The ultimate challenge! (Too late, hehe)

So I claimed to have done ALL the bosses in heroics, but I realised today that is not quite true:
The missing one is the timed run boss in CoS, I would venture that that is the ultimate pre-3.3 pet tanking challenge!

I therefore propose a Grande Challenge!

First one to down him after MT'ing the whole instance gets a Ice-Cream sundae on the house. I'm sure Durante (being our most esteemed great leader) wouldn't mind coming up with the prize and sending it by ship .

The most difficult bits here are the bit at the top of the stairs (just before Epoch) and the gauntlet. I don't have much advice for the first (other than may the force be with you), but the gauntlet has a little trick. The mobs that hit really hard are not the big ones but the little devouring ghouls, they are about the same size as the other mobs and don't look very imposing but actually hit for about about 5k on turtle shell, so the trick is to not pull too many of them at once.

Other than that all I can say is good luck and may the best, uhm, pet of your choosing win.

Woohoo, got it on the first attempt, it wasn't so bad after all. I was genuinely expecting to try several times and take more than a week to do this, I was convinced no-one would do it before 3.3 as well tbqh. But whatdya know...

You can see I had blown a bunch of cd's (including taunt) on the gauntlet. I also forgot to pop Dragonhawk immediately (okay for a couple of seconds actually while we were pulling him away a bit). That little loss of threat was almost a disaster because the dps didn't hold back.



As you can see Weaster was coming up quickly behind and my AP trinket still had a couple of seconds to go:
Luckily fate was smiling, with a good set of CS procs I managed to stay ahead by a wafer:



And then:



Success!

You can estimate the time it took on that boss by looking at the taunt cd, which had still not cleared.

As it happened we didn't speak to Arthas on the way in, so we wiped on respawns on the way back. The second time on the gauntlet was smooth as silk, practice is the key here it seems. The same goes for the top of the stairs, I had everyone run PAST the spawnpoint so we would not have LoS issues or the healer standing on top of a spawn. Here is a screenie from the first gauntlet:



The group was Weaster and Corei the pallies, and Chrisinia the Druid from "The Ascending" guild. Jilea the priest (my wife) was on heals as usual. Having a group that can deal with pulling aggro every so often is definitely a plus is all I can say.

Can I get my Ice-cream sundae now?

(I realised there is one more actually, the lady-boss in ToC. I'm gonna try for that next).

That was fun!

Thanks so much for the run, Dny and George. It went beautifully. Was very funny though when we were running through the gauntlet the first time and somebody asked "Did somebody speak to Arthas?" (Hence, the "I didn't" comments in Dny's first screenshot.)

Well done, George and Dny!

Great job Doug! Bah I was so close I was just talking to my buddys about trying this tonight too! My close friend whos always said "Your crazy hunters cant tank Ill never run with you if you try that shit with me." decided last night "Hey man people in the guild wont shut up about you tanking and it looks like youve cleared 5 heroics so far. Lets try H Nexus, I wanna see this for my own eyes."

And with that we attempted Nexus!

Its great to see someone doing so much, as you can tell your who I have my sights on my list of Heroics done is starting to build...=P

Ed

I am genuinely shocked that I managed it the first time but I have doubt you guys will surpass me soon.

There are many achievements still left to be done, not least the three new heroics. Meantime hopefully you can use things like this to convince people it is doable.

This to me is very impressive. The one thing I still struggle with with pet tanking is aggro on multi-mob pulls, and doing a timed event where starting on DPS early on pulls with 4 or more mobs is very difficult.

I realised that when I do heroics as dps I almost always pull mobs off tanks and never have much problem killing them. Given that, I just say: "Don't go balistic on AoE and Splash damage early on", then try to trap what I can (hard in CoS) and mark as far as possible.

Once I have a chunk of threat built up on the target everyone was MEANT to be attacking I intimidate or taunt off the dps who weren't doing that, which is pretty inevitable. I normally tab through targets to check omen to check if someone needs help, but in really disciplined groups it normally is not an issue.

So... I have taken the attitude of tanks in tBC: If you grab the aggro after I marked you must be able to kill the mob yourself, otherwise I feel no pity.

Ironically our burst threat is not bad, so having good dps actually makes everything easier.

Doug wrote:So... I have taken the attitude of tanks in tBC: If you grab the aggro after I marked you must be able to kill the mob yourself, otherwise I feel no pity

Pretty much what I always used to say as a beartank: you pull it, you tank it. ... of course, that's back when my bear could actually hold people's threat. N better TPS.

With Kura, I make sure t omark things, and to mention to people (if they don't already know) that my AoE tanking sucks, and that I'm not going to be able to hold threat if they open the floodgates. I don't say 'Don't do it'. I just warn them. And if they do it, I just check mentally whether it's someone who can handle what they pulled or not and run with it. Like Doug mentioned, I've pulled threat a few times and just kited the damned thing a bit while I killed it solo. So I figure, if a ranged pulls, then they cna probably down it. If a melee does, then I can point and laugh at them for using an AOE when they were in range.

Things have been quiet lately, but I have managed a couple of attempts at H ToC again for the lady boss with no luck.

I think the combination of hunter/mage, warrior, rogue is very hard on us pet tanks .

Also the other missing boss (the Paletress) is much harder than the Black Night from a threat perspective (you have to be sure to save ALL your cooldowns for the nightmare).

The one consoling factor is that the dps/buff groups I ran with on the two occasions we tried it were less than ideal.

I don't see myself completing those things before 3.3 hits though since I will be studying this weekend, would be nice if someone could give it a try...

What I have found to be helpful is GftT which gives me tons of focus enough to leaal everything on auto cast!. I picked up the 3 sec taunt and made a macro for it (It is one of the best things I did.) Mob gets lose just pop it, have to go all out on a boss or mob I just pop it and intimidation and watch the tps fly.


ed

3 second taunt? Which one is that?

Yeah in the pets talent tree theres a taunt that makes the target attack your pet for 3sec. I use that as a macro that I apply as needed.

Ed

Oh you mean the normal taunt, I thought you meant a 3 sec cd taunt.

Yes, I tried for a while to run without it but found that it is really quite important to have, pity the cd is so atrociously long though , especially given that it doesn't add any threat over the top threat, but you can use it in conjunction with Intimidation to get the same effect as that.

Doug wrote:Yes, I tried for a while to run without it but found that it is really quite important to have, pity the cd is so atrociously long though , especially given that it doesn't add any threat over the top threat, but you can use it in conjunction with Intimidation to get the same effect as that.

The idea of taunt is that it's supposed to give the person a chance to throttle their DPS so they can get back down in the charts. It's how taunt was supposed to be for the other tanking classes, too. problem is that people forget to throttle since 'Oh hey! Tanks are unpullable nowadays!'. Which they often are, but not pet tanks.

I do wish the CD was shorter, but more impotrantly I wish that players would think back to 'older' days and be ready to draw their threat back. A lot of classes have threat-reducing abilities. Time to remind them of this!

For me, taunt is for multi-tank bosses, not for the dpsers sake.

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