Eye of Eternity still gives me fits, for some reason. I feel like I do fine, but it's almost like we never bring enough healers into it, and I feel that I'm at least partially responsible whenever the healer(s) can't keep me up, even if there's really not that much I can do. Once I've blown my last stand/shield wall/enraged regeneration/pot/lifebloom/healthstone/Commanding Shout (if it wasn't up already) I'm kind of out of options until the next cooldowns wear off. And since some of them are 5 minutes, there's no guarantee that I'll make it that long. That generally makes me a little more than twice as hard to kill as normal, but it's still doable.
Nonetheless, I actually think we had a convergence of two problems last night that made Eye difficult, and Naxx a "little" tougher than usual. Firstly, we were down a healer from what I understand. Secondly, some of the dps were new to raiding, and probably weren't expecting to have to put it all out there like that. Phase 1 of Eye took a little longer than I was used to it taking, and that wore the healers out a lot, and the few times that we made it to Phase 2, we also made it past Phase 2, but in Phase 3, once again, we were struggling from some losses from earlier, and just having a lot of people unfamiliar with the raid. I'm beginning to think that Eye of Eternity is mocking me. Even when I know that we have the grouping for the thing, somehow it still doesn't come out right.
Naxx went pretty good, and is also the reason that I'm posting. Someone decided to make me MT with an OT that I wasn't very familiar with, but who did a pretty good job overall. We only had to replace him once when we did Gothik, and then we stayed switched off to get through 4 Horsemen, Patchwerk, Grobbie, Gluth and Thaddius, and then I MT'd Sapph, and ended up MTing KT as well, although at first I was just OTing. I was especially impressed that I OT'd Patchwerk, Grobbie and Gluth, considering that a) apart from Patch, I'd never OT'd any of them, and b) they went pretty well (once Grobb stopped shooting "extra" slimes out). I haven't figured out when or why this happens, but sometimes, even if the dps are definitely trailing after the MT, and even if the MT has aggro, and even if the MT is moving backwards at the correct pace, Grobbulus will turn around to inject someone, and will spray slimes before turning back around. When this happens multiple times, it really causes problems. A single slime each time can be handled pretty easily, but 3 or 4 or more are more than a pain. I did figure out a pretty surefire way to pull them off the melee group when it happened though, Each time I saw dbm put up the message about him spraying slimes, I charged in and TC'd immediately. That would generally put enough aggro onto the newly formed slimes to get them off him, I would then back quickly away, and if I saw any that weren't following, I'd Taunt them if it were 1 left, or run back and do a shockwave and Demoralizing shout (and maybe another TC for good measure) if there were more than one. This seemed to work pretty well. Gluth turned out to be really easy to OT with a freindly mage helping out. I would charge, TC, Demoralizing shout, and then run away, and the trail of Zombies would follow me and the friendly mage would stop what he was doing and throw up the ice blast that rooted them in place, at which point I'd step back, charge in and do it all over again. Shield Slamming those that just spawned to make sure they didn't leave before my TC etc was off cooldown.
The first attempt on KT, our MT went down at one point, and I grabbed KT, and we held on, even with the guardians joining in until KT was at (no kidding here) 2234 HP left until dead.
What a defeat! So close! It lasted a little longer than usual, because I know I had time to last stand at least twice during the fight, so I just kept thinking, "Wow! Over the course of those 5-6 mins, if we'd had even 8 more dps from somewhere, we'd have had him (preferably in a burst right at the end I'm thinking). I mean, even one more hit from a well geared fury warrior would have been all we needed. It was rough to come that close and not finish him, but exciting too.
So we swapped out and I MT'd instead and our previous MT switched back to his warlock for the extra dps, and everything went like clockwork (pretty much).
The only thing I noticed about MTing those two is that:
a) Sapphiroth's biggest challenge is getting him to face the right way immediately. You have to run to be behind one of the iceblocks during the air phases, and then you have to get back to the correct place to taunt him so he looks at you IMMEDIATELY when he lands. Otherwise, he'll cleave the in-rushing dps which is no good.
b) KT isn't so bad, really. I'm still playing with my UI a little, and I haven't gotten used to the castbar for XPerl yet, but basically it's pretty staple (admittedly I had to leave most of the interrupting to the dps, but I threw Shield Bashes every chance I could in between Shield Slams, revenges, Heroic Strikes and devastates), and I wasn't having to rush too hard to keep up with aggro. I think the hardest thing about KT was that once he engages a tank, it seems like he really doesn't think he wants to move anymore (unless that tank goes down, because I've seen how fast he suddenly decides to move then). I mean, when he engaged, someone else took aggro for a second while I was waiting for him to get into range, and he turned and went after them immediately. I taunted him off, but had to actually move myself into melee range, since he didn't feel that he "needed" to close in on me (arrogant #$%&*). Everything went fine, but I can't help but wonder why the tank can't "position" him a little better in the beginning. Fortunately everyone was on the ball, and things went fine, though. Two shot, but I've been through worse.
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