This past weekend was a great weekend for my pally. I got a quite a few achievements, raided Naxxramas as ret (I actually left with four drops) and I bit the bullet and respecced prot and tanked my first WotLK instance, a heroic one at that!

Naxx

I raided Naxx with my guild on Friday and Saturday nights. On Friday, we did the Arachnid (achievement) and Plague (achievement) quarters. On Saturday, we did the Military (achievement) quarter and attempted the Construct quarter. On the Construct quarter, we downed Patchwerk and attempted Grobbulus a couple of times. We couldn’t get Grobbulus down since over 1/2 of the raid was lagging including our MT (who d/c’d on 2 of the attempts). We called the raid after the last wipe.

I walked out of Naxx with four drops, three of which are holy! The fourth drop was a cloak (that I will link when I am able to log into WoW) that is not any better than my current cloak. The holy pieces were Helm of the Corrupted Mind and two others that I’ll name and link when can log in to WoW.

Tanking

We were going to try and finish Naxx on Sunday night but couldn’t since one of our healers was having internet issues and couldn’t log in. We decided to split up into groups and do some heroics instead. Our MT has been wanting to respec ret and knows that I’ve been wanting to try my hand at tanking so we switched specs. I went with the most popular prot pally build (5/60/6) according to talentchic.com.

We attempted the first boss (Slad’ran) of Heroic Gundrak three times before skipping him in hopes of getting some emblems from two other bosses and then returning to him.

We downed the other bosses in the instance without a problem and went back to Slad’ran. We wiped on him once more before the freshly minted (read: very low dps) lock logged out and into his much better geared mage. After that switch was made, that boss was very trivial. Once attempt, one downing, altar switched and then it was onto the last boss, Gal’darah. The last boss was just as trivial as the others.

I got the achievement for completing Gundrak on Heroic. After reviewing the dps of my group (to myself), I commented that I should get the achievement for tanking my first heroic. Then I looted the boss and saw my achievement waiting: the Horn-Tipped Gauntlets! Those dropping was the icing on the cake for me.

The dps for the group was pretty low considering it was a heroic run. The top dps-er averaged ~1400 dps while the second was 1100ish. The fresh 80 lock averaged just over me, with 900ish dps. I rounded out the bottom with 823 dps (which I feel is extremely low for a WotLK tank).

I had a lot fun tanking that instance, despite the low dps of the group and the many wipes we faced. Tanking is a lot more hectic than dps but I’m ready to tank some more.