Mend Pet

When I first decided to level my paladin, I knew I wanted to try my hand at tanking.  I’ve DPSed on my hunter, I’ve healed on my priest, but I’ve never leveled a character that could tank.

I still managed to get to 75 without giving it a try though.  I’ve run my fair share of dungeons, but with all the Death Knights and Druids around, tanking always seemed to be covered.  I got to DPS, which I really enjoy! (Or ocassionally paladin heal, which I don’t enjoy so much.)

To be honest, I was scared.  How do you tank for the first time with a bunch of strangers?  What if I can’t handle it and cause the group to fail? Ah!  /stress

Well, after getting a hand from Psynister’s tanking guide and reading a bit of the Basic Training forum at Maintankadin, I felt I was ready.  I had my Cobalt Armour all ready to go, and I queued myself up for Utgarde Keep and The Nexus. (You always want your first time to be somewhere familiar and with someone below your level… right?).

Unfortunately, no one else wanted to run those.  So I gave up and shoved myself in the Azjol-Nerub queue.  Have you ever been to AN?  I have only been there twice before.  But the first boss is not friendly.  Once you start on your trash, they keep coming in waves followed by the boss.

[Healer]: WAIT FOR MANA!
[Hunter]: ya srsly!

>.< It was only my first boss fight and I was already getting yelled at!  I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t pulling, the pulls chain pull themselves.  We made it through the fight, even though I died near the end.

The second boss pull is also pretty similar, stuff just keeps coming.  We all survived even though I forgot to move out of the green stuff.  Last boss went pretty smoothly, and I picked up a tanking ring.  I was pretty happy with the run, considering the only person who died was me, and it isn’t really the best instance for your first time tanking.

[Healer]: Anyone want to run Old Kingdom??

Well, at least I knew I wasn’t too bad, since they didn’t kick me from the group after the run!  I told them I’ve never  been in there before on any character, so I took a couple minutes to get a quick overview of the place.

And this run went much more smoothly than I expected.  In fact, the one problem was the hunter.  He was a bit too eager.  He decided that since he has Misdirect, he is allowed to decide when to make the pulls.  He also had his pet on Defensive, so whenever he tried to misdirect, his pet would run over and steal aggro.  Argh. I tried to tell him to put his pet on Passive, but he wouldn’t listen.

All in all, the run went well.  I picked up another piece of tanking gear! We had 2 or 3 wipes, but they were all caused by the Hunter’s stupid misdirecting when a pat was near, or misdirecting a group when I was pulling a different group.  I think I did pretty well!

I didn't get a screenshot of the text... Whoops! I swear it was Ghugh!

/sigh of relief

Oh, and look at Ghugh’s new spikey shoulders!  Aren’t they pretty?

If I’ve learned anything from all the priest bloggers I follow, it’s the importance of Levitate!

Re-roll Ferguson reached the fine level of 35 yesterday, picking up his floaty ability.  Sure, his gear isn’t pretty… but I promise you he is a priest!

We’ve got about 3 weeks left on the Recruit-a-Friend, and we’re going to try to get as close to 60 as we can.  So far, we’re pulling about 4 levels each time we play for 2-3 hours, so we’re making decent progress.  Having mounts is certainly helping now too!

Next stop is Nesingwary’s Camp and the rest of Strangethorn Vale… we are both thoroughly looking forward to doing it for the first time on a PvE instead of PvP server.

Tuesday’s roster was… interesting.  We’ve recently come in to a whole slew of new recruits, which bumped out signups from having about 23 signed up as available to having closer to 33.  Quite nice to have a selection to choose from, and backups in case someone can’t stay!

And the raid itself went great!  We took out Flame Leviathan, XT and Kologarn in 1 shot each.  We also took out Auriaya, and she saw fit to hand over her Siren’s Cry!  Luckily the loot distribution was such that I was next up for gear among the present Hunters, so it’s mine!

It’s a very different feeling, being the first to get a shiny new Hunter weapon from Ulduar.  I was last of our raiding Hunters to get a Naxx ranged weapon, as well as last to get Journey’s End.  I am glad I don’t have to be last again!

We also took down The Iron Council with only a few tries, clearing out the Antechamber on Heroic for the fist time.   I think we can improve on that fight – specifically, next time I will move over to the Stormcaller after the big guy goes down so it’ll be easier for me to interrupt.  It’s nice to have me on interrupts there since I can stay out of range of his Overcharge ability but still get him easily.

Wednesday night we found ourselves face to face with Freya again.  We spent nearly 2 nights on her last week with only once passing into Phase 2… it was a bit discouraging.  But this week went much better!  After 3 attempts, we got her down.  What did we do differently?  Well, not much.  But we learned that Shockwave is the most effective way to freeze the explodey flowers in place, and that for us, the best way to deal with phase to is to have everyone loosely stack, and then alternate between two spots with Freya whenever she drops her seeds.

Thorim… not so nice.  We were having serious issues in the tunnel, and are yet to find the perfect balance of DPS to bring along.  I think we’ll do better next time if we bring one or two more.

Thursday we decided to finally suck it up and finish that darn Siege Quarter.  In only about 2-3 attempts each, we managed to take down Ignis and Razorscale, the bane of Unemployed!  Huzzah!  Rejoice!

We spent the rest of the evening working on Hodir.  We basically got him down… less than 8% left on one of our attempts, so we KNOW we can do it.  And we will next time!  I think everyone was just a bit too tired and losing their coordination nearing the end of the night.

SERVER FIRST!

So that’s 4 new bosses, and 7 achievements in 3 nights of raiding!  Not too shabby, if I do say so myself!

This Week in Raiding… is my weekly Saturday post where I allow myself to brag about new gear, bosses, achievements, and such.

Come back next week for another dose of epeen and QQ!

Spent some more time with the Paladin this weekend!  I didn’t get the 4 levels in 1 day I got last week, but I did managed to get him to nearly 69.  Woo, almost to Northrend!

I decided not to head out right at 68 because that’s when I had just started Nagrand.  Nagrand is my favourite Outlands zone – I’m not going to skip it!

I discovered something though:  They made the Nagrand quests shorter in 3.1! Remember the Mastery quests from Nesingwary?  You had to kill 30 of every beast in the zone?  No longer!  They’ve all been knocked down to 12!  Does this mean the DEHTA has finally gotten to Nesingwary?  I think so!

In fact, this holds true for several other quests in the zone that I’ve noticed so far – the poo quest is down to 8 poo instead of 15 poo, you only have to kill 8 water elementals and 8 shadow elementals instead of 12 each… they have just made it all a bit quicker.

Even more reason to continue leveling in Outlands before hoping on a boat!

In other Paladin news, I ran a Blood Furnace PUG on the weekend.  We started with 2 Death Knights, 2 Paladins and a Rogue.  If you haven’t already, you can read my theory on Death Knights and PUGs.  I got shoved into the role of healer, which was fine.  We had no tank specified – it was a Free For All between the other Paladin and DKs.  That was fun to heal.

Well, we made it past the first boss, and then we wiped because someone pulled 2 groups full of silencers and I couldn’t ret heal our way through it.

DK #2 has gone offline.

/facepalm.

But for once, the rest of the PUG wanted to keep going.  So we did.  And we 4-manned the rest of Blood Furnace with two half-tanks and a ret paladin healer, with not a single wipe.    Too bad for the guy who ‘disconnected’, just gave us more loots!  So my theory holds true: our PUG was actually more successful after we lost the second DK!

After this, I decided to respec my secondary talents for Holy rather than Protection.  There are two reasons for this:

1. I don’t want to learn how to tank for the first time with a PUG.  I would rather wait til 80 when I can go with people who will be patient with me and help me out.
2. There is always a huge shortage of healers while leveling and PUGing. If I can fill that hole, I will be much more likely to finish instances.

So, while I really don’t enjoy paladin healing compared to priest healing or paladin DPS, I can deal with it.

So yesterday I was dual-boxing on my machine with my boyfriend’s Hunter to help me get Ghugh’s dungeon runs for his Charger quest. It was a very long afternoon, as we had to run UD Stratholme, Dire Maul and Scholomance… and I can sometimes bore easily.  We took turns playing to get it all done, and much frustration was had in Scholo.

When doing the final event in Scholo, I read that if you wipe, you have to reset the instance and do it all over again.  Well, my paladin died from AoE pretty early, and I was not happy.  I tried running him back, but of course the gates were shut so I could get close enough to get XP, but not in the door.  The event seemed to be taking forever, so I figured I had to reset.  Since my Hunter was stuck in the instance, I hearthed them both out and then started the long journey back to Scholo.

It was only then that I read that the event can still be completed after the paladin has died as long as he is… close enough to get XP.  So I reset it and hearthed for no reason at all!  He died again the second time, but the strategy worked, and I finished the event with the Hunter and ran the Paladin in after.  Much rejoicing was had!

I also saved a lot of money by going this way instead of buying the ability at 61.  Since I had most of the mats from being a miner, it only cost me about 230g to get this quest done, rather than the 500g or whatever it costs to just simply train it and buy the mount.  So there!

"Feat of Strength? ... What we have is great Strength of Feet!"

But an interesting little thing happened during this run.

At one point I decided to swap out his cat pet for his Gorilla pet, because… well, it just makes more sense.  So I used Call Stabled Pet, spent Gorilla’s talent points and went on killing things.  Then I noticed the little +s and sparkles that go with Mend Pet… but I didn’t remember casting it.  I look at his buff only to find this:

Huh!  That’s pretty sweet.  Bring this to a raid and you’re sure to top the healing (and overhealing) meters.   And it’s still there today, after logging out and everything… but now there are only 20 days remaining!