Sunday 7 November 2010

Who needs a tank when you have a turtle!


ETA: Video up here!

It can be a lot of fun seeing what you can take on in the game, and I was quite pleased with this kill a friend and I managed to get. We often go out to Hellfire to take out Magtheridon, usually he tanking on his warrior while I'm healing and helping dps. He's been working on his hunter recently though and thought we should try it with his pet tanking, which worked out pretty well and sped up our kill a lot.

We decided to see what else we could take out. We ended up heading to Northrend to check out Naxx 10. Some of the trash was a real nuisance - we thought about tackling Noth but decided not to bother this time as the trash would be a pain to clear. We had an alright time with Anub'Rekhan, but were falling a bit behind the enrage timer (the adds were causing some issues as their debuff required proper healing on Ortega (the turtle), taking away dps that I could do).

We decided to give Sapphiron a try, since it was a straightforward fight with no trash to clear. It was really quite good! We were a bit precariously close to the enrage timer, around 30 seconds off I think, though next time we should be better off as we got a good idea of what some of our positioning should be throughout.

The blizzards were the most annoying mechanic of the fight to deal with - since there was only two of us it usually came and sat right on us or drifted in rather irritating paths where we wanted to move to. Towards the end I just sat in it because moving seemed to keep putting us out of range of each other. Next time I may just sit in it briefly then shift slightly to step out once it's finished pathing, or just find a more coordinated way for us both to shift to keep in range of each other and minimise DPS time losses. Air phases were really simple to deal with as both of us were blocked each time, so it was simply a matter of waiting to be freed. Ortega was an excellent tank, held good threat and the AE damage reduction pets have mitigated a ton of the damage taken, especially from breaths.

I used my Tree of Life cooldown for DPS bursts rather than healing - the healing boost was still helpful, but I was timing the cooldown to try to get as many Wraths out as I could in the 30 second duration. I've been playing with this in dungeons especially - ToL Wrathing can pull some pretty good DPS if you're able to Wrath nonstop for the full 30 seconds. Moonfire and Insect Swarm are great helpers as you heal as well (though both will shift you out of ToL, so don't try to reapply them while in tree form). Three stacks of Faerie Fire should be up too for the armour reduction.

We should be heading back in again this week after the reset, I'd especially like to in order to video it this time (I thought to myself pre-pull 'I should record this', but of course I ended up not doing so), so hopefully we'll get back in again and I'll be able to upload a video of that as well. ETA: Video up here!

Very tempted to see what else we can take on around Outlands and Northrend. We managed to take down two of the Twilight Drakes in OS, Shadron and Vesperon, though Tenebron's whelps proved to be an issue. If we can get Tenebron down I imagine we may be able to take Sartharion down - the biggest issue I think would be the fire adds, as healing aggro really rips anything other than the primary target off of our turtle tank at the moment. Sarth has less HP than Sapphiron, so theoretically we could do it. We shall see!

Definitely some fun things to do while waiting for Cata!

2 comments:

Simon said...

would it be possible with a DK as tank and myself healing? I'd like to 2man a few naxx bosses in the weekends with my bro

Feral Tree said...

Definitely possible, so long as the damage is high enough to beat the enrage timer. Especially with Vengeance, tank dps is a lot better, and if he's decently geared he likely won't need too much healing so you could likely pump out some more DPS than I did. Worth a shot!

You might have better luck clearing some of the trash as well with an actual tank in - Ortega's threat wasn't the most amazing on large packs and trash just became a nuisance. We might have tried Noth (who I'm sure we could've killed) but we didn't want to bother with the gargoyals, who may have been an issue.