So, earlier in the week I regaled you with a stirring story of my incredible noobness in tanking 10 man (also known as normal) Vault of Archavon for the very first time.
You were all very kind and considerate, and generous in not calling me out for a lack of study prior to going into a raid. For that I thank you.
In fact, I had an awesome email from Ribeye to clue me in that he had a comprehensive and thorough walkthrough strategy guide for each fight in Naxxramas on his website, and hoped that it would help my planning out.
A gentle way of saying “next time, research first, THEN fight, noob”, and I thank you. Really nice clear descriptions of the fights, too.
Now, what was it I was supposed to do…
Oh yeah! You said to just leap in and try shit out, right?
Might as well have, that’s what happened last night.
The patch went live, and I went to Wintergrasp to try and get some Wintergrasp Marks of Honor, since I need 40 to buy the new must-have bear tanking helm (for my level of progression).
Well, Wintergrasp was bugged, as everyone knows, and was crashing Northrend everytime a game ended. Which was every 15 minutes, about, on my server.
The thing was, about 30 minutes after I started playing, the crashes stopped, with Alliance in control.. and a 25 man Vault of Archavon formed.
Somehow, I ended up as one of four tanks… three of us were feral bears, the other was a warrior.
Now, for the record, can I just mention how weird it feels saying that out of 25 people in a pugged raid, there were four tanks… and three were feral druids?
How drastically have things changed since the original pre-BC WoW, where out of four tanks raid-ready, three are feral bears to ONE warrior?
And of course two of those feral druids can switch to kitty for DPS while one bear and the warrior can tank and offtank.
We took Archavon on three times. The first two were wipes, we hit the enrage timer hard each time.
Each time, we used a different combination of tanks.
I was main tank and the warrior was offtank for the last successful run, but make no mistake; I didn’t do a damn thing different than either of the other feral bears on the run.
Each time, the raid leader assigned a tank, and started the run, and I stopped the run to make it clear we also needed to know who was offtank.
Why.. WHY does this have to be something that requires a reminder? Do people think that a main tank is all that’s important? What do you think happens when the main tank gets lunged? Do you really want the tanking job to fall on that hunter and his mighty pet ‘fluffy’?
Anyway, we had two feral tanks the first try (I was offtank), and then after the wipe, blame flew freely on the main tank, unjustified I felt, a new feral tank was set as main (with me as offtank again), we went again, wiped, the tank was blamed again, and I had noticed on the last run the warrior was taunting off me and fighting like hell to ping pong the boss back and forth.
It was actually impossible to keep the boss out of the damn clouds, because the warrior was fighting us both for aggro the whole fight. Run, run, run.
When we got back from wipe two, I asked the warrior why he was taunting and pulling aggro.
“The main tank kept leaving the boss in the clouds, I counted 20 seconds of not moving out of the cloud, so I took matters into my own hands”.
That started a nice bitter flamefest as each side said ‘did not’ ‘did too’, and other players picked sides.
There was also a nice little side argument going on between the feral tanks, since one tank had gemmed 100% for Stamina, no dodge at all… geared the same, all Stamina, and wanted to be main tank because “I have the highest health, so I’m the best geared tank.”
I wisely stayed the hell out of that discussion.
I will say that in my opinion, the main tank did NOT leave the boss in the clouds on try two. I was watching, and frankly, the only problems I saw the whole time was that the boss was kept running back and forth because he was never left alone to tank one guy long enough to stand bloody still.
And when you have to keep running, those damn spikes HURT.
Anyway, they were having a nice little fight on chat, so I left the raid and was hearthing when the raid leader asked me to please come back.
I’m like, “What? Dude, I’d be happy to run with you, but you have a flamewar in chat and 10 other people left the raid.”
But I came back, and he must be a VERY persuasive guy, because we had a full group again very fast.
A note here… the raid leader also topped out the DPS meters after the fight was over. According to my meter, he, as a hunter, had 3225 average DPS during the fight. Ummm, sure dude. You go ahead. Max DPS. You talk, I listen.
This time, he decided to make the warrior the offical offtank… and set ME as main tank.
With the warrior as offtank, the other two feral druids as kitty DPS, and me whacking away, somehow we managed to keep it so I was max threat and didn’t have to chase Archavon around the room TOO much, I tried to keep him out of clouds so melee didn’t get killed, tried to keep him standing still while thorns were on us, and the warrior picked it up when I got lunged.
We got his ass down, he dropped his 4 pieces of loot, and I got my first 2 Badges of Valor.
No, I didn’t get any other loot. So Cassie doesn’t feel the need to kill me. :)
What I was left with was the feeling that people act a lot better in a pug raid then I ever thought would be possible… but it’s still rife with silly drama. Going into it knowing that you’re just gonna try and have some fun is about the only way to play, because some folks are just waaaay too tightly wrapped.
Come on… ego fights over who gets to be main tank? Are you shitting me?
Still… it reminds me of the old joke…
Last week I couldn’t spell heroic VoA main tank… now I R 1!!!
Oh, and for more hilarity… one of the other feral tanks was equipped almost EXACTLY identical to me… the helm, the Polar gear, the gem choices, the staff… only differences were that I had the Greatness card, and he had Essence of Gossamer and the Keystone ring. I mean, seriously… that was funny.
What was funnier was when he whispered me that I really needed to replace the Badge of Tenacity and my Badge ring, that they were pretty much useless after the patch…
“I know damnit, I know, I know… “
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Hey BBB,
Been a fan of your Blog for some time now. Especially enjoy your rants and soapboxing. Being current serving military, I find that our perspectives on things match up fairly well. Still being the Raid Lead amd GM of my own guild I found a great tool for preparing my guild for Naxx fights was to ask them to review the videos on TankSpot.com. While Naxx is certainly an easier benchmark to raiding than Kara was for smalls guilds, we managed to one shot most bosses (Grobbulus, Sapphiron and Kel’Thuazad took a couple of tries each) because everyone had the opportunity to view the fight and have it described by Ciderhelm step by step. Think it might be worth a check. Anyways GL to you and your guild in the 10 man raid scene.
Aelryc, totally agree with you. Our raid has been running 10 man Naxx for about 4 weeks now and we were having some trouble on Grobbulus. Our raid leader made us all go watch the tank spot videos, I’m MT and his wife so he had already made me watch them :-), and after the video, we two shotted the punk. I would recommend them to any guild getting ready to hit up Naxx.
Awesome reading BBB! I find it ironic that I went back and read one of your blogs about guilds and stupid drama that breaks out last week. Over the weekend, my guild had some stupid drama break out and it ultimately destroyed us. We split into three guilds and the guild leader of our old guild is giving everyone a week before he /disbans. I really wanted to yell at everyone “go read BBB’s blog, this has to be the dumbest reason for breaking up a guild!” Alas, if only.
Yeah its funny when tanks taunt off each other for no reason. Ego macho tanks you can spot em a mile off!
You have so many more fun pug stories than I do. Most of my pugs are pretty tame and uneventful.
I’d recommend checking videos before naxx, sarth & malygos too. Makes a big difference if the RL has seen the action, and if you can persuade guildies to do the same, so much the better. Malygos in particular gave us trouble in 10 man for a couple of weeks of solid attempts before we finally got him down. I was constantly checking strats during that time since mostly I was RLing. They give you a great leg up, but they’re no substitute for getting in there and practicing.
I tend to try and DPS my first run on an instance. I do all the research and video watching for when I tank, but doing it before the first run? Just seems to spoil it a bit for me.
I sometimes wonder if we suck some of the fun out of the encounters when we read all the strats and gotchas of the encounter. Half the fun is figuring out how to survive that poison nova, though wiping is less than fun I must admit.
Side note, on my first trip to heroic Gun’Drak as part of a pug Slad’ran was easy. Tank runs up the stairs to pull and we kill the boss so fast no one has a chance to get snake wrapped. Second time was terrible, poison nova absolutely killed us. It is much better with a shaman in the group for poison cleansing totem.
Must have been a weird “Lets get out there and do stuff night” because I had the same experience on my DK, only mine was Naxx-10, and not nearly so successful, but the bunch I went with were great people, most of whom I’d encountered before on previous occassions, but no one I knew very well. Friendly and affable PuG, joking and laughing as we made some really weak attempts at a Anub’rekhan (or however you spell it) and Patchwerk.
We were all content to be noobs, and I too had not studied up on the bosses prior to going (I didn’t even know which bosses we were attempting until we went to get them), but everyone was so relaxed about it, that we had a good time even though nothing dropped and we all racked up copious repair bills, and I was glad for the raiding experience, such as it was, since I have been to only 1 raid in the last 6 or so months prior. The most satisfying thing was enjoying the “pleasure” of being beat on for about 30 seconds by Patchwerk. First genuine hard-hitting, tank-stomping boss I’ve seen since the expansion came out.
I’ve always thought of offtank as being the single toughest position for a raider, and while I understand the ego boost with being able to say, “I’m the MAIN tank”, I’ve never understood how people bristle at being “just” an offtank. Pretty much the whole game for a main tank is making your gear right and knowing positioning or movement on a given boss. You don’t worry about adds, generally, and you only have to make sure you are generating as much threat as you can. Main tank usually just means “the guy whose gear and/or class allows him to mitigate/avoid the most damage in this encounter”. Threat output and skill come into play, but I’ve always felt that it was the offtank who had to demonstrate more of either on most encounters. Its usually a tough and thankless job, but I’m surprised by how many people get upset about being placed in this role.
I have to agree with you Yggdrasil. OT for me is a much harder job than MT. When you’re maintanking it’s just “go grab this boss and stand there” for most fights. As an offtank, especially as a feral druid, you have to pick up any adds that come out, make judgements about if it’s ok to go kitty for a part of the fight, and if it’s ok, just when and where you need to be. You’re basically a tank and a dps throughout one fight. I personally find OTing much more fun than MTing. If I’m MT all the time, I’ll get bored. :P
Great work there BBB. I love it when people try and tell you how to gem your gear or think that their way is the best way. We druids hear that all the time. I have found that it really depends on the needs of the raid group, hence why I have a high stam set (for 3 drakes I am at 52k hp fully buffed) and a mixed set (45% dodge with 42k hp) for fights where I need to dodge more but still take big hits :) Just do what you feel is best for you and your raid and ignore the know it alls.
Btw when you tanked did you get a chance to look at the animation when he lunges at you? He grabs you by the face and holds you in the air before he tosses you. I laughed so hard the first time I noticed my big bear ass in his hands :)
My pet’s name is Steve, not fluffy :(
I’ve noticed that you don’t have to pull the boss in VoA out of the clouds he will run right back to the MT. When I tank it i just park my bear butt in 1 place and watch him walk right back to me while dps is still hitting him. I also agree with watching Tankspot videos if your first going into tank Naxx. I had some pre 3.0 Naxx stuff but still watched to refresh. Right now we are 10/15 in 25 naxx and the guides are still really helpful even after full 10 man clears.
Hi BBB!
Good luck on the job search. I’m sayin my bear prayers for you.
Remember that time, a while back when you were like: “Oh, bears are no fun. I’m going to roll a hunter”. I’m glad you stopped hanging out with that BRK, I think hes a bad influence. And yeah, I was OT on VoA with another bear as main tank, had no problems at all. I was pretty concerned when WoTLK came out that bears were in for a run of bad luck. Then 3.08 came along, and boy has my tune changed. Hooray.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed this flurry of activity from you, makes my day go by a little faster. Thanks for all the work you put in.
PS, I still have to upgrade my badge of tenacity as well. :-(
Not apropos of this post, but an amusing thing to note from the recent feral changes: the epic [Mastercraft Kalu'ak Fishing Pole] is now a +1860 feral attack power weapon!
Just as a note for this fight, I have always done it as one of the two tanks. However, we never designate a MT or OT. Just the two tanks. Reason being, if the tanks stack, they can both just fight for threat the entire time. It doesn’t matter who gets picked up and thrown. The advantage of this is that one of you will always be second on the threat list and that makes it easier to deal with the lunges. If one tank is trying to stay below the other in threat then well-geared dps, especially in PUGs, may move higher in the threat list and you then have to taunt off of them to get threat back.
I totally agree with Finandir; the tank who suffers the aggro loss after getting picked up simply has to taunt; both have to be on #1 and #2 on threat and its a really easy fight. It does not matter who the main- or off-tank is.