Return to Reaver

Last night Mal Katai took another stab at Tempest Keep : The Eye.

I was running around like made trying to get my new chest and helm enchanted and gemmed up in time for the Raid. I got everything done except getting the Earthstorm Diamond made. Expensive Primal Waters are FTL.

(Big Thank you to the two generous people who donated the Primal Waters for my Diamond).

I was really glad to be back in TK. Last time I forgot to get a screenshot of Al'lar.

I can't wait til we can engage this guy. I think Rob and Lisa are being really smart in keeping us focused on one boss at a time, but I keep wondering why we've skipped Magtheridon completely.

Anywho. We burned through the trash pulls much faster this time. We were assigning roles for healers, tanks, etc.There was that awkward silence on the first pull where we had 3 tanks and 2 targets that need to be tanked.

I assigned myself to one target and Lan to other. I told Raydz I'd have him OT on the next pull. It was during that next pull. Then something happened during the early trash pulls that I have to comment on. It wasn't planned by me or any of the Officers.

As the 3rd tank, on a 2 tank pull, you have a little time to look around, assess the situation, rely information. DPS is usually focused on their targets, and Healers are focused are their targets. I started calling out DPS targets, moving people around, and encouraging heals. Basically, I took over the raid.

Realizing what I was doing, I quickly sent a tell to the other Officers. Bascially telling them to shut me up if they thought I was overstepping my bounds. They didnt'. We kept on rolling.

I was partically happy with the way the bird packs went. We employed a strategy of lining the hallway with traps. I pulled with Avengers Shield and the birds hit the traps. Lan and Raydz picked up the Falconers and the Mages marked and sheeped the birds. I tanked any birds that weren't taken care of. It worked very well.

We cleared all the trash and were able to make several attempts on Void Reaver. With my new chest, I'm can get up to nearly 500 raid buffed Spell Damage. It's almost not fair to the other tanks, but they did a great job keeping aggro.

Our problem seems to be moving away from the Orbs. The Healer group came up with a new idea on how to handle that and I believe it will be very helpful next time we do it.

A quick word about my respec.

My miss % went up from last week Void Reaver attempt, and that makes me a sad panda. You can't "see" the 3% crit so most don't even know its there. I'm strongly considering dropping the 3% crit talent and going back to my old 0/49/12, but still swapping Reckoning for Combat Expertise.

So it's look like I'll have had a diffenent spec everytime we fought Void Reaver. Rob would be proud.