I don't like ICC

There, I said it. Hang me up high til my neck stretches too far. I don't like Icecrown Citadel.

I'm not going to waste time trying to define fun or interesting since you'd say it's wrong anyway. But the first wing is not fun, except gunship, which is easy but at least different. Festerface and Rotgut aren't much fun either. Putricide is almost fun, definitely fun as the abomination, though also quite simple and easy.

Heal dragon fight is not fun either. Run here and kill this then runthere and kill that and nothing lasts more than a few seconds. It just feels frantic without being truly difficult. Sindragosa is a bit of fun, but frost breath irritates me as a tank.

Blood council is boring as a tank or melee. But as a nuclei catcher I've had fun. Blood queen is boring. Biting is a fun idea, but in practice is just a source of stress, or in 25 a call for addons and I'm no fan of fights that demand addons or even do more than slightly encourage their use. This is part of why I hate healing.

But at least there's Arthas. Except I don't enjoy that fight either. Phase one is boring. Phase 1.5 is boring. Phase 2 is some combination of irritating RNG and excessively precise positioning. Phase 3 is boring. It's fucking irritating staring at a release button for half the fight duration while Arthas and Tirion have a shouting match. A free last 10% doesn't feel fun, it just feels like I'm doing PvP with a rogue around.

I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment, pride, joy, or even relief when I got my first kill. I just thought "oh, I ran out of health". That's no way to feel after killing the last boss of the expansion. And I'll stick with the Insane, thanks.

I cannot blame all of this on ICC. More than a little bit, I believe, comes from having spent months longer wiping in ICC than I should have. I associate it too much with needless wipes, not from mistakes, which happen, but from players just plain not trying, not listening, not grasping basic concepts of fights or even roles. So when bosses died, it did not feel like my accomplishment or our accomplishment, but simply the eventual outcome of for once someone by accident not uttterly and completely failing.

And tanking in general has been pretty much straight downhill this expansion, with only a brief period of fun and challenge back before we overheated everything. Ret DPS wasn't much better, with T10 being a lovely source of lag-based DPS loss.

While I'm at it...
Naxxramas was a giant pile of crap.
Malygos was too soon and three dimensional vehicle fights do not fit in WoW, not the audience, not the game engine.
Ulduar was fairly fun but felt like it got cut off too much from the Storm Peaks setup due to having a raid and too much tome in between, not that I'm blaming blizzard for the delay, it just didn't work well for the immersion factor.
ToC was too hyped for being basically ICC-lite. Not much fun and somehow too short to be substantial but long enough to feel like I wasted a night.
I forgot Sartharion. 3D is brilliant for nothing else than showing exactly how ridiculous gear inflation has become.

Razorscale with one and a half tanks

Right after I did the Ulduar weekly on my paladin, in which someone started hardmode so we had to kill towers, I hopped on my DK. Aha, trade chat, just the place to see lf1m tank for ulduar. I'm on it!

Join, fly over, hop in a demolisher, and the other tank leaves. Dammit.

We start clearing the gauntlet while we try to get a tank.

Backtrack a moment: I talked to Brann first thing after I got it, just to be sure. No hardmode.

We start clearing and by the time we're at the trash that triggers FL, we've gotten a terrible idea: One tank and three healers. I like terrible ideas, so I decided, let's go for it.

Someone pulls FL trash before the new people get there. It comes out, we fight, it aggros on someone outside and resets. At least I didn't die. Someone pulls again. I didn't die. Clearly this is not going to go well.

FL dies smoothly once we're all there.

Now for the hard part.

The air phase was a fun challenge. I'd drop Death and Decay on one mole and use taunt and deathgrip to grab the other. Sometimes overzealous DPS would get aggro. Fortunately they were also high DPS, so we got her down permanently after only one flight back up. Time for fun.

I was disappointed to find that antimagic shell doesn't prevent the armor fuse. Makes sense, since that would be more than a little bit overpowered. With no offtank, I took all the stacks. And at 5 I was welded in place and an arms warrior ended up tanking her for 20 seconds or so. The healers did well and he lived. So did I.

Then I did it on my warrior, warning them that my gear wasn't amazing. The raid leader said they had good healers as long as I was in 200+. I was confused. That's a... perfectly reasonable level of gear to expect. Twilight zone stuff! We downed him with no problems. I got a new smashy hat. And was kinda burnt out from having tanked him three times in a row on three different tanks.

Fail
Not enough people showed up for ICC so we ended up doing ToC instead. I didn't win death's choice. I got outrolled on a tanking belt. I did get a trophy, so my tanking gloves are a little bit better.

What's gs?
My DK did a random, got UP again. Happens a lot to me. That and Oculus, which I actually like. The warlock was adorable. She hadn't played for 6 months and didn't know the new raids. Or what "gs" is. The healer and I were horribly distracted explaining things. We managed to wipe on the gauntlet boss.

Noob in VoA 10
Someone was looking for a tank for VoA10, so I volunteered my DK. They clearly were not gearchecking if I got in. Have I mentioned that I accidentally vendored my tanking boots a few days ago? That was my first time ever in there on a DK, so I got all the achievements. And some t8 DPS gloves off the wind guy. The raid leader had us kill every boss for mount chances. It did drop and he won the roll.

I died a lot

Monday afternoons are not a very good PUG raiding time.

Ulduar
I decided to do the weekly on my DK. It's Ignis. Shouldn't be too bad on ten-man, right?

The last attempt I made on him was much earlier in the week. The raid leader seemed to be a complete idiot. He activated hardmode for FL and didn't respond when people mentioned it. This was after someone had said "don't talk to so and so". I left when it became apparent that he had no clue what was going on; as someone left and he didn't know if it was a healer or not.

I tried again today, joining a group that needed a tank and a tank. I can tank, so go me. I wasn't quite sure of my gear, being in a mix of 200 level blues, a few heroic epics, and 232/245 badge gear. Probably enough, but I know how people love their overgeared tanks.

Actually I'd been rejected earlier in the week. But I think that was 25 man, so it's somewhat understandable.

I get in and after a while we find a tank. Let's do this... Alright so obvious first step is to call dibs on the catapult passenger slot because it's awesome and I'm awesome, so it makes sense. Someone who took. So I settled for tank gunner. But it had no driver. Eventually I got someone out of a chopper to be my gunner, but she wouldn't drive. Driving those things is boring.

FL time, easy kill, easy badge, maybe easy loot, let's do this. The other tank died on the first follow. I was right on top of interrupts, so go me. Then I died to a follow, I suspect because flame vents were also going. That's my excuse anyway. I'd even used the speed boost! Pyrite wasn't getting stacked. As in, there was none on him and no, they hadn't just burned it all up already. So DPS was slow. We did manage to kill him. I lost the roll on tinkering, which is why I should remember to just nab the stuff before anyone can remember. Stupid other engineers. I bet they weren't throwing around iron grenades four years ago. Posers! At least I got new tanking bracers.

We had some deaths on Ignis trash.

On Ignis I took adds since the druid had more health and we all know health is what matters most for everything. Also he had much better gear. Commence.

Hunter misdirects, we hurt the boss, I taunt adds and get diseases on them, I lose aggro because I'm barely attacking them since heals don't draw that much aggro. Why the hell are DPS attacking the adds? Druid dies, I grab boss, I die, only 20%, we can do this. Run back, we all die again. DPS are still messing with my adds.

Leader leaves, new guy kicks some people, we get some replacements. I look at recount and wonder why I was beating any DPS with only 2k or so. We try burn again, because there didn't seem to be anyone who could shatter the adds. It finally worked. I got new tanking gloves. And won the BoE caster mail bracers.

Onward.

Icecrown Citadel
I need to work on my prot set because well, it's falling behind. My ret gear could use some touching up here and there. I don't want to go even deeper into negative DKP, not that I'd win anything anyway, so what can I do? Oh that's easy: make a ICC10 PUG. The first wing is easy enough. Right?

I'm not a fan of "link achievement and gear score" since, well everyone needs their first kill somehow. And I don't have gear score. I opted to glance at people's gear in Dalaran while we tried to find another tank and healer.

A rogue complained the one of the fury warriors didn't have the achievement. He left despite the warrior having gear and claiming to have read the strats and watched videos. Onward.

We finally all get there. This process made me decide that I should insist on achievements; specifically the achievement for having done Icecrown quests because it's annoying to have people unable to summon while out of phase.

Time for trash. Oh good, the paladin started blessing while I told him I was trying to figure out assignments. I hate when they do that.

Trash went okay. A few deaths, but no wipes. The traps are much more fun with no rogue. I'd pull very carefully and then run around to trigger it. I actually enjoyed the trash.

Marrowgar time. I'll summarize: wipe wipe wipe wipe wipe people leave replacements standing in fire bone spikes not broken DPS during transition out of bone storm and wiping. Eventually he died. I gave some caster thing to someone. The shaman got an enhancement belt.

Deathwhisper trash killed some people. I explained deathwhisper, someone corrected a few mistakes in my explanation, partly due to having never done it on 10 man. The first attempt had some problems, such as adds spawning right before phase two. I should have told them to stop DPS before then and wait for adds. We did that the second time. Okay so we wiped. It was a decent attempt I thought, considering I'd never tanked it and I think most people hadn't been there at all.

Then she died and I couldn't roll on the awesome trinket because I'd been dumb and set main spec rolls before dual spec.

People went up the elevator and died. They ran back. We all went up and died. We ran back. We went up again and the Horde NPCs killed the Alliance NPCs. Then we killed a dragon.

Gunship time. But we only had 8 people. Let's try anyway. Somehow the melee died and then we had no DPS on the mage. We wiped. People DCed. I found another tank so I could go ret and fill a spot. It's hard to find people to join for the second half of the wing. So I told the new paladin no wait outside while I looked for people. After way too many hours for just two bosses, I called the raid, thanked everyone, hoped they had fun, and went back to Dalaran.

Several hours and many wipes for a bit of rep and a measly four frost emblems. At least some people got to see new content. It resets anyway, so not too big of a loss to get saved.