Mythic dungeon week, perfect excuse to do some tanking on my Paladin.
His gear is in a bit of a mess at the moment with a mixture of stats as I switch him from role to role. Crit is king for Holy while haste is the worst stat and, of course, the reverse is true for Prot/Ret.
As my overall plan with this char is to heal our social raid, all the gems and enchants are Crit. I figure that this shouldn't make too much difference to my tanking as I have no intention of pushing into difficult content any time soon.
Eventually I will need two sets of gear but there is no rush for that and it definitely isn't needed to run 4 Mythic dungeons.
So I was expecting a nice easy ride to complete my quest and obtain a Heroic shiny.
When I logged on, some guildies were already running Mythics so I waited to join their group. Unfortunately, they had already done a couple of 'normal' mythic dungeons and wanted to step it up to Mythic+ to use their keystones.
Ok... so not quite going to be as easy as I was expecting but it should be fine.
I insisted on starting with the lowest one, to see if my tanking could hold up to the extra damage, which was Black Rook Hold on a gentle +2.
I know BRH fairly well, where the difficult parts are and where you can save a bit of time, so was happy with that side of things. It was just the overall damage, particularly on those more difficult pulls, that I wanted to check.
The fact that it took them over 10 minutes to get to the instance should have been a warning of what was to follow... Nah, only joking, it wasn't that bad.
There were a few deaths that were definitely avoidable... Spider poison, rolling boulders, barraging hunters... that kind of thing, but I was happy with how the tanking side of things was going.
Then we got to the gauntlet near the end, where you run up the stairs with all the bats flying around.
This bit may have been my fault but hey ho...
When we killed the two mobs at the bottom of the stairs my spells picked up every bat that was flying nearby... virtually every Prot Pala spell is AoE!
I decided the best course of action would to run, without stopping on the middle platform and getting swamped with bats, all the way into the boss room and kill the mobs in a bat-free environment.
I've seen it done before and figured a Warrior, DK and MM Hunter would have plenty of AoE to kill everything before I ran out of cooldowns.
It turns out there are a couple more of those mobs than I remembered so it was going to be a bit trickier. I still think we would have been ok but the hunter hit Barrage as we ran up, pulling all of the bats in the entire world.
/sigh
Everyone else was running straight up to the boss room so she got aggro and died almost instantly, leaving us about a million bats to deal with and 1 less dps to do it.
The mobs were massively enraged because (in what was to become a recurring theme of the evening) I was the only one interrupting but, luckily, they were almost dead by the time I finally succumbed to the onslaught and our melee finished them off.
I'm not sure if that is the best approach for the gauntlet but I think we would have been fine with less bats and more dps.
What is the 'correct' way to do it?
The rest of the dungeon was fine and we got two chests. Maybe I could have gone faster in parts but I felt constrained by the dps, it was probably all the running from the avoidable deaths that really cost us the extra chest though.
Overall, happy with the tanking side, so we moved on to Maw of Souls +3.
MoS... probably the easiest of the Legion Dungeons, what could possibly go wrong? :-)
It started well, I even did the big pull up to the first boss which was fun!
I'm not sure our healer agreed as people failed to move from the various cleaves and soaked up all her mana, but we got through ok.
The inside of the boat wasn't too bad either but I noticed that our recurring theme had continued and nobody was interrupting the two big mobs just before you go outside.
Knowing the deck was full of mobs casting fears and heals that would need interrupting, I made a point of stopping and telling the rest of the team that we would need more interrupts...
60 seconds later, we have pulled the entirety of the deck as nobody managed to interrupt any of the fears...
the mobs are all at full HP because, of course, nobody managed to interrupt the heals either...
and we wipe.
Paladins are amazing for interrupting with Avenger's Shield and an AoE stun on top of their regular interrupt but I couldn't get everything on my own and we crawled our way down that deck to the next boss, it took forever.
Even on the last boss, it couldn't just be easy...
Our amazing Monk healer was oom before the fight started.
This time it was definitely my fault! I jumped down thinking she could drink while Helya did her RP bit but it didn't work that way and she was on fumes from the start.
the fight itself started badly with both melee ignoring the destructor tentacles and just hitting the ones at the side, so much so that the 2nd and 3rd were up together... it was just lucky they were close together and I could tank them both at the same time.
We reached P2 and, knowing the healer had no mana, I was hoping for some help on the interrupts.
The DK died to the very first breath so wasn't going to get much help from him but I didn't get any help from the other dps either... and then they died together to another breath.
Me and the oom Monk limped our way to the end of the fight and 1 chest.
I mentioned again the (lack of) interrupts, the DK moaned that he was dead so couldn't interrupt... fair point I suppose, not something I would be shouting about but accurate.
I linked the total interrupts for the two dungeons we had completed:
Me... 58 (Paladins are OP)
Warr... 14
Hunt... 4
DK... 1
The Warrior is happy with the 14 and the DK was strangely silent while the Hunter responds with... "I don't see them on my screen"
Now I've known this hunter for a long time and heard many comments like this but even I was confused... and I'm hoping she won't mind me having a little fun at her expense here.
The Warrior asks "What don't you see?"
"What I need to interrupt is off my screen" she replies, explaining everything.
"What is off your screen?" the Warrior bravely continues.
"I don't know, I can't see it." Eh? "I just interrupt when I can and hope it hits something"
Yes, you have read that right.
I called for more interrupting and our Hunter decided to start blindly casting Counter Shot on cooldown in the hope that it would interrupt something.
/facepalm
I needed a break after that but when I returned the group wanted to do a +4, we had a choice between Halls of Valor and Eye of Azshara.
I picked EoA as I know that one better and didn't fancy the drinking hall part of HoV, it was my first experience of tanking an affix (Sanguine this time) so wanted it to be as smooth as possible.
The first boss took an absolute age to die but it was all going pretty well so far... I worked out what Sanguine looked like on the first pack so just had to keep an eye out for that and kite the mobs a little.
Moving down the hill, we come across one of the witches. We are killing her but pick up some stray wildlife and the witch ends up in a Sanguine puddle left behind by a dead turtle.
Typically, both of my interrupts are on cooldown so the witch stays in the pool casting away and healing back up to full. I decided to wait for a few seconds to see if anyone would do anything about it... it just stayed in the pool at full HP.
Oh well, interrupt and move on.
After poking a bit of fun at my team-mates, obviously the next fail would be mine :-)
There are a few blobs around the pool of the second boss. I have seen other tanks pull them, I just assumed it was so they didn't accidentally get pulled during the boss fight, but didn't know what they did.
It turns out they slow movement speed and, with enough stacks, you can't move at all!
Ploughing into them regardless, I ended up rooted as they all died and Sanguine pools on the floor...
Never mind, I hear you say, you are a Paladin so can just use Blessing of Freedom or Blessing of Protection to remove the root/debuff and get out of the pool.
And yes, that is exactly what most Paladins would do.
This Paladin is really a Shaman and didn't think of it until about an hour later... so just died in the pool.
Numpty.
At this point, I realised I could have used Cleanse on the poison from the spiders in the first dungeon.
Double numpty.
2nd boss died easily and we were clearing the trash on the 3rd when the DK decided he had had enough of trash and pulled the boss.
Tanking the boss and all of the surrounding trash was great fun!
Our Monk, as usual, did an amazing job to keep us all alive through the mess of boss abilities, trash hydra abilities and random seagulls.
We moved on!
Clearing the small packs of crabs before the tunnel, the DK asks why I am pulling extra.
I'm busy tanking so just carry on but he asks again as we pull more inside the tunnel, and the Hunter joins in asking (and this one really made me laugh)...
"Don't you know this is a timed run?"
I can't tank and type at the same time, which is probably for the best, so this went on for a couple of minutes until the Warrior and Monk explained the concept of the mob counter... reinforced by the fact that, despite all my 'unnecessary' extra pulls, we finished on 99% and had to go hunting for a crab.
And people wonder why I don't tank...
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