Tanking Magtheridon


Magtheridon has been defeated by my Guild, Mal Katai. I was given the privilege and responsibility of being Main Tank for this fight.

I started the fight out in my max Effective Health gear. All the stamina, block value and armor I could muster. This was my paper doll before our first pull. After a couple of attempts, I decided to make one change.
I swapped out my Battlescar for the Boots of Elusion. My dodge had been under 20%, but with this change, I was able to bump it up to almost 22%. It only cost me about 700hp.

Fully buffed, I was sitting at 21k hit points. We had 5 Paladins in the raid so I was able to get everything except Salvation which I didn't want anyway.

We only had one wipe that I can fully attribute to my class being Paladin rather than Warrior. Holy Shield has a cooldown equal to its duration. That means that even though I'm spamming my Holy Shield button, there is a time equal to my latency (300ms to 500ms) where I am crushable. Mag happened to nail me during one of those windows for an 11k Crush. The healers reacted by queuing up big heals but I was dead before they could land.

The first thing I had to figure out was how I was going to get the Commanding Shout buff. The Warrior in my group was on Channeler#4. I was on Channeler#1. After Channeler#1 was dead, I moved with the DPS to Channeler#2 just long enough to get my Judgement of the Crusader (3% crit) on him. Then I started looking around for Infernals while keeping my eye on the Phase 2 timer.

Basically, I would try to aggro an infernal from range until it could be feared, trapped, or banished.

With 30 seconds to go on the timer, I moved over to Channeler#4 and alerted Raydz that I was in range. He would buff me with Commanding Shout, while tanking his mob, and I went and parked myself under Magtheridon.

With 5 seconds to go on the timer, I would activate Holy Shield, then Consecrate. This way Consecrate would be ticking as soon as Mag was active. Once I got Mag's attention, I would move him to the tanking spot.

We tanked him in between where Channeler#1 and #2 had been. The danger in tanking him near a wall is that you risk your clicker getting bounced into a cleave. If you tank him in the center you run the risk of the tank getting bounced around and Mag cleaving all your melee dps.

The cleave hits me for around 9k, I can't imagine what it would hit the leather users for.

Once I had him positioned, I would back myself up into a wall everytime he did his ground shake, then walk back out once it was over. Other than that wrinkle, it was fairly simple to tank. I just kept up my threat rotation. The fight was much more about whether or not the clickers would stop the blastwave.

The part of the fight that I was most concerned about was the 30% Cave In. At 30%, Mag does a Cave In that hits the entire raid for 6k and stuns everyone. Your healers are stunned and even when they come out, everyone in the raid needs heals.
Most every strat calls for the use of Shield Wall and Last Stand to survive this part. Being a Paladin, I have a hard time finding these abilities on my hot bar.

So what to do. We followed the strat that called for dps to stop at 32% to handle the next blastwave. As soon as that blastwave was done, I popped an Ironshield pot. Shield Wall it is not, but it was still a nice damage reduction. I carefully watched Mag's health. As he hit 30%, I activated my Dawnstone Crab (dodge trinket), and a Nightmare Seed. Not exactly Last Stand, but a decent temporary Hit Point boost. I also used Stoneform which gives extra armor. I figured it couldn't hurt.

We got through the 30% transition and I was never in any real danger of dying.

Comments

Matticus said…
Grats on the Mag kill! Now would you say it's easier or harder then Gruul? :S
Tim Pullin said…
Sorry for the noob questions, but what exatcly is your aggro rotation? What seal do you keep on the boss?

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