First Tanking Experience
Rockstar got a chance to perform his first duties as a Protection Warrior. The selected instance was Old Hillsbrad, the Escape From Durnholde Keep. I thought this would be a good choice, because of two reasons. First, marking isn’t a huge deal, because there’s little to no time during the escort to be fiddling with raid icons. It’s usually understood party members with crowd control will control the cloth wearers in enemy groups, while the tank picks up all the melee opponents. No problem. Second, it’s a good test as far as being able to quickly identify and pick up targets, something all great tanks do.
The party comprised of myself (70 protection Warrior), unguilded Arkalas (69 Mage), Freezer of River of Deceit (70 Mage), Cetus of Element (Hunter), and Schwarztwald of Dawn of the Rebellion (70 holy Paladin).
As we cleared through the barracks area, I could tell Freezer was either in a hurry, or was just supremely confident that we could be sloppy and still handle things. I prefer a more technical execution, which means doing anything in order to reduce the chances of death or a wipe. What do I mean by this? In my experience, it is the tank who breaks crowd control. It is only the tank who breaks crowd control. The tank consults the mana situation, the tank checks the threat situation, the tank picks up a mob when crowd control breaks. Freezer had no issues immediately dealing burst damage in anticipating of me breaking the crowd control. I frequently had to use a Taunt to keep the broken mob off of him. Bad mage.
To the healer’s (and maybe my) credit, we cleared to Lieutenant Drake without any deaths. That’s fairly easy though, as the group regulates the tempo of the pulling, and the pulls are either patrols (2-3 mobs) or straightforward 4-mob pulls.
Lieutenant Drake has a Whirlwind attack; it seems like it can be avoided, but I’ve been continuing to build threat. I think in the future, I’ll probably have to join the others in trying to immediately get out of the range of Whirlwind, and then resume tanking him when the effect fades. I was also feared a couple of times, and will have to figure out how to deal with that. The fight went pretty well, and Lieutenant Drake dropped the Ravenwing Pauldrons (I believe Schwartzwald got the item).
As the escort began and Thrall led each charge against he packs of mobs, I attempted to use my Taunt to get Thrall’s initial target onto me…then I would Devastate and Revenge on the second melee target, and hope that the crowd control personnel would be able to successfully pick up their assignments. I suppose in the future I’ll have to be more vigilant of that. I thought we did well keeping Thrall’s health up by the time we got to the encounter with Captain Skarloc.
Captain Skarloc had no qualms about giving me the old Hammer of Justice. I’m not liking being stunned for 6 seconds while the boss runs around on the rest of the group. Outside of the stun, I was able to tank him fairly steadily for the fight. Captain Skarloc dropped the Northshire Battlemace (I won the greed roll) and a Red Winter Hat (Arkalas won the greed roll). It was a bit silly seeing him stride up to us prior to the fight, wearing the Red Winter Hat.
The Durnholde instance is most likely to bug during the last phase of the escort…leading up to the Epoch Hunter. Luckily for us, it didn’t. It was a bit rushed as it always is, but the healer was excellent in keeping my health up. I even had time to skin a few of the dragonkin corpses before the Epoch Hunter landed and we engaged him. I didn’t notice his abilities, save the knockback which he performed on me several times. I kept him faced away from the group, and kept getting punted further and further back. The Epoch Hunter dropped the Mantle of Perenolde. If I’m not mistaken, no one picked this up!
It was a great trial run for good old Rockstar. No one died. I was able to hold aggro fairly well, considering the frenetic pace of the escort and the presence of an eager-to-dps mage.
The damage output was the following:
- Freezer was at 28% (558 dps)
- Arkalas was at 24% (629 dps)
- Cetus was at 23% (435 dps)
- Rockstar was at 16% (204 dps)
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