"This Item is Busy" - My new nemesis.

Friday night was Tempest Keep, much like last week. Unlike last week we decided to start the run with attempts on Void Reaver rather than head to him after Al'ar training. This may have been a mistake in retrospect, since we were completely atrocious on the trash leading up to him. Ignorance wasn't an issue, just sloppiness, but it led to a few wipes and cost us a lot of time. Void Reaver died, of course, but after all that, we only had a few shots on Al'ar before respawns. Those shots were pretty much wasted by tanks not moving off platforms before the quills, dying and forcing us to reset.

Saturday afternoon was "Badgeazhan" where we proceeded to clear all bosses in two and a half hours. After we killed Nightbane, I noticed I only had five badges rather than the usual nine at this point. Turns out I'd tried to loot the badges from Moroes and Maiden at the same time as someone else, got the "this item is busy" message (which I probably missed since I was readying /raid) and then left them there. Sadly by the time I realised this, both the bodies had despawned. So annoyingly I ended a full clear with only 18/22 Badges. Must pay closer attention next time, since now I have two idioms named after me. "Doing an Ulushnar" is the act of failing to pick up a badge off a now-despawned boss. There's also an "Ulu-Pull" where additional mobs are pulled making an easily-handled pull into a marginally-successful one or an outright wipe.

Sunday saw us back into SSC to kill Karathress and train Vashj. I was used to Ulu being used to tank the Hunter Add and his pet, but this time I was asked to tank the main boss. I was somewhat underwhelmed, however, to find that Karathress hits like a girl. (Well ok, let me retract that because if one thing growing up with a twin sister's taught me, it's that girls can be vicious little bitches.) Karathress however hits the tank for an underwhelming 4-5k per hit with a fairly normal attack speed, which goes up to 6.5k when he gets the Beast Within power from the dead Hunter. The only real wrinkle to him is the Cataclysm Bolt which will hit a random mana user for half their health. Who's the only mana-using tank in the raid? Yours truly. That said, it's never more than a tree druid and holy priest can keep up with. Even when he's got The Beast Within up, his melee's never enough to leapfrog Ardent Defender, which means I'm in no real danger tanking him.

There were a few problems coordinating the rest of the raid, so we wiped/reset him about 3-4 times before killing him. After that, I swapped out for a healer who'd logged in late. Vashj is a 2-tank fight and it was more useful to have a spare healer in the learning phase.