Tank Hard!

I had finally gotten on board the Effective Health Bandwagon. Avoidance is great and all but as long as you have a balanced set of gear then you have enough avoidance already so you might as well gem and enchant for pure stamina. I still was a little queasy when I would see people eschewing balanced gear for something with nothing but stamina and some sockets but I got over it. ‘So what if they are lacking avoidance, they have enough stamina to do just fine’, I would tell myself. I was reluctant to get on the bandwagon in the first place because making gear choices simply based on which item has more stamina is boring and simply doesn’t do justice to tanking - one of the most complex roles in the raid. But, reluctant or not, I jumped on the bandwagon.

As I write this I am listening on vent to my guild doing Felmyst.  For the MT we use a druid.  Felmyst doesn’t have the same you-die-now bursts like Brutallus but he doesn’t mess around on tank damage either.  He is only on the ground and hitting the tank in phase 1.  In phase 2 he flies up in the air the fun really starts.  He targets a random person with a green beam that the person has to kite for a couple seconds and it leaves a green trail.  The trail will do a boatload of damage to anyone who stands in it but it also spawns a whole bunch of skeletons.  Think Nightbane on crack.  He does two green beams and each one spawns about 10 skeletons that hit for 800-1000 on plate.  It is basically a pally tank wet dream.  But for the last two nights we have been doing it our pally tank couldn’t be online for the first hour of raid so we had me and two druids trying to pick up all the skellies.  It wasn’t too bad once we got the hang of it but the learning curve was steep.  So the moral of the story is that it took three non pally tanks to do the job of a single pally tank.  Our pally eventually logged on tonight so me and the other druid got subbed out and we should get a kill tonight.

Edit: Got her.

“Wow, my shield is broken, I wonder when that happened”

- Our pally tank right after the boss died.

See that title there?  Yeah, its got two meanings.  I am tricksy like that. 

I stopped raiding a while back because I was going to join the Air Force (although I have more recently decided to do Navy instead).  It turns out that the application process for an officer takes a looooong time which leaves me able to raid.  I knew it would look awfully shady to my old guild if I stopped raiding while we were farming BT/Hyjal ad naseum and all of a sudden now that Sunwell was out I could raid again.  I also wasn’t crazy about the atmosphere in the guild, it felt stagnant and even if my coming back to raiding didn’t look shady, I would not have wanted to raid there anyway.  So I started looking elsewhere.  Which brought me to new and exciting place #1, a server called Moonrunner.

The last thing I wanted to do was go backward in progression so I made sure to hook up with progression raiding guild which brings me to new and exciting place #2, Sunwell Plateau (yes, I had to google ‘plateau’ to spell it correctly).

A screenshot of the fun that Sunwell brings -

For anybody keeping score at home, that is 52k damage in 2 seconds.  Needless to say, I died.  And here’s the rub: thats not a totally freak occurence, either me or the other tank took ridiculous bursts like that a couple times.  But at the end of the day he died (second kill for the guild, first for me) and I got me a new neck piece - http://wowhead.com/?item=34178

Archimonde is requires near perfect play from 25 people for 7-10 minutes and is very harsh if you screw it up but it is possible to recover from a few mistakes. Once your guild is able to kill everything leading up to Illidan, he really isn’t that hard. Pre 2.1 Gruul was very hard but he was killable once you got the hang of it. Kael’thas is a pure execution fight so once you get your strategy worked out he is actually very easy. Prior to the 2.1 patch Vashj did random mind controls on people, including the tank, and the nagas had 360 degree cleaves and I think you can count the number of guilds that killed pre-2.1 Vashj on one hand. But since I never did that version of the fight I am going to disqualify it. The current version of Vashj is a controlled dps race which is pretty easy once you get a feel for it.

So, if none of those fights are the hardest in TBC, which one is?

Well, I am glad that I pretended that you asked me that. The hardest fight in The Burning Crusade is Shade of Aran.

I was first learning this fight almost a year ago and back then nobody had any gear from arenas and nobody had much if any badge of justice gear. Some people might have had 1 or 2 epics from heroics and one or two from early karazhan, but for the most part, we were all wearing dungeon blues.

Nobody had enough HP to live through a flame wreath explosion which did 6-7k damage instead of the 3-4k it does now. And flame wreath back then was a lot more sensitive. Hunter pets, warlock demons and priest shadowfiends would all cause an explosion if they crossed a flame wreath. Pallies using divine shield and mages using ice block would cause an explosion. A destruction warlock with nether protection would cause an explosion. Jumping up and down would cause an explosion.

If he was allowed to sheep and pyroblast, most people didn’t have enough HP to survive it so interrupts had to be perfect. The summoned elementals had too much HP to kill them in a reasonable amount of time so you had to banish and fear them until they despawned. If you killed the boss before the elementals despawned, they would stick and could still wipe you. And of course the trash was on a 45 minute respawn so you would go up, wipe a couple times and then you had to reclear a HUGE amount of trash before you could practice on the boss again (which was one of the things that made Kael’thas so hard before his trash got nerfed).

These days there are many parallel progression paths so you can overgear some encounters before you even get to them. With the abundance of “welfare” epics nobody really runs into the wall boss of Karazhan anymore. Sure you may struggle a bit with the fight but its just a matter of people figuring out “oh, you were serious when you said ‘don’t move during flame wreath’” and then he will go down. Back in the day guilds would be stuck for weeks on Shade of Aran. My guild at the time stopped raiding Karazhan all together and went and farmed heroics. And I don’t mean just doing underbog and mech for badges, there was hardly any badge gear at the time - trinket, neck, cloak, offhand - so we were actually running the instances to get the boss drops. And back then heroics were hard. I think there has been a nerf to heroics in every single patch. Back then pulling aggro meant a wipe. CC breaking early meant a wipe. Healer sneezed at the wrong moment meant a wipe.

There are some hard fights in TBC, but honestly, the original version of Shade of Aran while wearing dungeon blues is probably the most challenging thing I have done.

In my day we walked to school, uphill both ways, in 2 feet of snow, bare foot, and we like it!

I have copied my character over to the PVE-US ptr and my character’s name is Lake if anybody wants to say hello.