Not with a bang but a whimper.

On Thursday we achieved a Tribute to Insanity, something which as a guild I never thought we were capable of (too many people fond of trying to tank the Faction Champions). By Friday morning it seems as if the guild is pretty much on the way out. Already the rats are leaping from the sinking ship in search of greener pastures and Icecrown seems impossible. Why you might ask… a simple forum post in which our GM stated that she wants to play a bit less. I suppose its one way of finding out which people are interested in a community and which are just after shiny purples.

Obviously things are not yet written in stone, but the prognosis doesn’t seem particularly good. Which leaves me in a strange mood, on the one hand I’m angry because my raiding has been brought to an abrupt halt and I had no control over it. Yes, I could look for another guild but finding one which wants both a priest and a warrior would be tricky if not impossible. Then there is the fact that over Christmas we have family commitments to keep and then in January we are moving house meaning that trialling for a new guild even if we could sweet talk our way into one as a package would be hard. Then on the other side of the coin is a sense of relief. If the guild had continued its fairly hardcore raiding, we would have been letting people down when January arrived and we had to disappear whilst we moved (our raiding roster was fairly tight and my boyfriend is/was the maintank). Not to mention the fact that I find the game less and less enthralling these days.

On a slightly more interesting note, here is a video of our heroic Anub’arak kill.

We use 2 tanks (both warriors), one on the boss and one tanking all the adds in an unhittable block set. 6 healers, basically 1 per mark plus one full time on the tanks (in the video two of them are holy paladins who have the tanks beaconed as well). As a disc priest I got the exciting job of taking one mark plus keeping shields on the rogues to make sure they stay alive as our strategy relied fairly heavily on tricks.

But it seems to borrow (and paraphrase)  T.S Eliot’s words,

This is the way the guild ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

At least we got to end on a high I suppose.

Time to “Sweep the leg” again

Flicking through all the 3.3 patch goodies on MMO Champion, I couldn’t help but notice something.  Lurking in amongst the names of the weekly raid quests is every priest’s favourite fight. Instructor Razuvious, he the dashing blue armour and the four rather disappointing students. So because I’m sweet and kind, I thought I would share the macro which made my tanking experiences considerably more bearable.

/target Instructor
/petattack
/click PetActionButton6;
/click PetActionButton5;
/raid —-> YOURNAMEHERE has Taunted <—–
/sw 20
/script Stopwatch_Play();
/in 20 /rsay === TAUNT NOW! ===

Obviously you want to change YOURNAMEHERE to your actual character name (I forgot the first time, something which I have never been allowed to forget). Basically it simplifies the fight down to cast mind soothe, cast mindcontrol and hit the macro which pops bone shield and taunts him. Then whilst tanking all you have to do is dps using blood strike and wait for your partner to taunt it off you.

I found it on WoWhead whilst digging through pages of information trying to figure out why even when hit capped my mindcontrol was very temperamental. Which leads me to the other piece of useful advice on the subject, make sure your paladins switch off shadow resistance aura. The last thing you need is your minion gaining 130 shadow resistance just as you mind control him. It tends to lead to squished priests and then everyone else running around blaming you for somehow being incompetent (especially in PuGs).