04-02-2007, 02:13 PM
To add to what Bolty said, we tried to somewhat simulate the use of a Paladin for being the target of the Smoking Blast by having the tanked out feral druid (me) deshift and spam heals as soon as Nightbane takes off. This usually made me the target for Nightbane when he starts firing, then I would shift to bear and be taking ~700 damage per tick rather than the normal ~1650 if he is targetting a healer. The only drawback to this is that when I shifted I could no longer heal. Thus, I'd eventually lose aggro to another healer and then he would start blasting that healer. I think this really helped out at the start of the phase because I could both eat his blasts and tank a bunch of skeletons, but when he shifted off to target one of the actual healers, then things got a lot harder.
As Bolty says, this whole deal would be mostly trivialized by using a Paladin to eat all of the blasts while still being able to heal and perhaps tank a lot of the skeletons (via consecration). But since we do not have any Paladins available to us, things are a lot more difficult. As such, we are basically left needing either another tank (so I could help heal) or another healer or two. It is very unfortunate that this fight requires so much more healing/tanking than most of the rest of the instance because you just don't have much leeway in a 10 man instance to bring people just for one fight unless you're stacking the raid (which we really don't want to have to do).
As Bolty says, this whole deal would be mostly trivialized by using a Paladin to eat all of the blasts while still being able to heal and perhaps tank a lot of the skeletons (via consecration). But since we do not have any Paladins available to us, things are a lot more difficult. As such, we are basically left needing either another tank (so I could help heal) or another healer or two. It is very unfortunate that this fight requires so much more healing/tanking than most of the rest of the instance because you just don't have much leeway in a 10 man instance to bring people just for one fight unless you're stacking the raid (which we really don't want to have to do).
-TheDragoon