My Druid Tank Clears Karazhan

First off, welcome to any new readers that I my have due to the Wow Insider post from Dan O’Halloran this past Saturday.  As a matter of clarification and updates, I do have my flying epic mount now, and I’m about ¼-way through honored with the Netherwing.  The racing quests are a lot of fun; I like that the expansion brought out a lot of new types of quests.  But on to the main topic of today’s post.

Suffice it to say that I have a Druid tank that is pretty well geared for where we’re at.  Those of you that know the story and have “helped” him get all of his gear, the guild thanks you.  ;) I haven’t tanked in a lot of instances, so I learn something almost every time I do.  Over this long weekend we just had, I got the opportunity (read: responsibility) to be MT for most of Karazhan.  I really hadn’t tanked the main bosses in there at all.  But for the group we had online, I was by far the most well-geared tank.  The other tank we used was our pally tank (warriors were on holiday or something) who basically helped out on heals for the single tank bosses.

I think that the fights with Nightbane and Prince were probably the two most stressful times I’ve had in Wow ever, with Nightbane being about 100 times worse since you have to readjust multiple times.  Both of them need to be tanked in a certain position, so it is completely my responsibility to make sure the bosses are facing/standing the correct way.  Furthermore, I have to be standing against a wall, so I basically get to stare at this Big Bear Butt for the entire time.  And that’s if I’m lucky.  Most of the time, the graphics are so close that it just looks like multi-color polygons on my screen.  I had one of the healers tell me when I needed to move the bosses.

About ½-way through Nightbane (after killing Prince), I figured out one thing that made tanking these wall-hugging bosses easier.  Instead of my normal camera angle of right behind my toon, I found I could look directly down on my toon and actually see the angle of Nightbane.  I still had to kind of guess as to where he was relative to the party, and seeing the scorched earth was also a challenge, but it made things easier.  And, of course, once he went up into the air, I could resume my normal camera angle to take down the adds.  

We cleared the tower except for Illhoof and Netherspite, so it was a lot of tanking.  (Just didn't take time to attempt those bosses over the course of the 2 nights.)  There were also a lot of pulls that, normally being my mage in the back row, I didn’t really pay attention to the order of the pulls.  But it was a lot of fun.  No real down time, easy to chain pull stuff, always in the thick of battle… it was a lot of fun.  Now, if I can just get over the stress of it all.  Lol.  So, any other tanking tips like the camera angles thing?