Daily Thoughts: Patch Day Blues

So 4.1 is in full swing and with that comes all the wonder and joy of new content and new ridiculous bugs. Fortunately, I wasn’t struck too seriously by the patch day blues. The majority of my addons worked right off the bat. The only notable exception for me was recount, but I can still raid without it. Yes, I can raid without watching my epeen grow and flourish. I got home about 20 minutes before raid time, downloaded the patch content, and went right to work tanking BWD and BoT. There were a few hiccups along the way to this otherwise very successful evening. A few of our raiders had trouble zoning in to the instances. They were getting odd error messages such as the instance cannot be found. Others disconnected when releasing from their corpse after a wipe. The most curious was on the Omnitron encounter. When the first boss mob reached 50 energy, it did not trigger a second. Eventually it ran out of energy and powered off without spawning any more bosses. I’m pretty sure someone declared we dps’d too hard that we broke it. Needless to say, we didn’t break it. If you get this bug, don’t fret too much. Just get everyone out of the instance and come back in. After that it was all smooth sailing. I tanked Chimaeron, Atramedes and the Twin Dragons for the first time and one shot them! Go me… ugh, I mean us… go us!

So you might be wondering, is there a list of known issues with patch 4.1? Why yes, yes there is. Blizzard was nice enough to post them HERE – a location which should have more current issues as time goes on. I’ve also included the entire list after the break, at least as it was at the time of this posting. Also check back on this blog in the next couple days for info on the new instances! (more…)

Daily Thoughts: It Was My First Time and…

No, I wasn’t tanking this boss, but some accidental fire mishaps ending up with us writing a letter. Besides, I don’t usually include a screen shot, be grateful.

So it was my first time and I rocked it! Just a few days ago we’re about to start forming up our raid for the night and noticed our sign-up list was lacking some key features. Namely, we were missing a second tank. I actually could have taken the easy way out and let our shaman take his alt Paladin. He is completely capable and geared almost completely in epics. If you’ve been reading, I did have a series of blogs about being scared to tank. This shaman of ours really wanted to gear his main and also really doesn’t like tanking. I decided to take up the challenge and let big ugly things beat on my face for the next 3 hours.

And beat my face they did. As I can recall, there was only 2 wipes during the night caused by my tanking. First was a death during the Omnitron encounter. You could also blame that on the healers for not keeping me up, but with relatively sub-par gear, my CD usage could have been a lot stronger. The only other wipe was a complete result of my fail. We were working on Throne of the Four Winds and I was tanking the frost boss. Never before had I been subject to such a constant slowing effect while switching to the other platform and started running for it too late. Missing the tank swap can be (and was) pretty fatal. Outside of that, things went pretty smoothly. Of course, I was the off tank so I had the pleasure of raid DPSing on my DK for 3 of the 6 bosses we fought that night. All in all, raid tanking – both bosses and trash – was dramatically easier than tanking a heroic. I’d be willing to wager this is due to having a group of competent players as opposed to a random collection of potential douches that don’t expect to
ever see you again. Whatever the reason, I won’t have any qualms with tanking some more in the future.

It can be pretty nice occasionally, though, to not tank or heal some raids. Just getting to pewpew/smashsmash a boss and move out of stuff occasionally is a lot more relaxing.