Flamebender and Tanking
I noticed that one of our regular tanks wasn't online yet. When we reached start time, he was still no where to be seen. We had our full group ready to go except for this one player. I thought about how I should handle it. I feel like I handled myself poorly in Dominion and I wanted to be more mature and generally handle myself better this time around. The night of my interview with the Dirty Casuals, I didn't know voices yet and since I was multitasking in game I didn't have Team Speak up to see who was talking, I didn't know if our raid leader had been part of that interview where they asked me what I wanted to do for an offset and I got to express my preference for Prot over Holy (or Ret to be honest).
I decided to whisper the raid leader what my Tanking gear iLevel was (655) and told him I was ready if they needed me. I figured that was the best way of making myself available without it seemingly like I was politicking for a tank spot. He could opt to use me or decide to wait or decide to go with someone else. At least he knew I was an option.
After a few more minutes, the raid leader says we'll start clearing trash and asks me to switch to my Prot spec. We proceeded to clear trash with little difficulty. I let the other usual main tank Warrior initiate pulls and grabbed what I could.
We cleared all the way up to Flamebender and started assessing the strategy when the other main tank logged on. We didn't have a Warlock in the group so he started flying out to Iron Docks. The raid leader asked if any of the three us would prefer to go DPS for the night. When they didn't express an interest in going DPS I went back to Ret. These two are the regular main tanks for the raid. It was fun to put the shield back on again and I felt like I helped out the raid by getting the trash cleared while we waited for the second main tank to log on.
Now it was time to get down to killing Internet Orcs.
There's a fiery theme to Blackrock Foundry and Flamebender, as her name might imply, keeps up with that theme well. The fight seems fairly straight forward. Flamebender shoots fire trails out that hurt, and there's a meteor type mechanic that ranged players handle by running to melee. The big thing seems to be the Cinder Wolves. He summons two of them. One fixates on a target and the other get big and breathes fire. The big guy needs a tank and the little guy needs to be kited. After a while the two Wolves trade roles and they both have to die before Flamebender goes into his AoE mode.
We made several solid attempts but the Cinder Wolves weren't dying fast enough. Originally, we only had Ranged on the wolves thinking melee would lose too much chasing them around. We decided to have melee work on the wolf being tanked and Ranged to work on the one being kited. That helped but we were still killing the wolves with seconds to spare before the AoE phase.
Flamebender prevailed this night, but as Hans'gar and Franz'gor might say, we'll be back!
I decided to whisper the raid leader what my Tanking gear iLevel was (655) and told him I was ready if they needed me. I figured that was the best way of making myself available without it seemingly like I was politicking for a tank spot. He could opt to use me or decide to wait or decide to go with someone else. At least he knew I was an option.
After a few more minutes, the raid leader says we'll start clearing trash and asks me to switch to my Prot spec. We proceeded to clear trash with little difficulty. I let the other usual main tank Warrior initiate pulls and grabbed what I could.
We cleared all the way up to Flamebender and started assessing the strategy when the other main tank logged on. We didn't have a Warlock in the group so he started flying out to Iron Docks. The raid leader asked if any of the three us would prefer to go DPS for the night. When they didn't express an interest in going DPS I went back to Ret. These two are the regular main tanks for the raid. It was fun to put the shield back on again and I felt like I helped out the raid by getting the trash cleared while we waited for the second main tank to log on.
Now it was time to get down to killing Internet Orcs.
There's a fiery theme to Blackrock Foundry and Flamebender, as her name might imply, keeps up with that theme well. The fight seems fairly straight forward. Flamebender shoots fire trails out that hurt, and there's a meteor type mechanic that ranged players handle by running to melee. The big thing seems to be the Cinder Wolves. He summons two of them. One fixates on a target and the other get big and breathes fire. The big guy needs a tank and the little guy needs to be kited. After a while the two Wolves trade roles and they both have to die before Flamebender goes into his AoE mode.
We made several solid attempts but the Cinder Wolves weren't dying fast enough. Originally, we only had Ranged on the wolves thinking melee would lose too much chasing them around. We decided to have melee work on the wolf being tanked and Ranged to work on the one being kited. That helped but we were still killing the wolves with seconds to spare before the AoE phase.
Flamebender prevailed this night, but as Hans'gar and Franz'gor might say, we'll be back!
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