Assorted Stuffs

So, we cleared the trash (Princess and Stinky were the highpoints) and spent a while wiping on Rotface, and then slightly less time wiping on Festergut.

The former fight I think we can resolve by dropping to two healers, as we were repeatedly wiping at the 15-20% mark with five DPS. At this point, he was dropping infections too quickly to easily handle, so it dissolved into a chaotic mess and failure.

The latter I'm not even going to contemplate fewer than three healers, but swapping the tanks around so the better geared gets the first three-stack period and slightly improved cooldown usage should sort it. It's a very simple fight in comparison to Rotface, but quite frustrating to heal with no mitigation cooldowns. I guess our tanks and non-shaman healers need to have a discussion on this.

As an aside, something which I find a bit weird... Rotface's infection debuff really messes with my healing intuitions. I don't know why, but whilst I can generally happily heal through a Mortal Strike-like debuff just fine, in this case I was constantly overestimating incoming healing on infected targets despite Grid helpfully informing me of the reduced estimates. Hmm. Not sure about that, but it's messy. The kiting tank also spent altogether too long outside of healing range. Things that experience will help with, both.


So, that's enough about the new bosses - we've not downed them yet, despite two nights of wiping. Overall I'd consider that a good thing, it's nice to be challenged a bit.

Babytank has been fun. She's had some good pugs, and some baddish ones, but no true failpugs for a while. Learning to tank as a warrior is interesting, to say the least. I don't really thing my brain is wired for red bars, but I certainly can't complain that I lack tools.

My druid, when tanking, basically has spammable-AoE, spammable-on-next-attack-high-threat attack, a taunt, free-aggro-thingy-on-cooldown... and Lacerate, which is some kind of mutant nonscaling failthing.

My warrior, despite lacking 30 levels on the druid, has far more tools, and they're more fun. More are on cooldowns, there are Revenge procs, Shield Block generates mitigation and rage and Shield Slam awesomeness, and Cleave is fun. I understand a bit more already about why it can sometimes seem easy to pull things off a warrior tank if you follow the tank's target - chances are they're just tabbing through things dropping high-threat attacks until something properly AoE comes off cooldown - and also why DPS entering a fight late might all start to attack different targets based on the tank's current target. It explains a few things I've seen while healing, should I be feeling generous enough not to invoke the standard 'the DPS are drivelling idiots' line.

Warriors are definitely different to the other tanks when it comes to AoE threat. They generate it in a spiky manner, and have to work like mad to keep aggro on everything between those AoE cooldowns. It can get quite manic. They are a lot more fun than druids at this stage though. I still don't recommend having a boomkin pull enormous packs of trolls in Zul'Farrak by using Hurricane, but outside of that rampant e-peening it mostly felt like something that can be handled with experience.

Even so: not having aggro on some quantity of mobs, and having no rage to deal with this, is a horrible feeling. I may have to make an enormous stack of rage potions.

Also: Shouts suck. They're the most annoying buff system I've seen since shaman weapon imbues had a five minute duration.

And I really need an addon to track Vigilance. I spent the talent point, damnit, I should use my only sensible buff more often.