First time in Gruul's lair

Hi Folks

I need some help figuring out what I'm meant to be doing in the HKM fight.

I took part in my first ever Gruul's lair last weekend and while we managed to down HKM, I felt particularly useless. We didn't attempt Gruul because of time issues.

The raid was 3 casual guilds combined and 15 people had never been in the lair at all so we took it slow. I'm the MT for our guild and we're happily getting through Kara, when we fail it's lack of coordination not gear.

So for the HKM fight the first attempt I was tanking HKM and I got nailed leading to a wipe, the healer on me couldn't keep up with the damage and demanded that I be replaced as tank, which was fine by me.

For the second attempt I was assigned to tank Olm and spent the whole fight trying to run back into position. As a pally tank I'm more vulnerable to fear, but it seems like there has to be a better way and from reading having his felpuppies tank him is best but we didn't have enough warlocks on this run.

But we did succeed on the second attempt and I got my shoulders .

We're going back in this weekend and I'm really not sure what my best role is in this fight. Should I try and tank the healer, I probably have the highest threat of the tanks and that should allow him to be burned down faster, but I have no way to interrupt his heals.

Is there any way I can be more useful in this fight?

cheers
Arneus
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the healer actually does not need a tank. i got used to tank him when i still raided with my elemental shaman and it worked completely fine. if you are not tanking HKM and not tanking olm either, put your healing gear on and burn some pots. on the other hand, you shouldnt have problems tanking olm. running around is just what you do when tanking him.
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Cearn - 70 pew pew Spankadin! - EU Anetheron

If you tanked nightbane you can tank Maulgar easy, just takes 2 healers(like nb), maybe 3 if they're unused/undergeared. They just have to know when Arcing Smash and Whirlwind are coming to keep you up against the big hits.

Ask a warlock to do curse of weakness on him and you'll be golden till they come dps him. What was the other tank, a warrior? A Druid? warriors can do TC and Demoralizing shout to greatly reduce incoming damage. This is one of the few fights where it makes a difference because they shouldn't come apply it for you till it's his turn to die.
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Spankadin in development.
.'>';

There were two healers assigned to me for HKM, but both complained that they couldn't do other raid healing while healing me. It was their first time too and I think they were just surprised by the damage HKM put out. The second run used a bear to tank HKM. And I think they were a little more focussed on just keeping the HKM tank up and trusting the other healers to do the other raid healing.

Thanks for the input on Olm, nice to know it wasn't just me being useless . If I tank him again I'll at least know what to expect.

As for swapping out block, our guild hasn't been running Kara for very long, we only have just enough players, so I'm quite keen to get a few key pieces of gear that will make it easier to juggle dodge and block and still stay uncrushable.

That said, I have focussed on being as high a threat tank as I can because our dps is a little enthusiastic. And block helps threat a lot.
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