Faith -noun 1. Confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another’s ability.
Keep this in mind…I’m going somewhere with it!
My guild has been working our way through the hard mode content in Ulduar. Last night the officers decided to give Hard Mode Iron Council a shot. In terms of difficulty for hard modes, this one is…well…difficult. There is an immense DPS requirement, as well as several positioning changes. Its a fun fight, even on hard mode, but very frustrating when you get so close only to wipe.
For those of you who don’t know how the fight goes, ill fill you in on the details. This fight involves 3 NPCs, Steelbreaker (Big guy), Runemaster Molgeim (Medium guy), and Stormcaller Brundir (Little guy). In a normal fight you would engage the big guy while either one or two off tanks handle medium and small guy. Burn down the big guy, then medium, and finally jump on the little guy. Its a fairly easy fight once you understand the abilities that each mob can use. Hard mode involves changing the order in which you kill the mobs, and with it comes changes to their abilities. Each time you kill one of the three in the fight, the other two gain more abilities. My guild is following Tank Spots guide to this encounter, which means we engage the middle guy first, followed by the little guy and save the big one for last. While Brundir is alive, he casts overload about every 45-50 seconds. The spell takes 6 seconds to cast, and once it is complete everyone within 20 yards will take 25,000 Nature damage. Overload cannot be interrupted but can be avoided…if you want to avoid it.
As a Death Knight, I have a wonderful ability called Anti Magic Shell (AMS). This is the bane of casters everywhere as it absorbs magic damage AND gives the Death Knight runic power. Every time Brundir casts his overload ability, I time AMS to absorb the damage. Why? Well, not only do I get to stay in the fight which boosts my DPS (which helps in hard mode) but I also get a full bar of runic power which…well it lets me DPS more. Every time I eat an overload, someones fail mod reports that I got hit by it and should be dead or close to dead which isn’t the case.
The officers of the guild hate when I do this. It makes hearts skip a beat, healers panic, everyone believes that I am dead. You know what though? I don’t die. I have never died to an overload because I know where and how to use my abilities so that instead of getting killed, I boost my DPS.
This is where faith comes in. Fail mods are great for finding the big problems in a raid, however they don’t tell the whole story. If someone is doing something weird, ask them. If a strategy says TO do something and is is being disregarded, find out why. Don’t be a blind sheep calling out peoples failures just because you don’t understand what is going on.
End Result?
P.S. AMS doesn’t help against Mimron’s Shock Blast ability.