Light’s Defender

I’ve been in Karazhan enough times. We pretty much have everything up to The Curator on farm status. And I’ve gotten every piece of Tanking loot through The Curator, bar one …

…Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch.

This is one sweet little trinket. It’s one of those “Oh Sh*t!!!” kinda items. One little rub of the pocket watch and you can control time. I say that because you can suddenly see most of the swings coming at you in slow motion (in your own mind, of course) and you become a dodging fiend for a short while, avoiding many of those swings. This gives your healers or whoever else time to get back into it without losing you in the process.

I’ve see this item drop once for New Moon. Since the middle of 2007, going in almost every week, only one stinkin’ time!! The one time it did drop, Barinath won the roll. He is the Master Tankadin in our guild, and I congratulate him on picking up one of the most coveted tanking items in all of Karazhan.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty comfortable with my gear. I’m uncrittable, uncrushable, have a fairly high level of stamina and armor, as well as a number of pieces of situation gear that I can use as needed. This is not about not being able to progress without it, this about principle now.

This trinket has dropped once, as I said; but every other piece of weaponry and armor has dropped multiple times, some of them a ridiculously high number of multiple times. I guess I don’t understand why Blizzard doesn’t normalize the drop rates on bosses. Is it for exclusivity? That seems odd. I can understand the white items should drop more often then green, green more often then blue, etc; but when a boss only drops epic gear, they should all have a fairly similar drop rate. In fact, the same thing has happened to me with the Spaulders of the Righteous, but that’s for another post. My point is that we should all have an similar opportunity to get gear that we can use. Making it easier for some items and harder for others of equal quality just seems unfair.

Ok, I guess that is enough. /end rant

On an upbeat note, I’ve finally maxed out my Fishing Skill. That means that I know have a max skill in Mining, Fishing, Cooking and First Aid. I have 9 skill points to go in my Blacksmithing training, and I’m hoping to have that done soon as well. Slowly but surely!

So this weekend, a guildie asked me to help retake Halaa in Nagrand. I needed a change from grinding ore, so I decided to give a helping hand. I’m at one of those flight posts ready to do a bombing run when I suddenly get backstabbed by something that wasn’t there before. A Rogue, hiding in the bushes decided to take me on.

Now, I don’t think I’m very good at PvP. I just don’t click buttons fast enough, or so I think. Playing around in the Battlegrounds has taught me a technique that I like to call the “Running Around Like a Chicken Without a Head Technique”. I’m sure you can imagine what that technique looks like. But it’s funny as you try very hard not to get grounded or to expose your back to a Rogue.
Anyway, the Rogue vanishes, but I keep going around. After a few seconds, I stop with my back to the edge of a cliff, whip out the griffin and fly off; again because I don’t think I’m very good at PvP, so why stick around to get slaughtered.

About a minute later, I get a whisper that starts the chain below:

Now, I really don’t use any extraordinary means to PvP. I’m too much of a n00b to figure out how, not to mention that doing things like that is not how I enjoy playing the game. Like I said, it’s just me and my mouse. Now maybe, just maybe, I’m a little better then I think I am at PvP. And as for the lock, we had a rogue in our group that showed that lock a thing or two.

Even if Tankadins can’t PvP, I think I’ll try it a little more just for the heck of it.

Well, this has been a proud Raiding week for New Moon.  We took down the Shade of Aran for the first time, and next we decided to go up against Prince Malchezaar.  We made our way up to his balcony and went to work.  We worked, and we worked, and we worked some more. 

 But, perseverence was the word of the day.  After something like 7 tries, Prince was downed by the crack team of Arzen (Protection Warrior playing the role of a Fury Warrior), Grimix (Super Mage), Zophia (Super, Super Mage), Cadeus (Stabby, Stabby Rogue), Ktarye (Totum Slinger), Zinshara (Controller of all things Demonic), the Healing Trio of Haliot, Savita and Taelina, and me doing the Holy Tanking thing.

This was an interesting fight.  Prince in and of himself is not difficult to tank, or to DPS for that matter.  Beating him is all about placement and attentiveness.  You need to watch your threat, get the heck out when Enfeeble hits you and you need to dodge infernals while you’re doing that.  Healers have the tough job of keeping people up, but if you play it right, they only need to worry about the tank most of the time.  On most attempts, I would pull him right.  We would either lose melee DPS first, in which case our damage was gimped, or I would drop during Phase 2, in which case the raid would wipe.

On the kill fight, we decided to change it up and pull left.  We got good positioning, good Infernal drops, and good communication.  Can you say “clock work”?  Like the well oiled machine we can be, Price dropped quickly and without any casualties.  People got out when they needed to and communicated well.  We didn’t give up and we finally executed in near flawlessness.  In the words of Hannibal Smith, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

New Moon stepped back into Karazhan last night once again. This time, we were starting with The Curator and working our way past that as time allowed. We cleared the trash up to Curator pretty easily, though we did have a few deaths along the way. I think the Curator was a sign of things to come. We just didn’t have our stuff together. It took us three tries to finally down him; and the entire time our Raid Leader, Grimix, kept telling people that we needed to DPS the flares faster. We should have that fight down by now. I guess he’s not on farm status just yet.

He dropped Gloves of the Fallen Champion which no one else really needed but me, so now I have the Justicar Handguards. I think I have more gloves then Amelda Marcos had shoes.

We continued to be sloppy on the Library trash (me included), which was frustrating at first. But after a few “encouraging” words from Arzen (Protection Warrior) we tightened up a bit. We cleared just enough trash to get us to Aran so we could have some additional tries at him.

Aran is a DPS fight with controlled execution mixed in, so everyone was either DPS’ing or healing. I was trying to do a little bit of both. It was clear that we had a good DPS crowd last night, because we were taking his health down pretty quickly in comparison to other nights. Our problem was that some of our cloth-wearing members kept getting killed early on in the fight. On the first two attempts, we would lose either our Priests or Warlock before we would even reach the pyroblast or the elementals. That was just not going to work if we hoped to get to the end.

We faired a bit better on the 3rd attempt. We did a great job of keeping Aran’s health bar even with or lower than his mana bar. That ensured that we could deal with the elementals and not worry about the polymorph happening at the same time. And sure enough, the elementals spawned with a good chunk of mana left on Aran. Off we went to control the elementals. One was banished, one was perma-feared, one was tanked by me, and the other was downed by most everyone else. Somewhere during the elemental fight, we started losing people. First Arzen went, and then the polymorph hit with the elementals still up. Good thing the last 2 were banished/feared. That helped quite a bit. After the Pyroblast, the elementals despawned 5 seconds later.

I don’t know how people dropped, but we lost Zophia, then Savita, then Grimix and Alin. After that, Ktarye and Zinshara dropped. That left me (Tank?), Cadeus (Rogue) and Kyllyn (Priest). With Aran down to 1% health, the next thing I hear is “Heal yourselves! You have no healers!” We had lost Kyllyn, and then Cadeus dropped right after. I was alone. Me and Aran, a duel to the death. But whose death?

Sorry, I felt like being dramatic. Luckily, Kyllyn kept sending some heals my way in spirit form, and Cadeus had poisoned Aran before he died. That really helped. I hit Aran with everything I had. Consecrate. Exorcism. Hammer of Wrath. Judgment of Righteousness. I even bubbled right before a Flame Wreath and used Lay on Hands on myself.

That last 1% seemed like an eternity. He had about 8,500 health left and I was at full health with about 16,000. You’d think I had the upper hand there, but I was doing around 200 damage per attack while he was doing 1200. The outcome you ask?

And then there was one … me.

Aran down!! Congratulations New Moon!! Nicely done!

We did Chess for some relaxing fun after that fight. That netted me the Triptych Shield of the Ancients for my healing set, and after that we called it a night. Monday will be uncharted territory for New Moon. Prince, watch out!!