Gruul is Merciless

After debating with myself for a couple days I decided to go ahead and purchase my Gavel, despite the face that the 2nd boss in Zul Aman drops a similar Mace.

I can use the Gavel now, and the Zul'Aman mace is a drop, which Shadow Priest, Elemental Shamans, and Balance Druids would also want to roll for. So it would have to drop and I'd have to win it.

I was a little short on Large Prismatic Shards, so I had to buy a couple off the AH. Man are those suckers expensive, 19g a piece. I bought the shards and had my ole buddy, Regolos slap a +40 spell damage enchant on it.

Faceeraser and Haust started to put together a Heroic Slave Pens run. We were just missing a healer, and about to go to the LFG channel when Dora announced we were headed for Gruul's. It took the better part of an hour to get the raid group together, and ready to go.

I wanted to see what my new mace could do. So on the first pull, I let fly with Avenger's Shield, hitting my mob and one of the other offtanks mobs. Tralic taunted him off, but as soon as the taunt debuff wore off, his mob was back to hating me. Unfortunately with two big ole Ogres using me a punching bag I couldn't manage to stay upright despite the best efforts of my healers. Fortunately, it was not a wipe. I didn't use Avenger's Shield on a trash mob pack again.

But I did manage to put out some really nice TPS. At one point, I broke 4 digit TPS, one a regular Mob (no exorcism). I was rather happy with myself.

We get to the big guy. Tralic (Feral Druid) was going to be offtanking, Lanorah (Warrior) would be Main Tank. I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be on one of the Tank positions, but I've got to know that I won't be tanking every time out. We have a tank corps and all of us need time and experience tanking different encounters. This is not only to build our own skill set, but also to have the DPS and Healers build confidence with every tank in the Corps.

By having a strong Tank Corps we will help to combat burnout of any of the tanks, and we are much more flexible in our raids. We don't have to call the raid is Player X can't come. Still, Tanking is what I doing most in the game, especially Raid Tanking.

I was really excited to see my buffed Hit Points over 17k. The Grull fight just seems to require things like Shield Wall and Last Stand. Hopefully, I'll get my turn tanking him at some point, even though, he's a rough fight for a Paladin. He's plays to our weaknesses, and not our strengths.

We made several attempts at Gruul. I made sure to keep up Judgement of Light, even though Crusader would have helped my threat more. In 2.3, I'll be able to get the 3% Raid Crit added to my Crusader, so it will be a better Judgement for everyone. I put up Light to act as a baby HoT for our Tanks and Melee, then I just did as much DPS as I could and tried to get as much threat as I could.

As a dedicated offtank, I always had the mana for my threat rotation, but as a 3rd tank/dps, I wasn't taking enough damage to keep my mana up. In addition, I was running out of the Ground Slams, instead of staying in, so I lost major time building threat. Also, when I would get back to Grull, I had to rejudge Light.

Our best attempt, we got him down to 4%. It was heartbreaking and exciting all at the same time. On more than one attempt, our Main Tank died, and our OT stepped up to fill the MT role. That meant I needed to ramp up quickly to the OT role. Usually that took long.

As I looked over the WWS Log, it seems that the Reverberation Silence effect is usually what killed our tanks. Our healers would get silenced, and then Gruul would be 2 or even 3 hits on the tank. The tank would only have HoTs on him.

I was in full tank this time, instead of my Offtank set. With my new mace, I had even more spell damage in this set than I had in my Offtank set previously, and I'd be more survivable. (Please disregard the PVP trinket shown in this picture, I had it equipped to deal with the trash fear and wasn't wearing it for Gruul).

Maybe what we should do is have the tank can blow Shield Wall for the first Reverb, then have the Paladins set up a bubble rotation. Each can bubble out of Reverb and help heal the tank until the other healers can heal again.

Depending on where they decide to use me, I'm going to do everything I can to be higher on threat. Staying in during the Ground Slams and running Crusader instead of Light. The other problem I was having was Seal of Vengeance. Its really nice for threat, but sometimes, getting that thing to land the DoT was just painful. I'll probably go back to Seal of Righteousness.