I tanked something this weekend. I know, many people tank things all the time. But I am talking about as a priest. In an instance. A heroic, for that matter. In fact, it was a heroic boss…
Well, to start the story from the beginning:
I was in a group half-pug/half-guild trying to do the heroic daily for Auchenei Crypts. I believe only one person had done the instance on heroic mode before, and many of us hadn’t even done the instance on normal mode in a long time. So of course there were a few hilarious deaths (for the record, Levitate will NOT save you if you get punted off the bridge).
For those of you who haven’t done the instance before on heroic-mode: the first half of the instance is so much harder than the second half. By the time we got to the first boss, we had already had to go and repair once.
Shirrak the Dead Watcher proceeded to chomp through our group four times, our best attempt got him down to 40%. We had a holy priest healing, and a mage, rogue, and shadow priest on DPS, and a paladin tank. Positioning seemed to be a large problem for us.
Going into our fifth attempt (ugh) I thought I had an good understanding of what needed to happen with regards to the positioning and how the Focus Fire flares worked. As we were buffing up to attempt him again, I instructed the holy priest that we were going to let the tank die. I know, I know, this is a horrible thing, but our tank was moving the boss around too much, which caused large stacks of his magic-impairing debuff on the casters/healer, plus the tank never was able to shed the Carnivorous Bite debuff by moving away when Shirrak did the Focus Fire flare.
Sure enough, with the holy priest doing little to keep the tank alive, he dropped fast. Shirrak immediately turned onto me and I positioned him on the platform. I DPS’d the best I could, but the magic debuff shut down most of my spells. I shifted out of shadowform and just kept myself shielded, renewed and PoM up, and continued casting what I could. I was able to move the Carnivourous Bite debuff off me once, I stoneformed out of it the second time. The third time it got high I wasn’t given the opportunity to get it off, so I ended up dying from it after about 20 seconds of having a large stack. However, Shirrak went down moments after I did. Victory was ours!
We merrily continued on our way through the instance , and were able to clear through the second half with little trouble. In end, we ended up with four badges and a monetary reward that didn’t quite cover our hefty repair costs, but at least it was close.
What is the moral of this story? That shadow priests can be good tanks?
No, but a holy priest can be a damn good healer.
Keeping a clothie tank up on a heroic boss for almost the whole fight, especially given the nature of this particular boss, is a feat worthy of praise in my book.