Drink! (continued)

Not much warcraft for me this week - I flew out to the real life Brewfest in Munich to meet some guildies who live in Germany. Much fun was had, beer drunk and cheese eaten by all. Dark Iron dwarves not sighted, but pink elekks put in a brief appearance.

Other than that, tried ToC10 heroic for the first time last night, and got whipped by Gormok repeatedly. Some thoughts -

1) Maybe I'm not geared enough. Still using ilevel219 head and legs (the "big four" tanking items are apparently head, chest, legs and shield).

Perhaps I need to upgrade to T9 legs asap.

2) Armour and health are vital against impale. Avoidance helps against melee swings but is less important than normal since I don't think you can dodge impale.

I still don't have the damn Black Heart. The emblem of triumph trinket would help, although this as an objective conflicts with (1) above.

3) We have an impale strategy that seems to work...

The strategy was for me to start tanking and take four impales, using shield wall just before the third impale. The other tank would then taunt and I would then get BoP to clear my impale stack. I would go battle stance for a bit, and use shattering throw to improve raid dps.

I would then taunt at three stacks of impale, with the pally using bubble wall just before the third stack hit. Pally would taunt back at three stacks, with me hitting last stand before the third impale. We should hopefully get the boss down before the paladin hit 13 impales...

4) ...but maybe we can do even better.

I'm not sure I need to shield wall before the third impale on the first tank switch. The boss has only one stack of rising anger at that stage. I wonder if I should swap last stand and shield wall in the above.

Also - it would be useful for the pally to be able to clear my impale stack at the start of P2 by using BoP. If we could save this ability it would be helpful. That would mean going with three stacks of impale every time.

5) Perhaps we need to use external cooldowns.

In our raid we have a holy priest, so have access to guardian spirit. We have a resto druid, a resto shammy and our only pally is a tank, so no other external cooldowns afaik.

6) Indestructible potions seem a good idea.

Will have to get some more of those. As usual, chugging one before the fight allows you to take a second 2 minutes in, but since Gormok is a 90 second fight, probably not a good idea here.