We are still on Horridon. We’ve progressed to the fourth door twice now, but the third door with the Frozen Warlords is still messy. The issue of my health dropping, and taking a lot of spike damage from the Mortal Strikes was brought to my attention. I looked at my stats and wondered to myself “How?” How could I fix it? How was it happening? What was I doing wrong. Couple that with a bad week in real life and I was at a low point. What could I do? I already veer away from Ask Mr Robot as his stat weights are different to what I use (I cap Expertise and hit regardless of what he says.) 

So this drove me to mmo-champion, where I got a significant amount of help! People were very willing to give me criticism, and suggest areas in my rotation and stat priority that I could improve on/change. The crux of the issue was, however, that I was stacking far too much Stamina. 

Now, I’ll explain to you all why I was stacking stamina. My raid leader/healers. Now that I have regemmed/forged and enchanted, without raid buffs I am about 470k HP… almost 200k below my Paladin offtank. When this issue first arose, we were doing Will of the Emperor and I was getting blown to pieces, so I stacked a bit more stamina. However, now that I have a much greater understanding of the way my class works/mitigates damage, I no longer have the need for that much health, however I was always urged to get more because I was so much lower than my offtank. 

Of course the thing is… we as Monk tanks are always going to be low on health in comparison to other tanking classes. It’s the nature of the way we are. The way I like to explain it to people is we are not a high mitigation tank, we are first and foremost… an avoidance tank. Stat priorities of haste and crit being at the forefront of our spec. Haste for quicker energy regen and attack speed, more attacks = more gifts of the ox to heal yourself. The more crit we have the more white hit crits we get which means more stacks of elusive brew. However, the only thing that healers and my raid leader seem to see at one point or another is their perception of my lack of health. 

But I digress, I changed everything around, and we went in to do horridon. It was after these changes that we made it through to the fourth door. I also have to note that I was pulled up by an mmo post that asked if I was falling into the trap of dps’ing as opposed to tanking, and it’s true. On horridon, I solely tank adds (pally offtank can solo tank horridon becuase of Hand of Protection) so of course, the instant we had all the adds together, I was just using Keg Smash, SCK, and BoF… I was forgetting black out kick, and rushing jade wind, at a crucial time of high damage. Because I was so focussed on getting the adds down. 

So I have to keep telling myself “Just because you can do a lot of damage, doesn’t mean you should.” Because in all honesty, what’s the point of me doing 100k dps, if I die before the fight is over? If I die, it’s almost always a wipe, the adds go banans and start running over our dps and healers like they don’t even matter. So I’ve had to train myself to go back to my basic rotation, stop trying to be fancy, and just concentrate on what’s in front of me. 

What’s in front of me is usually a lot of floating health bars, green, red, yellow and white text, with intermittent spell flash warnings! It’s chaos, but the point of the Horridon fight is to make that chaos, organised. 

So we will be doing Jihn’Rok and Horridon again on Sunday and Monday, hopefully getting the fat triceratops down. I’m going to miss two weeks of raiding due to a trip, and I kinda want to see him go down before I go away! 

On a semi-related note, I still hate LFR. In fact I hate it even more since the invention/introduction of Durumu in “halls of the flesh shaper” however, my hatred of that boss, was dwarfed today by sheer and unadulterated rage towards the loot system. I have been using bonus rolls on Horridon LFR for the last however long the damn things been out, and gotten nothing. I just want the weapon, is that too much to ask? So anyway, here I am in the halls of the flesh shaper, we down Dark Animus, and what does Blizz award me…

The. One. Handed. Mace. 

What the hell am I going to do with that?! Do I look like I have another one hander to go with it? Do I look like I even use one handers at all. The only other one hander I have is the fist weapon off Spiritbinder, and it’s the LFR version. 

So here I am, in a bit of a bind. I have my polearm from the spirit kings 10m Normal, upgraded one level to 493. I have my 502 one handed mace, and my LFR fist weapon. What on earth do I do? And has ANYone got any idea what is going on with hit rating in regards to Dual Wielding? I am hit capped, but when I switch to DW it says that my normal attacks have up to a 19% chance to miss on a 93 elite boss… what the?

So now I’m going to spend a long time running Heart of Fear: The Nightmare of Shek’zeer, to see if she’ll drop her fist weapon, so that I can put my sha-touched gem in it, and see if that makes any difference to anything I’m doing currently. My grievance with this is two fold:

1) HoF LFR… *stabs eyes out*

2) Having to fork out cash for two x Weapon enchants, on weapons I may not even end up using, but need to enchants on to do any kind of comparisons on. 

Raaaaaaaargh!!