Heroic Spider + Plague Quarters

Tonight I tanked Anub'Rekhan, Grand Widow Faerlina, Maexxna, Heigan the Unclean, and Loatheb.

Now, a quick disclaimer, on Anub, Faerlina, and Heigan my pet died while each of these bosses were at about 10% just from little mistakes I made since tonight was the first time I've ever tried tanking any of these bosses, and we 1-shot each one so I didn't get to correct my mistakes. Hopefully next week I'll get clean kills on these and others.

I was 54/17/0 speced, and used both Bubbles the Gorilla, and Bubbles 2.0, a turtle. I used a gorilla for purely sentimental reasons whenever I felt that I could get by without Shell Shield.

Our guild FRAPS camera man has an insane computer and was recording at 1920x1080, so we have to dig through, compress, and edit over 40 gigs of footage, so it may be a few days before its ready to show. Until then this will have to suffice.



Here is a screen shot of my pet's character window:



I'm still wearing the gear I had on for that attempt. Note that a few pieces of my gear aren't completely optimized for pet tanking, as some of them are also used for normal raid DPS or PvP. Unfortunately I forgot to bring some Arctic Fur with me to redo my bracer enchants, or I would have easily broken 40k pet HP.

Sweet.

How'd you tank Heigan? That was the one I didn't dare tank when I did those two wings on 10 man. We thought about standing on the platform during phase 1, but someone said it was nerfed or something.

My pet died on 10% on Loatheb though, purely because of the healers screwing up. They "forgot" to heal it during the debuff downtime.

As soon as one wave went down, I'd run over to the next spot and put my pet on passive, then have him attack again. Generally you had an extra 2 seconds or so. Not exactly lightning quick compared to a normal tank, but fast enough to get the job done. The only issue is that your melee need to know where to stand on their own. If they're relying on you to get him into position then reacting to that they're probably not going to have enough time. Then again, it was the first time I'd ever done the phase 1 dance, let alone tank it, so with practice it would probably get a bit faster.

The video for that will probably look a bit funny. I only convinced my guild to let me try it while clearing the trash after Noth, and since no one thought it was possible I convinced them only after telling them that for the first cycle I'd dance by myself and everyone else could stand on the platform and just watch. That way if I screwed up a tank could just run out and taunt him and the fight could continue without wiping.

Really cool. But the threat-generation must be horrible like that =/ I'm so hoping Blizzard fixes our threat.

Would it be possible to use EotB during phase 1? Or will it get interrupted by the curses?

Threat wasn't as horrible as you'd think, since you have your pet on passive for only a couple seconds you're not pushing back the Growl's too much and that's where a good chunk of the threat is coming from anyway. Also the fact that they didn't trust me enough to DPS during the first phase gave me a great head start.

As for Eyes of the Beast, its very possible that it would get interrupted, but I haven't tried it. I was mostly worried that each phase was going to be longer than the minute duration of Eyes of the Beast (I've never timed it and I can't look at the footage at the moment, but it feels like more than a minute) and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to recast it in time or would otherwise screw it up renewing EotB.

Durante wrote:I was mostly worried that each phase was going to be longer than the minute duration of Eyes of the Beast (I've never timed it and I can't look at the footage at the moment, but it feels like more than a minute)

Quoted from Wowhead:

Phase 1 will last 90 seconds, and Phase 2 - 45, making a 135-second cycle.

So time-wise, you'd have to renew it somewhere in the middle. And I'm not sure how well that would work for using EotB. Maybe you can test it on a lesser mob somewhere. Just EotB them, grab their aggro, and Heigan-dance a bit.

Personally, I think the 'passive' might be better for tanking Heigan because it would be much, much easier to be able to see where the explosions are and to not get as disoriented. I found when I tanked Heigan in melee (as a bear-tank), it was too easy for me to lose track of where I was and where I needed to go with this massive Heigan in my face. Threat would have been the worst issue I saw, and if you're right and threat is pretty solid (especially if you get some time to gather threat, like you had with the first phase 'dancing') then all's well.

It's really awesome that people let you tank like that without thinking about how much longer it takes. I wish my guild was as patient. Not that we ever go Naxx any longer... =P

Actually I don't get to tank as often as you might think. Monday was actually only the third time I've gotten to tank in raid at 80, the other two being the Sapphiron video and the impromptu Archavon attempt, and I didn't exactly ask permission to do that.

I've been trying to get our GM to let me tank Brundir in the Iron Council encounter but to no avail yet. I'm hoping that after Monday's Naxx run I can convince him to let me do it next week, since we did IC already this week.