WoW ramblings: Been in Kara twice now, once as my pally, once as my lock.

Offtanking trash is very weird. You sit there running through your usual tanking routine for a long period of time, and it's sort of like you're the only person there, till the rest of the raid burns down the trash that the MT was on and gets to you. But I got the lone tank drop off of Attumen, that pleased me. We killed Moroes twice (we had some add management problems and I didn't know fear was bugged in that encounter), wiped on Maiden once (I was only cleansing that encounter, we had positioning problems), and cleared the Wizard of Oz opera event (in which I felt about as silly as can possibly be, tanking Tinhead by running from him). When we came back to try to do more, some of our group wasn't on, so we ended up pulling in a couple of people who were pretty lousy, and thus couldn't get past Curator.

Going in as my lock was a bizarrely different experience. With consumables I broke 1k +sd, which pleased me immensely -- and also gave me some serious threat problems. I've been working hard at redlining my damage -- as affliction, this means timing my DOTs precisely, then chain-casting shadowbolts as fast as possible. I really ought to get Quartz (or whatever mod it is that lets you know when you can actually begin casting another spell, as opposed to what your cast bar says)... but in any case, my +damage was high enough that I had to back off on a pretty decent pallytank with recommended +sd levels. And I died repeatedly. We downed Attumen (I aggroed the horse, but soulshattered), and he dropped the same tank wrists as before (what are the odds?). Moroes killed the hell out of me because the OT was... well, not quite as adaptive to new circumstances, this being the first time he'd ever been in Kara and OT'd. (I did better, but I'm me.) So I was second on threat list and standing on him to absorb Blinds, so a gouge on the tank had him drop me for over twice my health in a couple shots. (He crushed me for 10k! Bastard.)

I got my revenge, though, Curse of Doom hit him for about the same in return a little while later. :) Despite my death and some serious add management problems again, the raid dropped him and our MT got his watch. I want that watch. :(

We wiped on Maiden, and my DPS was artificially low on our successful second try because I went for the second Curse of Doom rather than a CoA, and she dropped with 1.6 seconds to go on its countdown. She had crap loot. A druid friend of ours who we'd picked up midway started the Opera too soon, so we wiped on Romulo and Julienne (and I got nuked hard) due to bad heal interrupts. Frustrations were running high (due to a couple of trash wipes) but we gave it another go and by a MIRACLE won on the second one (despite one rogue dying too quickly). I actually had to stop DPS entirely for a period there, my threat was sky-high.

Thanks in large part to the presence of a shadow priest, the other warlock and I made up almost half the raid DPS. 667.7 DPS is not a bad average, though my technique needs a lot of work. The loot was universally crap, though. With luck we'll get back in and down Curator at least, tomorrow (I want to see CoD hit for 20k, though I may be tanking it. Either way, I'll take).

I'm feeling good about this.