Tuesday, April 7, 2009

A Mentor's Pride

So last night we finished our first 25 man Naxxramus clear in a little while.  Our guild has had some personal issues and we've gone through a slight adjustment period while we sorted things out.  

An old guild member came back to us from the "dark" side and decided to go tanking with his 80 undead warrior.  He's used to tanking as a night elf druid on the "dark" side, so this has been an adjustment for him.  He has come to me for help and I'm proud to say he did very well over the course of the raid this last week.  He and I were respective off-tanks and his gear was subpar when he entered, but now he's def capped, and starting to be comfortable with his ability "toolbelt".  

Last night he took his job as one of the two off-tanks for KT very seriously (and it's not an exciting job for a while, and then it gets exciting for a few minutes and then it slacks off for a while, and whether or not it gets exciting again kind of depends on your healers) and did a great job.  Except for the two very odd draws that I haven't seen happen that way before, everything went very well, and we downed him.

The two odd pulls, I was perplexed by.  In one of them, I pulled my first of the two Guardians to me, then waited, then pulled the second and tried to get into position so that I could see the ground underneath me (so they didn't hide the evil void zones like they like to do) and suddenly a third Guardian came out of my side portal. Huh?  So I wasn't expecting that, but I call out in vent that I've got a third add, figuring that either the other warrior only has one, or that the healers will know to kick things into a higher gear for a smidge, but lo and behold, the other warrior is tanking both of his adds that he was expecting and the healer on me can't keep up with the three Guardians, and I go down after about 6 seconds of my shield wall, even though they're beating through my 40K health from last stand.  Wow, ok, mental note to self there then.

So the pull after that, I grab the first Guardian and I'm standing there and waiting and waiting and waiting and I hear the other tank shout, I have 3 on me.  Ok, I say, I know what that's like, and his gear is a little behind mine, so I run into taunt range and immediately pull one of his off him and the two healers that were on him kept him alive long enough to make it till I could close the 20 yards to taunt range.  And thereafter everything went smoothly.

I think that most of us agreed that the wipes we had that evening on KT were from nothing more insidious than just having no definite "plan" for healer positioning.  The first two tries we had a number of people going down to iceblocks just because there weren't healers around to help them, and since at least 2 of those were healers each time, it left us with a big deficit to recover from, and so we Etch-a-Sketch and start over.

The last time through, though, the healers got organized and arranged themselves in a line next to the throne and everything went like clockwork (except for the unusual 3-1 Guardian entry which we managed to avert the crisis of) and I am so proud that our guild has a new warrior raiding tank that made that possible.

It just makes me beam to see a fledgling warrior come into his own, and I'm amazed I could help with that in however minor of a fashion.


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