Remember your failure at the cave

One of my guild's core members (our "other" tank for hard stuff) is letting his account lapse in a few days, so we have been doing some reminiscing... In the form of doing stuff as a group. Mostly that has consisted of a LOT of PvP but last night we decided to go back to Zul'Aman. We've only been there twice. The first time we went was on New Year's Eve. At the time, we had just gotten to the point where we could down Moroes (and Attumen and Maiden). It would be two more weeks before we cleared Opera and Curator for the first time. But Zul'Aman was new and we wanted to take a look, so we downed three bosses in Karazhan and dashed off to the Ghostlands.

When we got there, we tried the bear boss. The trash thrashed us pretty soundly. We wiped a couple of times on the mounted mobs. And Nalorakk... We had 4 healers (we took what we could get in those days, plus with the gear our tanks had at the time, we needed the extra healing) but only 4 DPS. That meant we kept running into the enrage timer.

The second time we got there, one of our main healers hearthed during the first pull. We wiped without downing a single mob and the raid broke up. It was a sad day. And we didn't raid for two weeks after that because people were so pissed.

But this time was different... We were saying goodbye to someone (it's not like he's leaving, we still work with the guy but he won't be playing), we have better gear, a better choice of who to bring. This time... Only 3 healers: a priest, resto druid and a slightly undergeared, slightly offspec holy paladin (34/27 - it's his only toon so I wanted to give him a spec that he could still use to solo until his gear gets to the point where he can just overpower everything even if he's fully holy).

This time we only wiped on the last trash pull before Nalorakk because the hunter's trap broke early and the other tank missed when the bear and rider split. We did it a lot cleaner the second time through.

The first two attempts on Nalorakk ended at around 50% after a transition between tanks. It's like they didn't see the switch and the main tank dropped like a stone. I had a quick conversation with the priest and resto druid and we decided to have the powerhouse healers (them) focus on the tanks and have the paladin watch the rest of the raid. I'm guessing that the tank transition coincided with some raid splash damage and they were raid healing and the tanks went down.

We made just that one little switch and suddenly... The tanks are staying up and topped off. The raid is topped off. The healers have oodles of mana. The tanks have tons of threat so the DPS can go nuts. We downed him in about 6 minutes. After our first two trips there, I thought we'd never down anything in that zone. I think this was very cathartic for the whole guild. Of course, it will be a long time before we have a second tank ready to go back but now we know that we can do it and we know the strat for that one boss... Now if we could just get Prince down....

No... I'm going to be happy about this. We downed a boss in Zul'Aman!! We pulled together as a team. We worked it out without pointing fingers or calling names. Yay us!! (Damn it... I still want to down Prince.)