Know Thyself

Last night I logged in and found out we were doing a Gruul and Mag run. I did the best I could to get my UI and Addons working.
I got summoned into Gruul's Lair and we started working on trash. We get to HKM and I am told by our Raid Leader that I will be tanking HKM himself. It turns out our regular HKM Tank (Warrior) was already in the new 5 man, and really wanted to finish it. No worries, this is farm.
Now on my first run with Mal Katai, I was on Blindeye, then they moved me to Olm and now I get a shot at HKM himself.
So we pull. HKM goes running off and takes out a healer before I can get a Judgement on him. The pull is a mess and we wipe.
If I Shield Toss, I'll hit Blindeye and Olm and put a daze effect on Blindeye. All of those would be bad things.
Next pull, I start running as our Mage Tank gets the countdown to 2. I grab HKM flawlessly and begin walking him over to the tank spot. His Mighty Blow hits really hard. I went down like a sack of potatoes.
This happens two more times. I've got 18k armor and over 20k Health. I KNOW I can handle this.
Grim Reaper wasn't working. Eavesdrop wasn't working. I start scrolling through the new combat log which zoomed about 70 events past my window in about a half second.
Once it calmed down, I noticed that I was taking Crushing Blows. WTH? I've been Uncrushable for months and I KNOW he's not burning through 8 Holy Shield charges in 10 seconds.
I pull up Tankpoints and go through the calculator. Sure enough, I'm 4% Crushable. I start looking at my gear. Everything looked okay. Wait a minute, WHY is my Consecration Libram EQUIPPED?!?!
Somehow my Itemrack icons were messed up. I told it to put me in my Boss set and I got my Heroic set (very similar except for Trinkets and Rings). I tried my Solo set and it tried to put me in my Ret set. I hit PVP Healer and got PVE Healer gear.
I kept clicking through my 9 gear sets until I got the right gear for Boss tanking. Itemrack had it under Heroic set.
We pull again. This time my healers had no trouble keeping me up, and HKM went down.
You know what was really good. 250g and 2 Badges. That worked out to 10g per raider.
We move on to Mr. Gruul himself.
The Raid Leader opted to have Trelic, our incredible Feral Druid Main Tank Gruul while I offtanked the Hurtful Strike.
I have never successfully Main Tank Gruul. I always seem to catch a bad silence RIGHT when I need to refresh Holy Shield, and I take a Crush at the same time my healers are silenced. That is generally a bad combination. Throw in a Cave In and it can be wipe city.
As an added bonus, the new Omen wasn't working. I could only see my threat and no one else's.
We pull Gruul. Our DPS is just sick. Once upon a time, we used to be really concerned if he wasn't at 50% life when he hit Growth 8. Last night, he was dead at Growth 9. Another 10g and 3 more Badges, thank you very much.
I lost the roll on my T4 pants. There are a couple of fights (Void Reaver and Solarian, I'm looking at you) where I'd really love to have my 4 piece Tier 4 bonus working. I'd prefer the chest off Mag, but I couldn't be guaranteed it would drop. Oh well, there's always next week.
After Gruul, we decided to check out the new Magtheridon. He's definitely been nerfed.
So just what exactly have they done to ole Mag?
First of all, the Channelers spawn less infernals and you have an additional class (Paladins) who can CC them. Paladins can now fear Demons as well as Undead. There were several points where I was looking around for a loose Infernal only to find none were up.
The other big change is that the debuff you get from cube clicking has been reduced in duration. What this means is that you only need 1 set of Cube Clickers. Basically those 5 people can dedicate themselves to Cube Clicking. Sure, autoshoot or throw a Frostbolt, but your JOB for that fight is to click cubes, and it's the most important job in the whole raid.
I main tanked him again. With Doreaellian (Priest), Celoria (Druid), and Mowbray (Paladin) healing, it was literally impossible for Mag to kill me.
Mag dropped on our second attempt. Our first was doomed when one of the Cube Clickers got confused and went to the wrong cube.
This is part of what I love about MK. The person wasn't yelled at, threatened, or penalized in any way (50 DKP MINUS!). The general attitude was more a "Please don't make that mistake again." The person who had made the mistake was harder on himself than anyone else in the raid.
Mistakes happen, people learn.
This contrasts with a guild on our server who gkicked a hunter for pulling aggro on a boss during an Illidan progression attempt.
We killed Mag on our next attempt.
What a loot piƱata he was. 3 chest tokens. Another 10g and 3 badges. 3 Epic gems, 2 Rare. And a 20 slot bag.
We begin to divy up the loot when everyone in the raid disconnects. It turns out the instance server died. Our GM, Dora, is trying to get the loot back so we can give it out. If not we'll be back again next week to kill his sorry butt again.
I couldn't log into Honors the rest of the night. Eventually a GM will have to move him to Shat or IF or something.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Great post, I love reading about raiding nights. What went right/wrong, what dropped ect.. I'm excited to do Gruul/Mag for the increase in loot. Again, great post keep em coming.
Superconqui said…
I think that the patch has made it so that the shield toss does not hit mobs that are cc'ed.... I could be wrong though.

Popular posts from this blog

Cataclysm Profession Bonuses

Raid Comp Tool

Back To Basics: The 969 Paladin Threat Rotation