The hiatus is over...

I got my steak, so I have to start posting again.

First things first, we just ran Kara again on Friday night. It went very, very well. It was Pos's first time as a tank through the whole instance.

We went Attumen to Prince down in just over 3 hours, skipping only Illhoof (no warlock). My fellow tank was Owaru, and we only ran into problems when I noob-bulled a pat before Opera, and when I was tanking Prince during phase 2, I went down twice.

The 3rd time was a charm, though, and we took him down.

Then we went to try Netherspite. After the first couple of tries, we got the strategy down (its a tough one to do without ever having seen it)

We had him to 18% but the untimely death of Orzag the Uber cost us.

We then had respawns and decided to call it, as we were past the 4 hour mark at that time.

Things I learned:

Offtank/tank synergy is a big deal. If you're the tank or offtank, your job is not only to hold aggro, its to mark, to prepare, and to keep the raid moving through trash.

Your job is NOT to dps. Your 180 dps means diddly poop on trash mobs. Take that 15 seconds and go mark the next group. Why? So as soon as the current target dies (after a quick check on healer mana - dps mana doesn't matter, no matter how much they whine) you can then pull the next group and keep the raid moving. 30 seconds here, and a minute there turns a 3 hour run into a 4 hour run.

I think that is the biggest difference between our current runs and our old regime runs.

Setting a DPSer to be the loot master, also another plus. When you down a boss, everyone but the loot master heads to the next spot. By making it a non-tank and non-healer, we can just roll on.

I felt like I did a good job. Like things went smoothly. The usual suspects praised me, but, I think they would do that if we wiped 87 times on Attumen, because, they are my good friends.

Next step? Netherspite and Nightbane.

We may need a 2-run week to do that, perhaps, next weekend we'll give it a go.

One night for a clear, one night for a learning process (and flasks for everyone!)