Although I’ve been taking my Prot Pally into SSC – and he’s probably ready for some of the early content in Black Temple and Hyjal – I had never main tanked Gruul’s and Mag’s before. I typically fulfilled a supplementary role – chasing Olm around, eating Hurtful Strikes, tanking one of the last channelers, or simply throwing on my healing gear.

Last night, I got a chance to add three more notches to my mace. I showed up for our weekly Gruul’s/Mag’s run on Thursday night. Looking at the roster, I noticed that a new Warrior tank was there, and the old Pally MT was gone. The Raid Leader started announcing targets, and I was on the skull. When we got to Maulgar, low and behold, I was officially the MT. Woot!

The Maulgar fight went fine on my end. Maulgar was misdirected to me, I smacked him for a good long time, I didn’t die, and I had no trouble maintaining aggro. There was a bit of a hiccup in the raid, though. The Krosh tank went splat. Uh-oh.

I figured it was going to be a wipe, so I decided to have some fun. I targeted Krosh and used my Righteous Defense macro to taunt off his current target. I’m sure the healers had fun as I took the next two 9k fireballs… but it gave the other mages enough time to pick out a new tank and get him set up. Woot for quick thinking! Maulgar went down, and no loot for me.

Gruul went a lot smoother. I stayed on top of the aggro chart, and the Hateful Strike tank (a druid) stayed number two. Thanks to a bunch of Hunter misdirections, we had no trouble with threat. There was a close call at the end after one of the Reverberations, and I was down to 20% health or so. I popped a Lay on Hands, healed to full, and it was smooth sailing from there.

I did notice that mana – at the beginning of the fight – was a problem. Once Gruul got two 5 or 6 grows, I was taking enough damage to stabilize my mana pool. Until that point, generating max threat was pretty draining. Thankfully, I had some Blue Ogre Brew on me, so I quaffed a pot early and I didn’t have any problems. These are also invaluable tools for trying to off-tank Gruul and take the Hateful Strikes. Without mana pots, you’ll run out of mana pretty quick – and there’s no sense paying gold for pots when you can use up some of those Apexis Shards.

Magtheridon was the sloppiest of the three kills. On my end, everything went smoothly. When he was ready to release, I was waiting with Holy Shield up. I dropped a Consecrate about 2 seconds before he popped, and I had a Seal of Righteousness waiting to be judged. As soon as I grabbed him, I hit him with an Exorcism and started backpedaling to the wall. Thanks to Mag’s Demon-ness, I didn’t have any threat problems, and the healers didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping me up.

Unfortunately, we had some new people along that were designated to click cubes. They screwed up. Two wipes later, we finally got it straight and killed him. /sigh. What is so hard about clicking cubes?

On a funny note, one of our Warlocks got himself killed before we actually started attempting Mags. He walked into the room (thankfully everyone else, including me, was behind the door) with his Imp out. For whatever reason, the Imp wasn’t phased, and he must have been on Aggressive. He shot the first Channeler he saw. /lol. Splat goes the Warlock.