In officer chat I remarked, "This is going to be either interesting or a complete failure." Someone amusingly pointed out that it could be an interesting failure too. My fellow officers know my penchant for doing things off-spec.
So I logged on Gillien and put on his tanking gear. Sure enough, 490 defense, so he's uncrittable against anything up to level 73, which should be fine for Nexus. It was Kara/heroic gear so I figured I should be all right for mitigation. I had some concerns though, just because I hadn't tanked an instance since the 3.0.2 patch unless one counts the Headless Horseman fight.
Prior to that patch, I knew exactly where I stood on building threat, because spell damage was something I could easily relate to as a holy paladin. One of my talents even increased it. Now that prot paladins rely on attack power to do holy damage... well, for one thing I'm still swinging [Gavel ofNaaru Blessings] around because it has a fair bit of stamina and I don't have a new tanking weapon yet. Supposedly my threat would still be good though, since the prot paladins survived the change just fine.
We started the instance all right, but wiped embarrassingly hard on an early pull. I was quite frankly horrified because the first thing that goes through my mind when I die as a tank is that my mitigation is horrible, I underestimated the need for CC, I suck, etc.
Actually, we just needed to mark the kill order. I hadn't been given lead, so when I suggested that I could mark the targets, I got it, and then progress went much more smoothly. We did have one more wipe, but that was the rhino pet's fault for bringing adds (turn off knockback in instances please!).
Once we got into a rhythm, tanking became fun again. I felt a little spastic once we got to Keristrasza though. She has a debuff she puts on all the party members where they take damage from cold if they stand still too long. Even though I knew this and had done this fight before as a healer, for some reason my skull got particularly thick shortly after the fight started and I didn't keep moving after I positioned her. Then I wondered why I was taking so much damage and blowing all my emergency buttons just to stay alive.
After a mental bonk on the head I started shifting around, side to side, front and back. I hated doing that because we had two melee dps and it's rough on them having to reposition themselves every time the boss moves, but once I started dancing around healing me became much easier.
Overall though, I think it was a good experience. And thanks to a quest that was shared I now have a nice new pair of shoulders. Finally hit 12k health in tanking gear! Haha!
3 comments:
Moonfire wrote: I started shifting around, side to side, front and back
You can also jump in place. This works poorly if you're healing, because you can't cast until you land, but it works pretty well if you're tanking, because all the tanking skills are instant-cast.
Off-spec tasks are fun! Makes you think about what you have to do, using a skill set that is NOT designed for the task at hand.
And... by the way... Prot uses STAM for spell power - Ret is the AP --> SP conversion. =)
Jason: I hadn't thought about jumping in place. That's a good idea. I'm so used to being a caster that I hardly ever jump for anything other than canceling a cast.
Orgauth: Thanks for the reminder. I forgot about the talent that gives spellpower for stam. I was thinking about how Seal of Vengeance does damage based on a combination of AP and spellpower and missed that prot paladins do use spellpower still.
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