YESYESYES MWAHAHAAAAA!

I got to tank a real 25man boss! And I got my Sunguard Legplates (100-badge tanking pants) to boot! (Which incidentally will last me until level 77, when I can have the Tempered Saronite Legplates crafted.)

We downed High King Maulgar after three real tries (and one accidental facepull), and Jah outbid me for the t4 shoulder token. The good news is he's no longer wearing rogue leather.

Then, on to Gruul. Our pally MT stepped down for the fight because he was worried about being able to keep up max threat gen throughout the encounter. I was silently fuming and glaring at the tank channel when Dak whispers me asking for my mitigation numbers...

"k then, looks like you're MTing gruul :)"
"MEEEP. Okay."

Craziest thing about it was I was getting rage-starved! You'd think with something that hits that hard that often, rage generation would be absolutely through the roof...but apparently not. So instead of keeping a steady ~1,000 TPS average like I've been trying to learn to do, my threat spiked between 800 TPS and 1,300 TPS. Our OT (feral druid) had trouble staying second on the threat meters, which led to Gruul hauling off and bitch-slapping lots of rogues. We had him to grow 11 and I think mid-50s percent of his health on our best attempt before we called it due to lack of DPS. (But for a 23-man raid with a mixed bag of gear and several brand new 70s along, we did AWESOME. And I had loads of fun.)

With the new pants, my tanking stats are now:
14127 HP
14510 armor
20.34% dodge
17.99% parry
25.76% block
367 block value

Plus chump change for +hit and expertise, which is going to be my next gearing project. I figure the Girdle of the Fearless, Dawnforged Defender, and (ideally) Furies Deck card will be a good start and a huge boost to my sustained TPS.

...Well.

You know how you're all excited for something, and then you find out it's not going to happen? (Or at least not happen as you expected.) That sinking feeling in your gut and the sudden desire to just go back to bed for the rest of the week.

Octale posted the official raid schedule for Versus the World today, and it's Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. I.E., the three days of the week I know I'm going to have to work. I never have Thursdays or Saturdays off unless I ask for them, and Tuesdays seem to be holding steady as a 'morning shift' day, but...I don't WANT to tank off-night farm content and only see progression on Tuesdays. I want to be a progression tank, damn it! That's why I'm DOING all this!

Argh.

A short post in the announcement thread to let them know I'm one of the people who will have a problem with the schedule, and hopefully a tall glass of something sweet and fizzy will calm me down.

The living are here and standing on top of your dead, stinky corpse.

After lots and lots of AOE farming densely populated areas of the EPL with a level 65 prot paladin helping, I hit Honored with AD and got my Naxxramas attunement out of the way to start doing oldschool tier 3 content with VTW. Unfortunately, all of our healers bowed out do to RL constraints. (All two of 'em. QQ.) C'est la vie, we'll go back soon anyhow.

Versus the World also made our first official (second overall) foray into Zul'Aman, stomped Nalorakk's face in, and called it for the night due to internet issues. Then someone said "Hey! We should do Kara for badges!" Then they nominated/forcibly volunteered me to lead it and MT it, and I found myself at the helm of a Kara clear with:
-One geared main-tank. (Me.)
-Two undergeared offtanks. (Two rockin' feral druids.)
-Two geared-the-hell-out healers.
-Various and sundry DPS.

Then after Opera we had to do some reshuffling and ended up with...
-One MT
-THREE offtanks (prot pally, feral druid with DPS gear, feral druid with tanking gear)
-THREE healers (two resto shamans, one IDS/holy priest)
-Various and sundry DPS.

Nightbane took for-fucking-ever. It was hilarious. Aran was almost a disaster, since we actually got to the point where he did the poly-drink-pyro combo, and SURVIVED... Then we decided to call it after Chess and do Netherspite, Illhoof, and Prince later this weekend.

So, that's my tanking news for this week. I tanked half a pull of Naxx trash (the first group in the abom wing, if anybody cares), got my Sun Eater (yaaaaaay!), main-tanked and led Kara for the first time. I think I'm 22 badges away from my badge tankpants. (Omnomnom expertise!) I like having measurable improvements on a regular basis.

On the topic of alts, Jah and I decided it was worth the cost of a new account to set up two RAFs and start powering secondary toons up to 59. Right now we both have mages on our main accounts, then I've got a rogue on my RAF and he's got a paladin. I've been playing with a mage on the premade PTR (and getting exploded three ways into next year with them on the copy PTRs) and really like what I see, so I decided to make it one of the toons I'd take into the expansion along with Besh, Jabbers, and at a later date, Mandar and Brangwyn.

Since this is mostly turning into a place for me to keep track of my goals and progress on various toons, tomorrow I'll devote a blurb to WotLK Checklist 2.0, now that I've seen beta.

I hold the line, aggro is mine o/~

That crazy little symbol up at the end of the title is supposed to look like a quarter note. I'm not sure if it does.

Anywho, Jah's warrior (formerly Nargle, now Kante) is going to be full-time deepz since it's looking more and more like I'll be a regular on VTW's tank roster. (That's me over there! FEAR THE COW.) I OT'd the last two guild-run Karas and picked up a Panzar'thar Breastplate, Boots of Elusion, Shermanar Great-Ring, and the Choker of Discipline. This brings me up to:
-14k armor, or 57.15% physical damage reduction.
-515 defense. Yay overcapped!
-16.7 Dodge
-17.83% Parry
-22.69% Block (with successful blocks stopping 292 damage)
-13,812 HP completely unbuffed - over 14k with Commanding Shout up, finally!
-I've gone from 400-500 TPS average to 550-700 TPS average, spiking up to 1,000+ TPS on heavy-hitting bosses where I can spam Heroic Strike.

And...a grand total of 39 badges. My dilemma is whether to buy the Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker right off the bat to ditch one of my horrendous pre-BC trinkets, or save up for my original plan of Girdle of the Fearless/Sunguard Legplates/everything else. (Still working towards the theoretic 'best' set maximizing stamina, expertise/hit, and finding gear with high raw avoidance stats.)

I'm a little annoyed that I'm going to miss out on our first Gruul's attempts due to work, but I'll get a chance eventually. Meh.

Regarding the beta: I've satisfied myself that prot will still be amazing for tanking and be semi-workable for leveling, as well as druid healing still being fun. I'm pretty much done with my beta account except for the occasional respec-and-grind test. Trying to keep as much of it new and interesting when it hits Live as possible...

Reading Unbearably HoT's writeups of the Refer-a-Friend nonsense tempts me to scrape up an extra whatever dollars and powerlevel-transfer two alts on Sen'jin. However, to use the jargon my Econ professor has stuffed into my head, the opportunity cost of an RAF account + 2 new 60s + a Zhevra mount for my moocow is somewhere around a week's worth of groceries for dinner and lunch money. And since I'd rather be able to eat for a week than have easymode 60s right now, looks like that won't be happening anytime soon.