Mistakes R Us

Ok lets have more of that good ol' Stunty screwed up posting.

The Setting


During my PvP week I logged on to join our guilds Karazhan raid as they were short dps, and I was specced to fill that spot. We had set ourselves the goal of doing the Maiden and the Opera Event in under 2 hours. This suited me fine as I had had no sleep the night before due to "too much WoW induced insomnia".


The Excuses



I'll get these out of the way so that they don't interrupt the main story.

1) As previously mentioned I had not slept in about 40 hours.

2) It has been quite a while since I raided as dps.

3) I had been doing a lot of PvP this week so my whole UI was set up for that. I had made some modifications back to a more raiding oriented UI, but it soon became apparent I had not done nearly enough. Also remember that my whole UI is composed of 3rd party addons.

4) I was distracted by a prominent guildie leaving the guild half way through the run. I suspect it was mainly because he was pissed at not being included in the Karazhan run (Probably the first time he was on line and hadn't been included), he has since rejoined the guild.


Mistake 1

We were tearing along to the Maiden when on one pull I make the mistake of clicking my "switch to battle stance /charge" macro while already in battle stance. "So what?" you say, " Thats what it's for, making you charge, right?" well yes ... but usually it's wise to wait until after the tanks have hit their targets before charging. Yep thats right I charged right out in front of the tanks hitting thats nasty mob with a nice big juicy crit. He didn't seem to like it much and promptly turned round and smushed me good before the tanks knew what was happening.

Ok my bad, but nobody else got hurt and we proceed to one shot the maiden, things are looking up.

On to the opera event!

Mistake 2

My next mistake happens on the first pull on the lead up to the opera event and I believe the technical term for it is "Lolz I make big numberz". Thats right folks I turned into the dreaded DPS junky.

There are those big guys guarding the seating area of the opera event, Skeletal Ushers I think. But anyway the point is that they freeze the highest threat target and start beating the hell out of the second highest threat target ... Which as it turned out was me. You see I was busy making "Big Numberz" and hadn't realized that I had exceeded the Off Tanks threat ... this might have something to do with the fact that I had turned my threat meter off. /facepalm. I truly am a disgrace to tanks everywhere ... I mean running in a raid without a threat meter ??? Anyway the end result was that the big guy freezes the bear and two shots me, not only that but he scores two 8k crits on me I only had 2k left after he did the first one but he went all out on my hiney. We go on to kill the Big Bad wolf (he got me while I was little red riding hood) and decided to take a shot at the Curator.

Ok lets review ... I have my stance bar back up and now have Omen threat meter covering half my screen. That should just about cover it right? Wrong!

Mistake 3 (and it's a doozy)

We move along at good speed and get to the Curator shortly before the raid duration runs out (we had shedualed this to be a two hour raid). We clear the room and set up to fight the curator, the tanks out front and everyones in their propper positions. Oh damn I forgot to put the Battle shout up, I guess I'd better do it now. My timing could not have been worse! We were using a feral druid MT and he had set himself up to body pull the curator which he did and the exact moment I cast Blood Rage and Battle Shout. Next thing I know there's what seems to be several tons of highly annoyed Curator bearing down on me. Whoops any spell at all causes more threat than a body pull, and I've just cast two, catching the poor MT flat footed as the last thing he expected was for the curator to ignore the big juicy bear in front of him and tear off at a tangent towards the inocent looking Dwarf with the big Axe.

Bad stunty BAD, go sit in the corner and think about what you've done!

No! Wait don't sit in the corner!

Run towards the tank, redeem some of that lost tanking pride by doing the right thing!

So I tear forward as fast as my little legs would carry me and jump between the curators legs. He still managed to hit me for about 6k and would have turned me into dwarven pancake if a nice pally hadn't given me a quick heal and a BoP (actualy it was two nice pallys one with the heal and one with the BoP). The tank managed to get the Curator back under control and we carry on as normal, we don't however manage to down the curator as our dps was just too low that day, and one of our healers had to go to work after that attempt (Damn you RL for interfeering in my gameing). The end result was that I head away feeling very shamefaced about the whole raid, and looking forward to going back to what I do best (i.e. stand in front of everyone and get hit alot, oh the glorious life of the tank).

Thank you for sitting through another "Don't do what I did" post.