Deme Versus The Lich King - Complacency is Bad.

Tanking. Crotch Watching. Getting your head stoved in with a dragon claw/giant hammer/cleave. Whatever you call it, it's a great job to hold in a raid group. It's not only a position of responsibility, it's also to some extent, a position of power. Cue Spiderman quotes of 'With great power … yadda yadda yadda'. And sometimes we forget about the power we have. And we forget to be responsible and we get a wee bit too comfy in our raid team and then we get a bit of a wake up call. That's what happened to this little DK tank on Tuesday night this week.

TB#1 who I referred to in a previous post, wasn't raiding. That meant that where I would normally be tanking the adds on LK, I was on Arthas himself. I tanked Sindy, for the entirety of our time on her. How hard could this be right? Well. Pretty bloody hard it turns out. With a sweet warlock in the group who is readily able to kick out more dps than I'm used to holding against, and not being able to use DnD or the other AoE abilities to hold Arthas, I found I lost him. Not just once. We had a group make up which meant we had two DKs tanking. That meant the other DK was laying down DnD under Arthas to pick up the ghouls in phase 1. It also meant I couldn't really spam Howling Blast or Blood Boil as I'd thus pick up the ghouls. So I was relying on Icy Dick Punch, Dark Command, my hits and the use of Death Grip to keep Arthas looking into my pretty glowing blue eyes. It was tough. I suspect that there was an element of distraction, sleepiness and complacency sneaking in too.

We worked on Sindragosa for a long, long time. To the point where I felt the rhythm of the fight and was able to call things consistently and felt almost as if I could predict the way the fight was going. This made me complacent. LK is a very different tank fight. There is a lot more movement required of the tanks, constant communication in the transition phases and passing around Arthas when Soul Reaper is up. Tanking Arthas, even though I get to stand in one place for the first part of the fight, felt infinitely more taxing then tanking Sindragosa. It's nice to have the challenge again.