Last night I had my first taste at tanking some Expert dungeons as a shieldless cleric. It’s a bit disorienting going back to the lowbie dungeons on expert mode and not being able to pull half the dungeon at one time. One thing that bothers me, immensely, is when people point at 50 being some kind of magic number for Toughness. Toughness reduces the amount of damage you take from PvE crits.  That’s it. I don’t know how much other people get crit but for me it seems like less than 20% of the time for any given mob, if that. Also, the biggest crit I saw last night was just under 3500, where the biggest heal was 4800. Maybe this is because of my Warhammer PvE experience, where praying was a commonly acceptable tactic, but that didn’t strike me as all that dangerous.

What seems to be more… ah, challenging, is the regular trash pulls or adds on a boss that are hitting for 700-1500 on regular hits. I can survive and be healed through a big crit every 5-10s or however long inbetween. What caught up to me in Realm of the Fae last night was the trash pulls hitting for upwards of 1500 in quick succession. We ended up having a Sentinel(?) as a main healer with a Bard and Chloro at least partially healing just to make things easier. I’m also told that Realm of the Fae is one of the most difficult T1 dungeons as well, so I’m willing to leave it at that.

Anyway, our xIT run went smooth. Very smooth. As a Justicar running 24% parry, 8200hp, 850 atk power, and 130 hit tanking wasn’t a problem. I wasn’t missing on my attacks, nothing was omgrofl critting me. The bosses have little quirks to figure out but most of them we had down in two or three attempts at most. I think the Spider boss wiped the group once with her AoE aura and my ineptitude at understanding when the hell I was supposed to LoS her. Halfway through the second fight I said fuck it and stood in the middle of the room. Healers did their job and I soaked up all the damage like a sponge. Caor was a pansy, as usual, and presented no problems whatsoever. The Three Kings were immune to CC on expert mode so we had to burn down the Cleric while all three were beating on my face. I was LoS’ing the caster causing it to drop it’s longer cast time heals since it couldn’t be CC’d. That seemed to work fine. The skeleton adds at the end were nothing to worry about.

The ogre boss Bonelord Fetlorn in the dark room was interesting. He does a 2s cast ability that either summons an elite add or fears you. It was tricky finding a good spot where I could stand while not LoS’ing my caster, but still have both of us able to duck out of the way when the cast pops up. I’ve made this helpful diagram.  When the guy says something, starts casting (look for the casting bar under his target window), or everyone panics and runs away, just move a little bit. Provided the tank and healer don’t get feared you should do this fight pretty easy. Not sure how tough the adds are since we only had one spawn and got feared the next time around anyway.

Ragnoth has a snare now when he starts doing his super fire AoE and you’re supposed to run to the other mob. However, there’s an achievement if you’re healed through the full duration of it, so it doesn’t really hit as hard I suppose. Tanking him in the middle-ish part of the room so people have a chance to run to safety helped a bit. Combat rezzes helped for the people that were too slow, and I think we did lose our healer part of the way through the fight too, but he came back. Oh, and he’s not the last boss anymore either. There’s a passage that gets opened up after the fight that takes you down into a subterranean cavern with a whole bunch of trash that you have to clear before the last boss.

Totek is a big dumb looking thing. Fairly simple fight that you’ll want everyone but the tank to stay at range for. His main annoyance is a persistant AoE knockback mode that will do some fair damage while bouncing you all over the room if you aren’t tanking him against a wall. Totek is big. Chances are you’ll be staring at a lot of crotch for this fight. Pretty sure he need to wash up in there. After a couple minutes of being pinned against the wall by his underbeard we took him down without any surprises. xIT is pretty cake so far.

I don’t want to talk about Realm of the Fae aside from saying that we had a significantly less geared main healer that may or may not have made the difference in ease from xIT. We knocked out the first two bosses and wiped a lot on the trash. While the third boss owned our collective asses without even breaking a sweat. I don’t plan on going back there without a flamethrower and some napalm. Fucking plants.