Weekend update - Bad heals = FAIL

Interesting weekend in the Fish household. We both got sick, me towards the end of last week, Kim over the weekend, so things were less than totally great over that time frame. I was able to engage in my two favorite hobbies though: lots of Wow, and some hockey on sunday.

Hockey was ok but we ended up losing in a shootout. The other team (who I used to play for) scored some freakish goals (one deflected off the goalie, then the crossbar, then in), ended up tying the game with a minute or so left in the third period and won in the shootout. It was a good game, we were missing our best shooter (his son plays on a traveling team so he couldn't make it), but I love our team and when everyone plays hard and it's close, the losing doesn't bother me.

My Wow weekend was pretty jam packed. I leveled my alliance pally to 70 (yay for 2 70's being the same class lol) and got my blacksmithing to 350. I switched my warrior to engineering and inscription. My mage hit level 33 so he could equip a lot of the goodies I had crafted/saved up for him and he's got a lil over 70 spellpower (which is pretty fun at that level). I messed around on the DK a lil bit, finished out hellfire.

Both the highlight and lowlight (I don't know if thats a word, but its appropriate) of the weekend was a sunday night run of Utgarde Keep. Now, I have run this instance quite a few times on my other paladin, so I know the fights. I got invited to tank it in a PuG and thought "well, free XP, if nothing else I'll get quest gear, they have a healer, how bad could it be?". I did insist that we fill out the group with a DPS who could heal. Since the last boss silences fairly frequently, even if I avoid dark smash (which I was able to, thank you strafe and deadly boss), being without heals will get me and then the rest of the group, killed. The healer, a holy paladin who I have run with before who shall remain nameless, said we didn't need backup heals, he wouldn't get silenced, we were fine. The best healer I know in the game gets silenced in that fight, I was skeptical so I held ground and invited a shammy who had cast water walking on me to help me out in some of the borean tundra quests. Major shout outs to Totina. She (well, I'm assuming she was a she, the character was female) had a number of alts, her shammy was 68 and she was pure Win. She was super effective switching between DPS and off heals, I'm glad I invited her, but back to the run. I try not to make UK too difficult, I mark skull for tank, DK gets assigned to neutralize casters. All the healer has to do is keep me up. Now my alliance pally isn't exactly wearing Kara or raid gear, but I had over 10k HP and about 13k armor and I have no problems with aggro. There were a few times the DK grabbed aggro, I do occasionally have probs clicking on the right mobs to attack but by an large, I held aggro and none of the DPS was taking damage. Well, except when our heals let me die, repeatedly. . .mostly to trash mobs (although three times on bosses).

It was tremendously frustrating for a few reasons reasons. First off, he made it sound like we wouldn't need off heals on the last boss. Guess what, we did, glad we brought Totina. Secondly there were two times when he would run off in front of the group to the next group of mobs, I would throw my shield, move to the mobs and start gathering aggro, get no heals and promptly die. I figure if you run off in front of the group, you're ready to go. Guess not. Lastly for some unknown reason, he tried kiting the last boss through the instance, killing the entire group when we ran back to regroup and saw a boss just wandering through the instance. Has anyone ever tried this tactic successfully? He said he has, it seems like a lot of pointless work. Avoid dark smash, have a backup healer keep the tank up when primary gets silenced, try to use mainly ranged DPS, its not that hard.

Well, I did win a roll on a pair of the leather bracers, got the two pieces of blue quest gear and the unnamed pally gave me a blue tanking belt that was better than the cobalt belt. We cleared the boss, I got about 200k XP but overall it was a mess.