excellent tank though. We started plodding through trash, pulls were alright, but mobs took a long time to die. I grumbled about lack of focus fire, which is like group play 101. We had 7 minutes left on the timer when we pulled Nalorakk. However, big problem. I had assumed the other half had been here often enough to know how tanking this works, but I guess you don’t look at the specifics when your job is to pew-pew hard. So from the get-go we had positioning problems. When we finally stood correctly on top of each other, he did his first charge. Unfortunately, that was about the time he started charging someone in the raid. Not remembering that part of the fight, the druid feral charged after him, I flailed about trying to get back to them, and in all that moving around, threat wasn’t built as fast as we normally do. Long story, short end: DPS aggros Nalorakk, he one-shots a mage and a rogue, and we 8-man him for the rest of the fight. Which made this our slowest ever Nalorakk kill and no chest for us. Imagine colorful cussing. Nothing ticks me off like DPS not looking at their threatmeter or ignoring it. Gah.

Akil’zon went better than the last time, but Halazzi was problematic. We had no hunter, so the Frenzy usually ate me alive. We replaced the mage who had never recovered from her Nalorakk booboo, and got a hunter instead. I died just about the same time as Halazzi did, but that’s alright.

Afterwards we went on to Jan’alai. The soft enrage was a bit rough on our druid who is not quite at my gear level, though not bad. We decided to have me tank Jan’alai, which was a first. It’s certainly not the adrenaline pumping frustration of a pre-3.0 dragonhawk tank. I don’t know how they did it, but the two platforms were cleared in no time, despite the other half telling me she ran around like an idiot chasing dragonhawks and not really tanking much. Whatever, it worked.

This took a long time for us, all in all, DPS is really still an issue. We have a raid DPS of 3500 according to WWS, which is not that much for ZA. We called it, to continue with Hex-Lord and ZJ the next day.

Hex-Lord we needed a couple of tries. It seems impossible to keep the ogre sheeped, so we had three adds killed again (ogre, wight, dragon) and then killed Hex-Lord. I was pretty excited that he dropped my Battleworn Tuskguard. It’s so ridiculous looking, yet has such wonderful stats. I really liked the T4 hat, which I used to switch out for Eternium Greathelm for mitigation, but the Tuskguard will cover both nicely, methinks.

 
This time I barely managed to remember in time to take picture proof of the kill. The rest of the day was spent wiping on Zul’jin at 46%. This seems to be the magic mark for us, by that time most people are dead. Frustrating. In our last two tries, we got to Lynx phase, in our best try we had him at 36%. Which is progress! However, we had so much healer death in the Eagle phase, I don’t see how we could possibly survive Lynx phase with a healer down. We tried having the druid roll lifeblooms on the healers, which worked a lot better, but eventually the druid bit it. As melee, it’s super frustrating. I dual-wielded and kept sunders up for the feral druid, rogue and hunter, but you just fly around a lot, despite trying to stay away from tornadoes coming to the center. I will be happy to see this phase a lot shorter after the patch.

I had two embarrassing tank moments: first time we actually got to Lynx phase, I was just slapping the board back on, but Lynx just decided to hit me for 7.5k while I was doing so, one-shotting me as I hadn’t been at full health in the first place. The second embarrassing moment is that I was so exhausted on the last try of the day that I didn’t look at my own threat, neither did the other half who was in bear form to avoid dying from the whirlwind in phase 1, and bam, she stole aggro, and I never gained it back in that phase. So much for being proud of building threat fast. Bah!

And that’s it. I keep dreaming the dream that ZJ will be dead before Nov 13, arrrr.

Well, guys, weekends are usually crunch raid time for me, so I didn’t get around to continuing my series of posts for a while there, but I am finding time now for my final installment. Tomorrow we’re facing 12 hours maintenance on the US and Oceanic realms, likely meaning I won’t actually see this patch live tomorrow, and my European readers will face similar downtime Wednesday morning.

Yesterday I had our last raid day pre-patch, a last shot at bosses before the big change. Post-patch, everything will change. Us protection warriors, we got some amazing new stuff, as I posted about many times. Other classes got major overhauls like that as well. Raid DPS in general will go up as people get new specs. I have three DPS characters that I tested on the PTR, and all of their DPS as tested on the level 70 dummies pretty much went through the roof. With every single of the DPS classes I tested comes a new skill rotation, a completely different way to work on rotations. Most classes seem to have the mechanics that using a specific ability will refresh buff or debuff duration. As example I will name Cut to the Chase that refreshes the duration of Slice and Dice for Assassination rogues or Haunt for Affliction warlocks which refreshes Corruption on a target. So instead of using combo points to refresh SnD, you refresh SnD by using a burst damage finisher (they have been pimped as well) and affliction locks will refresh their Corruption by using a shadow damage spell that can crit. Most classes have received changes like that. Raid DPS will undeniably go up.

I think healers will likely face the biggest change in playstyle. More heals, bigger heals. Fun stuff like Bacon of Light. And yet, common healer habits have to die. The death of downranking means healers can no longer use lower rank heals to keep people up. I think stopcasting will be pretty elemental, if a target doesn’t really need that big heal you’re trying to cast. Mana conversation will be huge, as potion sickness is introduced to reduce the impact of consumables. Our chain-potting priests will have to break the habit, as soon as they can.

We have three flavors of tanks until WotLK, and all of them should be doing great on threat. DPS gets lots of fun new toys but they also have to learn how to get the biggest bang for their buck aka mana if they’re casters. Healers get new challenges to see if the lack of downranking and potions is something they’ll overcome. We get more raid-wide buffs for everyone. It’ll be a new game for all of us.

To assist with the changes, Blizzard is nerfing all raid mobs, bosses and trash alike. All of them will have 30% less health and deal 30% less physical damage. Spell damage will remain unchanged. Crushing blows are no more. This should go a long way to assist raids to still being able to kill stuff despite all the changes. Is it a real nerf? We’ll see. I have heard reports that some content can be easily 5-manned now (as in Kara) but also heard reports stating that the nerf isn’t really one but necessary for us to continue raiding until WotLK rolls around in a month.

To adjust raid planning to all the new synergies and changes RaidComp seems like an awesome tool. I’ll certainly use it.

Of course I forgot to add the most epic change of them all: your new haircut and haircolor will make all the difference, I am sure. All our undead raiders will have to have pigtails, to send raid mobs screaming!

Wishing y’all a merry patchday, not too many borked addons, and have fun exploring your new specs.

See also:

• Countdown Part 1: How you can become def-capped again
• Countdown Part 2: Abilities scaling with AP and SBV
• Countdown Part 3: The Emperor’s New Clothes, old abilities revisited
• Countdown Part 4: Brand-new toys in the protection tree

I split this up, because I tend to ramble a lot (as any regular reader knows already). So, day 1 we killed three animal bosses, but it wasn’t our best raid. Sunday we had Dragonhawk on our list, and more Hex-Lord attempts.

Dragonhawk trash was the smoothest we’ve ever done it. Druid roots went perfectly, we only got adds from one Scout, and no wipe, even in the evil pull with the trolls throwing ball for their dragonhawk. In no time we stood before Dragonhawk, and I slapped on my trusty friend, the Petrified Lichen Guard. Our first try was pretty awful, as the assigned hatcher killer fell asleep or something, and the whole platform spawned. The next two tries were a little bit rocky, and the last try was perfect. Cleared all dragonhawks, went on to kill him, with one minute to spare on the Enrage timer. I can now pat myself on the shoulder and be proud of having successfully tanked dragonhawks without a paladin tank, pre-3.0. Go me!

We cleared up to Hex-Lord, had some real problems with the pull of four mobs, had to double tank them. That was pretty rough. And then Hex-Lord himself. As adds we had the ogre, the wight, the snake and the imp. After much trial and error, we killed the ogre, wight and snake to get CC burdens away from the healers and then started DPS on Hex-Lord himself. I will not lie, it took many tries, 8 all in all, but we learned a lot from them, to respond to the various Siphon Soul effects. On try number 8, our DPS stayed alive, the healers worked their butts off, and Hex-Lord kept siphoning warrior and rogue continuously, yay for him not healing himself. Down he went! And like idiots we all excitedly ran out to turn the quest in, thinking we’d get a quest to kill Zul’jin himself, so there’s no screenshot of the firstkill. It wasn’t pretty, but it’s the kill that matters, right? In that anonymous WWS, my name got butchered to Sifr, and I ate four crushes. Sloppy!

After turning the quest in, we went back in. People repaired outside, things were a bit slow, and I got bored and opened the door. Haha. Funny moment of the day. People came back to face death and destruction, but the silly MT who opened the door lived. So, should you ever be faced with the situation of first going through the door to Zul’jin, expect millions of mobs to come running out of that door. Wussy mobs, but still. Good times.

Then we tried Zul’jin and in our first attempt learnt what happens when only the tank and a healer are standing on the platform. The next couple tries, we tried to deal with the Eagle phase and got him to 46% in our best try. We had a rogue and a hunter, but that wasn’t enough DPS to get him down to 40%. Any advice welcome.

Killing new bosses is exciting, and I met my biggest goal before the expansion: getting to see Zul’jin. Next up we’ll actually have to kill him, we’ll see how that goes. Wish us luck.

I am interrupting useful stuff about the upcoming patch with lengthy stories about personal progress. Rar!

This weekend was another Zul’Aman raid for my guild. We had a great line-up, so my hopes were high to get the first chest again on the first day and progress further on the second day. But some things don’t work out as expected. Our top DPS frost mage had computer problems so didn’t show both days. We replaced her with a warlock who’s not quite in the mage’s DPS range, but better a full raid than not going, right? We start, rush towards Bear, have pretty chaotic pulls with at least one death per pull, and basically 9-man it because the shadowpriest disconnects every single pull. One of the holy priests crashes several times. Nevertheless, we push on, get to the pull before Nalorakk, and I die pretty quickly, because I have two bear riders beating on me instead of just the one I was supposed to tank. In our next try we get the pull down, but again, 9-manned, as the shadowpriest disconnected for the umpteenth time. At that point we only have a couple minutes left on the timer, I call it, and with heavy heart I had to ask the spriest to leave. In we brought the ele shaman boyfriend of one of our girls, who supposedly pulls 650 DPS, which did not quite turn out that way. At least he was enthusiastic, that matters for something.

On Nalorakk I usually tank bear phase, and I still find this boss ridiculously easy to tank. Like for real, this is just easy. And what does he drop? Jungle Stompers. These boots are huge, considering the 3.0 warrior changes, and considering I am sporting Boots of Elusion, which will not be re-itemized for 3.0. I never got the boots from Chess, so the Jungle Stompers are really a big deal for me. You can see where this story is going, right? Yup, right. I lost the roll to the other prot warrior, the one who was wearing the Chess boots. She actually whispered to me I could have them if I really wanted them, but I didn’t want to seem like a sore loser, especially as she used her bonus points to roll on them (we use a bonus point system for rolls that rewards attendance and contributions to the raid bank). Here you can tell that a girl is writing this blog, because I actually burst into RL tears from sheer frustration and disappointment. I really pour a lot of myself into our raids, and a pat on the shoulder and thanks in form of the first piece of tanking loot to ever drop for us in ZA would have been great. ZA is only on our raid calendar twice more, and given the drop tables, I might never see those boots again. And now I feel totally silly afterwards that I did. Silly loot, what it does to people, I say!

So that’s my sob story for the day, I seem to have one of those every weekend now. I couldn’t talk on Vent for a while on the way over to Eagle, because I had to blow my nose and stuff. We actually wiped in the gauntlet the first time, on the Tempest pull, tank death and it was over. Second try went a lot better. We then tried to down Eagle and I still really don’t know why we wipe on this fight so much. I don’t get it. Several times we had tank death, several times we had people too slow with collapsing for the storm. Then the gauntlet respawned and we had to do it again. Then we finally got him down and he dropped a paladin chestpiece. Our invisible paladin was happy and then cried when we sharded the piece.

On to Lynx. The trash I always find kinda relaxing and fun, no big deal. Smooth progress, in we go, and Halazzi is one-shot. How can we wipe so many times on Eagle and just one-shot Lynx? You tell me. Invisible paladin rejoiced again as the plate shoulders dropped. Again.

We usually call it after Lynx, but I am hoping that for our next raid, we can actually kill Eagle in under 5 tries and actually do all animal bosses that day. For realz.

I will continue this ‘exciting’ report of our ZA raid with a follow-up post later today, and there will be no loot sob story this time, promised. That doesn’t mean that I got anything, because it was invisible paladin weekend! Does tanking plate really exist in ZA? I have lost faith.

The idea of a WoW blog originally sprang from me spamming my personal blog every Monday with tales of my weekends in WoW. As a German player on American servers that’s when I have it going on, with instances, etc. Everyone who comes here should get used to me rambling on Mondays.

This last Saturday, I led another Gruul and Magtheridon raid, with girls from my guild, plus friends from our guild alliance. I wasn’t anywhere as nervous as I was the first time round, but I can safely say I prefer the ease of 10-man raids. For 25-man raids, there are obstacles to smooth experiences. People not showing up. People spamming you with whispers for invites. Assigning everyone into the groups they want to be in for best buffage. I made the mistake of inviting early and then someone I had counted on and who needed Mags for the Champion title suddenly not filling in, and the person I had squeezed in refusing to leave, because of wanting a specific piece of loot. My blood pressure is rising just reading it again, aargh. So, hats off to those of you who regularly lead 25-man raids, you are stronger people than me.

We had 16 people from my guild, 9 from the guild alliance, and we started about 15 minutes after official raid start time, which I guess is alright for big raid leader noob that I am. It helped that everyone was reaaaally on time and well prepared.

As for the raid, it went smooth, baby, smooth. I don’t know, I was a bit alarmed, because I had heard that our allied guild had tried Magtheridon twice recently and always had to call it because people just weren’t focused enough. In we went to HKM, where we promptly wiped, because Krosh ran over to where I wanted to pick up Maulgar, and I promptly died after a blast wave and two hits by Maulgar himself. We wiped it, went in again, I nudged hunters to put Misdirect on during the countdown, not afterwards (duh!) and we killed Maulgar and his chumps. Now let me introduce you to someone special in my life: Skirting. She’s that handsome druid over there, and she’s played by my partner. See the sparkly shoulders she’s sporting? /facepalm

It had been my goal to get the T4 shoulders. I won them last time fair and square but gave the token to my crappily-geared off-tank. This time Skirting was the off-tank, only one Defender token dropped, and I lost the roll. There’s nothing more bitter than losing the roll on something you covet so much to a person you love, heh! She hearthed to Shattrath, grabbed new shoulders, enchant and gems, and then we went in and one-shot Gruul. It was a really flawless kill, we only had one death in the raid, and that was at about 5% on him. I think druids do have an easier time as off-tank on Gruul. She took all Hurtful Strikes but two, for considerably less damage than our warrior tank last time. Of course we also killed him faster, in 11 growths. No ground-breaking record, but not bad at all.

We moved on to Magtheridon, swapping two hunters for a rogue and a moonkin, and went on to one-shot him as well. I have no idea what was different from our allied guild’s raids, but the channelers went down nice and easy, the infernals were mostly under control, and despite later seeing that I took some heavy hits (worst for 10k), my health never seemed to be down much. I had the help of an experienced guy from the other guild to call out cube clicking, because while tanking Mags I have this tunnel view of him and my action bar. I ended up rage-starved quite a lot which was annoying, but other than that, Magtheridon is as tank and spank as it gets, to the point of boring.

Two hour raid, two 25-man raid bosses down, and feeling like an accomplished raid leader, that was my weekend. Now I am trying to figure out if it’s worth running Gruul one more time, for the blasted shoulders, or to pray for the shoulders from the first chest in Zul’Aman. We’ll see if I can lay my greedy hands on them this coming ZA.

While I am still woefully behind on my crafting goals for the alts, this past weekend wasn’t bad at all. On Saturday, we managed to beat the first timer in Zul’Aman, finally, killing Bear with a minute to spare. Much cheering, I was really happy. I will say that having a mage along really helped with CC on the last pull before the boss. I was a bit worried about the Eagle gauntlet, as we didn’t have our usual holy paladin along, but we managed to rush through without too many difficulties. Eagle himself took three tries again. We had some bad luck with DPS dying early and such. Lynx trash is pretty easy IMHO, and I kinda really enjoy the Lynx fight, despite the spikey damage. We’re pretty good at it now too.

I will say though that ZA seems to hate tanks, at least our raid IDs do. We have yet to see a single piece of plate dropping. I had my hopes up on Bear again for the Jungle Stompers or even the shoulders from the chest, but nooo, Bear dropped Fury, and some caster cloak was in the chest.

On Sunday, we did our day two of ZA, which in the past had been filled with nothing but Dragonhawk attempts. I have to admit I copped out on Dragonhawk tanking. Our holy paladin went Retribution with the rest of the points in protection, and she helped me with tanking the dragonhawks. In fact, she had most of them, I only picked up stragglers. It worked, but it tastes a little bit like defeat to me. Just a little bit. I am looking forward to trying again in 3.0 to tank those birdies and then hold them myself, rar.

We then tried Hex-Lord a couple times, our best attempt being 45% or so. It looked promising, but it also looked really hard. We had imp, wight, blood elf priest and dragonkin adds, and I think I didn’t have them handled the right way. We DPSd the imp, dragonkin was hibernated then killed second, and last was the wight, shackled and then killed. We actually only managed to start DPS on Malacrass once, as it took a while to kill the adds and respond to Malacrass Soul-Drain accordingly. Holy crap, Consecrate sucks, doesn’t it? Opinions seem to differ how to handle the adds, so now I will be hunting for strategies for a while, to see how T4+badges gear equipped groups can get him down. I am proud of my girls, and I am positive we will pay a visit to Zul’jin before Nov 13. Go us!

With the pre-Wrath patch right around the corner, sounds like the raiding doom and gloom predictions are starting. Aylii over at World of Matticus has posted a summary why she believes the patch will end raiding as we currently know it.

While I don’t necessarily agree with some of the points, I do of course worry what this will mean for warrior threat, and that is indeed looking dire. With a piddly attack power of under 700 in my tanking gear, which has virtually no strength, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with DPS anymore. I guess it’s spotlight for the feral druids until we can get some Northrend gear. Gah. However, I also believe that Blizzard will be aware of this fact. The prot warrior revision isn’t in the beta yet. I shall continue to have faith.

What I am also concerned about is that right as my guild is planning to raid a little bit more often, we might be running out of time. I have bosses left to kill in Zul’Aman still, yo.