Not So Fast There, Pilgrim

The plan as usual was a good one. Return to SSC, kill Hydross again and proceed to Lurker. Good plan.

The execution left a little bit to be desired. First problem, I was late. I had a meeting at 6:30pm and I told the Raid Leader I wouldn't be online at 7:30pm when the invites went out. I figured I'd be home at 8:00pm at the latest.

Sorry, wrong answer. Thanks for playing, we've got some lovely parting gifts for you.

I roll in the house at 8:30pm. Ugh. I log in expecting to find them in SSC working on Lurker and me begging for a spot.

I get an invite as soon as I log in.

We form up the Raid and set off to do battle with the Duke, Duke, Duke,.... Duke of Currents......Duke, Duke. (my apologies to Gene Chandler).

We get one attempt in before we start losing people. This one has to go, so we get a replacement. Then the next one has to go. This leads to long breaks in between attempts as we have to stop, and summon, and get the raid going again.

We've only killed Hydross one time. He's not going from new kill to farm quite as fast as Mag. For Magtheridon, you basically need 10 people to get their role right, and even then you can have someone cover is a cube is not manned at the critical moment. With Hydross, a mistake by any of the 25 members of the Raid can doom your attempt.

We made 4 or 5 attempts on Hydross. The closest we got was around 19%. Coming out of a transition, I died. One of the druids Battlerezed me, but the healers were trying to get me back up and heal Brindall our Nature tank.

Thinking back on it after the fact, I should have never let myself get killed. This highlights to me one of the areas I need to work on as a tank. Panic buttons.

I can't tell you how many times I've died and looked at my screen only to see my Potion or my Healthstone or the Pocketwatch not on cooldown. And of course, there is the only real Panic Button that I have, Lay On Hands.

Lay On Hands is a bear because it has such a long cooldown, but we typically raid for 3 or 4 hours. That's 3 or 4 uses I should be getting out of Lay On Hands that I'm not.

I think part of this comes from the leveling up experience as a Paladin versus a Warrior.

When I got into trouble on my Paladin, I had an array of options: Heal, Bubble, Stun and Heal, etc. Each and every one of those options either doesn't work when I'm tanking or will do more harm than good.

Then I think about leveling up my Warrior (who is all of Level 33). When I get in trouble on him, I'm looking for consumables because that's all I've got. I'm much quicker to quaff a Health Pot on him because if I don't, I'm going to die.

So I'm really going to work on being more proactive in using my consumables and cooldowns. My UI has an audible Low Health and Low Mana warning. The moment I hear that, I'm going for cooldowns.

Pocketwatch, Healthstone, Health Pot, Lay On Hands.

Did I miss anything?