Zero vs Heroic Violet Hold

I finally got my new turtle to 80 (he is named after the damage he does....Zero) and was looking for a chance to try him on a heroic something or other. As luck would have it, my time lined up so I could do a dungeon about the same time as a group of guildies was trying to do a HVH run for the new 80s in the guild. I volunteered to tank (with the response of many jeers) and we headed off.

Group makeup:
Huntank
Resto-druid
Boomkin
Arms/Fury warrior
Rogue

The rest of the crew were geared in mostly blues and generally ready to get going on a career in heroics. I was set up with my PvP set (899 resil, 1500+ sta) and we headed in.

Waves 1-5: No issues, Zero ruled with a few of the noob types jumping on mobs he wasn't directly agroing, getting agro back was as easy as swapping targets.

Boss 1: Icharon (the water guy however you spell it)
What do you know, I finally got the Dehydrated achievement....Zero ruled and we had no agro issues.

Waves 7-11: No issues.

Boss 2: The Voidwalker guy, whatever his name was. We wiped here because noone killed the adds (the only guy that could see them hadn't seen the fight before). No issues with Zero keeping agro.

Waves 1-5 (again): No issues.

Boss 1 (again): No issues. Much faster kill because I swapped to DPS gear since the tank wasn't taking enough damage to need his 24k hp.

Waves 7-11: No issues.

Boss 2: Win. No issues.

Waves 13-17: Tough. The groups of 4 were taking their toll. I finally lost my concentration and foodged group 17 to the point where folks died due to me not having a grip.

We all decided not to go back through all the waves again. Ultimately, none of the issues we had were related to Zero's inability to tank any of the mobs. Healing the pet was never an issue. I just need to get better at gaining early agro (holding agro was never an issue) and I think I could tank uneventfully through heroics in Northrend. The only fights that give me fits are the ones where there are 4 or more targets to control.

Ground

PS: We zoned back in after wave 17 and found out that you CAN get back into the final fight in HVH. Just talk to the person at the door and they will port you in to your DOOM! <grin>

There's one single reason that I've not tanked this instance on heroic, and that's the randomness of getting the kite boss. I simply dare not do that one the way we have to control the tank.

I wasn't so worried about the kite boss, I think it would be relatively easy to do with Eyes of the Beast

The big problem for me was getting initial agro on multiple mobs that were spread out. Especially the ones that come down where you have to split - 2 from one direction and 1 from the other. Misdirect is good, but it takes a lot of retargetting to get it right.

Ground

Using Eyes of the Beast is a safe way to get yourself killed, and thus the tank despawned

I did this once with a fail group and got the kite boss first up. I took over tanking because the warrior kept dying and when I was tanking I was still top dps. But I did manage to kite the boss all the way across the room though, and am convinced we would have got him had we had decent dps.

Problem is that your threat is so low when you're kiting him like that with a pet.

Hmmm, Glyph of Possessed Strength? I actually grabbed that one since the hunter minors suck so bad.

What about it? If you're standing still channeling EotB your tps might be good enough, but you will die, and thus the pet will despawn. Unless you manage somehow to be out of line of sight of everything for the whole duration of the fight, but still in line of sight to reapply EotB when it runs out. In other words, not a tactic to use.

The only way to do that fight is to use petattack petfollow over and over to slowly make your way backwards, but the TPS is rather bad that way, making the fight extremely hard. Of course, if you're running with a lot of rogues and hunters, the issue isn't that big of a deal with MD and TotT. But it will require a group with full control over the situation.

Hmmm, good point on the refresh. I had been thinking of standing up near the doorway and just using EOTB...but hadn't thought through the refresh.

Maybe with all the huntank buffs that are coming they will remove the channelling on EOTB and just make it so you are FD'd the whole time while doing EOTB.....<more pipedreams of course>

Ground

Not to mention, if you were standing at the doorway, you'd be teleported into the middle as far as I know.

MDs, control-1-control-2-control-1s, and one or two master's call (a really fast control-2-control-1) all could help with the kiting.

Got it down today with some guildies! Finally, my second heroic full clear

We got the bird and waterboy so that wasn't too bad.