Saturday 17 October 2009

Zetter is Fur Tankz

So after a long time raiding on my druid I have collected a fair amount of Feral gear (much to our beloved Tess from http://www.reflectionsfromthepond.com/ annoyance), my offspec was boomer for a long time so I could help dps in raids and instances.Over the past couple of months it seemed a shame to let all that feral gear go to waste (some of it better than my boomer gear) and I fancied getting back in to tanking again as an offspec. This also has the bonus of allowing me to help out in heroics as either in demand spec.


I went straight over to the fantastic starting guide at Big Bear Butt (http://thebigbearbutt.com/2009/07/04/modern-bear-tanking-1-specs-and-rotations/) which set me up with the basics and gave me some great macros to help out. Hence was born Zetter the offspec tank RAAAAAAAA.










So hows it been going? Well my first major task after testing out my key binds and macros in the combat dummies was TOC heroic, a big ask this one but it was a guild run so they tend to me more forgiving than jumping into PUGs.It went great despite on of our hunters wanting to see how good my threat generation and multi mob tanking was by Multishotting everything in site on the confessor (you know it was you Darka!). After this I have done quite a few heroics with little issue.Next stop raid tanking! (disclaimer only when our main tanks are not able to or its a fun run I am still a hard core healer tree)
Zetter

Tuesday 13 October 2009

Healing in 25 mans

So last night we were oversubscribed with people for raiding so we pushed into 25 mans with a 23-24 person team and hit Ulduar. Now we did well and got up to the keepers while killing Onyxia in 25 man mode along the way.

As usual I was tree healing and I noticed something in my long absence from 25 mans. Healing was a LOT easier in 25 normal man than in 10 man.
In 10 man we have been running a lot of groups with two healers this generally means that as a healer you need to do a bit of everything tank healing, raid healing, self healing ect ect. Also if one of you drops the ball generally it means the raid wipes or someone dies. Mana becomes an issue during long fights and if you run out there is precious little time to get it back.
In 25 man we had five healers and there are a lot of people to cover each other. For example on the Onyxia fight our pally healer DCed due to the dreaded AOE damage effects and was out for the whole fight. Now in 10 man with 2 healers this would have probably caused a wipe but we managed to get the big git down with 4 of us.

This has got me to thinking 25 mans are still seen as the think to get into. They give better rewards because they are supposedly harder. But in all truth where is the difficulty is it mainly in the organisation of a 25 man raid (i.e. its tougher to get 25 people together than 10 and sort out DKP, , drama what to do ect ect).
Because from a healers point of view the difficulty seems greater in 10 mans as there is no where to hide if you drop the ball everyone will know it as they will be looking at the wrong end of a mace in the face from whatever boss you are facing.
Admittedly the difficulty ramps up in 25 mans during hard mode but so does it in 10 man again as you need to drop healers for DPS to beat the hard timers.

Zetter