Into Karazhan.

Well this weekend was a busy one for Ulushnar.

On Friday, with the help and patient indulgence of his friends, Ulushnar managed to get the last three parts of his Karazhan attunement done. The Black Morass run was a particular favourite of mine to tank.

He'd only finished it for 10 minutes when he was called into the current Kara run and ended up tanking The Big Bad Wolf encounter. We didn't manage to kill him, but raid tanking was an eye opener. I'm used to tough bosses hitting Ulu for 1-1.5k damage in normal 5-mans. In Karazhan, even the normal mobs hit for at least 2k, and they can hit for up to 4k. It was a whole 'nother world, and I wasn't sure his gear or spec were up to it. We didn't manage to kill the boss before we got tired and disbanded.

On Saturday and Sunday, I started work on upgrading his tanking gear. Whilst there are some nice drops that can boost his gear, trying for a boss drop is unreliable and I instead looked into faction rewards from the Cenarion Expedition and the Keepers of Time. It was a hard grind, I think CE required me to do an instance run and two multi-part quest chains to get the rep, whilst KoT required about four instance runs, but in the end, I got a new necklace, sword, leggings and head enchant with about an hour to spare before Sunday evening's Kara run.

We managed to kill the Wolf first time, after which it was a long slog up to the Curator. The trash before the Curator involves packs of mobs that eat mana, which make it a completely annoying fight for a mana-using tank like me.

Anyway, we eventually got past them, and tried the Curator, but sadly our group just didn't have enough fast DPS and we got taken out. A second attempt was precluded by an unlucky wipe whilst ressing (our other tank lagged in the boss' path) and the respawn of the aforementioned annoying trash.

We decided to ignore the Curator after that and try The Maiden of Virtue who was nearer the entrance and much easier to clear to. It's a difficult fight since your tank needs to know what he's doing and how to position and move the boss. Since that tank was me (our other tank had DC'd) then we wiped 3-4 times before calling it a night. That fight needs a lot more practise for me.

A good weekend all in all, if frustrating somewhat. I've beaten my goal with this character (to have him tanking Karazhan by June), but within Karazhan I've found a lot of new challenges I'm going to have to rise to. I just hope the rest of the group has the patience to let me master them.