057: /bows to the tanks & the healers

It's unlikely that this will be interesting to many people, but I was so impressed by the tanks and the healers last night that I need to write this down.

We'd put off the last part of BT until the end of the week so we could focus on Kalecgos. Sunday they had him at 2% so the following day they took the exact same group in the hopes that the magic would happen. It didn't, unfortunatly, as one of the 3 tanks had a family emergency bomb land on them in mid-raid. Unable to progress on Kalecgos, they went on to pluck off some BT bosses and got all the way to Mother. Since I wasn't in the raid and the raid was full, one of my good friends logged off his own char and onto mine, knowing that I was first in line for the t6 shoulder token if it dropped. Unfortunatly it wasn't a good night for anyone and Mother stayed up. Sometimes you just can't win.

Enter Tuesday, the last day of the reset, and we have 3 BT bosses left standing: Mother, Council and Sillydan. Afterwards we were meant to go Kalecgos hunting. Mother gets one-shot in probably our best kill to date (and I got my shouders! Woo!) but Council proves tricky. Our main tank suddenly disconnects which happens from time to time, but on this occasion he can't get back on. He's stuck on authenticating. We set up a trivia bot and play a few 20 questions rounds in the hopes that rebooting/resetting IP/other technimagical things will work, but no cookie. One of the Paladins is shipped off to Ironforge to respec. The Samurai Bear is switched from the Rogue to the Paladin, and the freshly specced Tankadin gets to play with the Rogue. Both are tanking these targets for the very first time, but it's perfectly executed. Council down and we're loving this whole 3 tier tokens business. Too bad the t6 legs stink for Shadow Priests.

Main Tank is still offline, so we set things up to let the Tankadin give Sillydan a try. It's 3 hours until end-of-raid and tomorrow everything resets. We really really really don't want to leave him up. (Plan B is to kiss the feet of one of our Horde buddies in the hopes that he'll be persuaded to log on our MT's character and tank for us.)

There are a few wipes - apparantly Blizzard messed around with the Flames of Azzinoth and made them a little harder than they used to be. We die to a couple charges until the Beartanks figure out what's been done and adjust accordingly. There's an embarassing wipe on behalf of all the healers where Tankadin dies 5 seconds into phase 3 because nobody heals him. Whops!

But then! Then everything starts to come together. Sort of.

I go down in phase 2. By then, two of the DPS'ers in my group are already dead and so is the Tankadin. In order to get at Samurai Bears combat rez (which is the only available), the order is given for the other Bear to taunt flame #2 as soon as flame #1 is down. The healers are so focused on the tank-switch that they forget about Dark Barrage. I'm dead in 3 seconds. No chance. Oh well, at least Tankadin is up and buffed before Illidan decends. One of the mages gets a little crit happy before Tankadin has established enough aggro and there goes the 4th person in my party. Clearly group 3 isn't the place to be.

But they plod along even though several of the key DPS'ers are down, and slowly but surely take him down to 30%. There's at least two occasions where Parasites aren't handled where they ought to be and there's a couple more deaths, but they get there. The mage gets a combat rez when somebodys cooldown is up to help with the parasite nuking. Maiev isn't in a friendly mood and keeps putting traps in walls or all the way over by the warlock tank. 4 DPS'ers and 1 healer are down and we keep watching the enrage timer. Thankfully, the Tankadin who has never done this before does everything perfectly and Illidan switches into Demon form at 3%. The warlock tank burns him down with ease. It's the most stressfull kill we've ever had of him, and I certainly hope we won't put him off until the last day again. It's a recipe for disaster: everything that can go wrong will go wrong in such scenarios. Still, it gave our tanks and our healers a chance to shine. They showed us just how far they can stretch, just how adaptable they are, just how good.

One of my chest token dropped. Tankadin took it. Methinks I'm first in line now. /wipes drool