In my head, that is the noise the bear makes when it eats Leo DiCaprio* in The Revenant.
Don't give me any of that nonsense about him single-handedly beating the bear, it's just not possible... you need 20 people for that! :-)
Ursoc!
As expected by some people (*cough*), this one took much less time than SpiderBird.
The fight is incredibly similar to Heroic. So similar in fact, that I'm not really sure what the differences are!
There is one rather obvious difference... Ursoc has invited a few of his friends to the party.
An extra bear joins in every now and then, lopes over to us, and we kill it.
Does the new bear actually do anything? No idea. Just an excuse for me to use Chain Lightning.
That is literally the only difference from the Heroic fight, an occasional extra bear that we cleave down in seconds.
That makes the fight sound dull though when it is actually the opposite, it is incredibly intense!
The main mechanic from normal and heroic remains, splitting into two groups and making sure the Focussed Gaze alternates running through each group.
Along with the Miasma pools left behind from Roaring Cacophony (Raar!), that means a rather deceptive amount of movement and you end up using the entire room.
Our biggest problem had nothing to do with movement though, it was that one of our tanks didn't know how, or more accurately when, to taunt.
That sounds bad enough but the reality is even worse... He knew the tactics so knew what he was supposed to be doing, taking one debuff while the other tank took the other debuff.
The problem arose because he couldn't tell when the other tank gained a debuff!
It was somehow hidden on his UI and he had no idea how to make it show up again.
Astounding!
Even with my extremely limited tanking experience, I know it's important to see what debuffs your co-tank has or doesn't have.
How did he even get this far without access to that key information?
Simple answer... he just did what DBM told him to do.
I suppose he's got a point :-)
After a few wipes and various attempts to fix the UI, we resorted to the main tank calling out every time a taunt was needed. DBM mark 2... not ideal but it did the job.
So we had everyone knowing where to run and tanks taunting on cue, now it was time to see if we had the numbers to kill the great bear.
We knew it would be tight, I imagine virtually all progress kills on this boss are tight, so we even had healers pre-potting with dps potions and doing their best to contribute whenever they could.
I said it was quite intense, it's only 5 minutes until enrage and that time just flies by!
We filled the outer circle and had to move into the middle of the room as time was running out.
Another add spawned but we had to ignore it (does it do anything anyway??) and focus the boss.
The 5 minutes were up and Ursoc went crazy!
With each passing second he would 1-shot a player or two but his health was dropping fast and, at 5mins10secs with only 8 people alive, he fell!
The tension had built to such a point, there were old-fashioned nerd-screams on teamspeak when he fell. It was fantastic! :-)
Dragons next!
Should be interesting as we have a healer that can't dispel :-s
*who is not Matt Damon
I remember a time when I was called back into being an emergency tank. I had nothing set up for it since I had been main specced as a healer for quite a few years. I had dabbled with raid tanking when needed in an emergency but really I only had my tank spec for levelling and solo. So my ui had never been properly configured for raid tanking. In those odd occasions in the past I got away with it.
ReplyDeleteIt looked fine until the boss fight started and then it just went to shit. I had timers and health bars and all sorts of crap pop up on my screen. Every time we wiped I explained that I needed to tweak my ui. Only thing is , every time I did it would mess something else up. It also didn't help that back in those days I was also fighting with having 3fps on some fights.
It got to the stage where a very disappointed shamen had to shout out to me when to swap the quillen boss with the other tank. It was not a good night for me and everyone else in the raid.
So I do have some empathy with your tank although I assume he is a main tank and therefore should have his shit figured out.
The moral of this story .....I never tanked again. I realised my skills lay in putting hots on other players hoping, that would cover my arse in the milliseconds it took my screen to refresh 😀
Surely the moral of the story is... Sort your UI out!
DeleteOr maybe... Always keep your OS updated!
:-)
Yeah, in this case, he is main spec tank and has been for quite some time. I've no idea how he got this far but it does explain some strange wipes we've had.
I think the most frustrating part of it is that he hid the issue, even when we had those wipes, rather than asking for help (which he has now received).
I absolutely hold MS tank in mythic progression to a higher standard than OS tank helping out on normal Stone Guard, and higher than my feeble attempts at tanking over the years.
Am I being too harsh?
I was going to ask why you didn't just sort your UI out for future raids but, with how frequently I run away from tanking at the first hurdle, it would probably be a bit hypocritical :-)
p.s. Raiding with 3 fps. Ouch.
p.p.s. Stay away from that Shaman, he sounds like a dick! ;-)