Tanking PUG Karazhan.
As you can see (If you click for the full size image.) I’ve stolen Ambi’s hippy damage font. Not sure if anyone remembers Ambi. She’s been MIA for awhile now.
(This started out as a story about me tanking something and ended up being all educational and informative. Bleh!)
So you may have figured out by the picture of me attacking Prince’s feet and the title (Tanking PUG Karazhan) that I tanked Karazhan last night for a group of people I don’t know. I had just finished doing my arena matches for the night (1650ish in 5s. Woo! Yeah ok I’m still a scrub.) when one of my guildies mentioned he was having problems tanking prince. He said that he was tanking Prince Malchezaar and that getting crushing blows and he wanted to know why.
This is a pretty common question. When you click on Defense in your skill tab it says
Higher Defense improves your chance to dodge, parry, and block attacks, makes you harder to hit, and makes monsters less likely to land a critical strike against you.
and according Tankspot/Evil Empire and personal experience, Defense from gear/anticipation does not reduce your chance to take crushing blows. When you block an attack it can’t be a crit or a crushing blow and since you probably already have a high chance to block and you’ll be keeping Shield Block up as much as possible (read: Every time its off cooldown. Every. Single. Time.) you won’t be seeing crushing blows all that often. Prince WILL crush you though. While he’s dual-wielding he attacks extremely fast and eats through your shield block charges quickly, which leaves you open to crushing blows.
A couple of my guildies asked me if I could come and tank Prince for them. I figured that they made it to Prince so how bad could the pug be? (Famous last words right?) So I went and did a quick Respec to Protection and then got summoned out to Karazhan. Being a PUG I was worried about the healing but I have to say the healing was great and the prince fight went without incident. Well ok a hunter died and the other warrior died. Paladin/Rogue/Shaman T4, Healing Ring (I think), and the “Rogue” Dagger dropped.
I figured my job was done and was about to hearth out when they said they wanted to go do Nightbane. Uh-oh. So we all ran down to Nightbane’s area and they summoned him. We lost 2 mages and a Priest somehow during that fight. The mages died during the air phase and I’m not entirely sure what happened to the priest. When he was about to land the second time there was someone standing right next to me and I was so worried that they were going to get cleaved and die but somehow they managed to live. I almost died a couple times but potions, Last Stand, and Shield Wall and good healers saved me. With the loss of the two mages the DPS slowed down a lot so I think that coupled with the loss of the one priest made the healing a lot harder and by the end there they were running low on Mana which is probably why I almost died.
I had fun and I got to try out my new boots (They rock!) which made me happy. I’d definitely do that again and I hope that they ask me to come and do that again because it was pretty fun. Its so weird that people PUG that place now because I remember when we first got to Prince we had so many issues with him.
