Mage Tank Training
By: Intp
Big appreciation to Syl, Muppet, Mal, Zoe and moral/tactical support from LD :) for their epic patience and helping me learn Tanking through the Temple of Ankhet experts.
-We ran Temple, Fortress, Darkening Deeps.
-I had major crashes on the Temple Pillar boss. Depsite this the team was able to survive long enough for me to relog and complete the boss! I had run this instance dozens of times, even on the Ultra graphics settings with no problem, but I had recently added the KBM (King Boss Mod) add on. After uninstalling this I was able to run the instance again with no problem. The comments on Curse about the add on clearly shows complaints that it crashes Dungeons and IA's so it had to be completely removed from the add on, not just disabled.
On Gristlespitt we struggle with one mechanic: Aggressive Charge: Charges a player and instantly kills them unless a barrel is picked up (or through healing cooldowns).
-The boss is chained up to a wench, emotes the charge, then click the lever to pull him in. It is possible to pull this too early or too late, you have to wait for the emote to pull it but it starts to sparkle before he emotes. We had a range do this and it went much better.
-Spreading out prevents getting his spittle.
-"When he charges a player, that player either needs to pick up a barrel of booze lying around somewhere in the arena or be saved by a healing cooldown".
I had far less problems with the bosses than with the adds, this comes down to developing an intuitive sense of:
-How far I could pull from.
-Selecting a single target or multi target pull
-When to charge
-How far to pull a group and how many to group. For example on one of the runs down to the boss area, I grabbed all but one mob towards the bottom, not a show stopper but would have been more efficient to go down a little further so he could have been AOE'd down.
-Identifying casters and coordinating the pull on them. A mage has two pulls, if you are out of range of a caster and you try to 'run back towards' him to pull him you can lose aggro on the group you have already grabbed. This is improving for me and is actually a very fun mechanic to learn.
Darkening Deeps:
-Just dragging the mobs to the bottom is way less confusing than trying to stop, fight and dodge red.
-The first set of three bosses can be tanked in between the two pillars, just number the two small bosses, drag them out a bit and then get the taller of the three bosses last.
-If you are running through the spiders, blow a shield cool down to help you make it through if you don't have uber HP and armor yet.
Overall one of the funnest times I've had to date and great support and patience from the family!
-INTP