Tanking and Healing Ahune

The Midsummer event provides us with another instance to grind every day for JP and 353 ilevel cloaks.  I’m going to recommend here and now that if you can viably tank or heal the boss – do so!  While both [though moreso healing] provide a few tense moments, the queue is much faster and will in turn make everyone else’s queue [including your alts] faster.

The messenger guarding the ice stone is inconsequential.  A single cloth dps can easily burn them down without problem.  Half the time he’s being killing as my screen comes up from the zone in and I honestly don’t care.

You talk to the ice stone to engage the event.  Immediately a large add pops up that you’ll want to quickly wrangle.  The add does a melee aoe, so if you’re ranged – DON’T stand in it.  Healing two people is annoying, three is dicey and 4-5 standing it in is going to probably be a dead group.  Healers, don’t be afraid to use emergency heals for melee and the tank here, there’s actually quite a bit of time to recover mana because the damage lulls somewhat after the big add.  You’ll probably be throwing efficient heals and keeping everyone up as long as people don’t stand in every single bad.

Once the big add is dead, you’ll deal with a flurry of little adds.  Do your best to “tank” them although you won’t be able to keep threat on them all.  Just keep throwing out aoes and dps and in most cases, half of them will die before they get to you.  Also watch out for runes on the ground that indicate where the ice spikes will come up – avoid those as much as possible.

When the boss submerges, gather up aggro on the last few little adds and go dps the boss.  You’ll want to kill him in two submerges at most [it can get dicey with healer mana beyond that] and one is even better.  Continue to watch for the runes because they do pop up in the snowy area and can be hard to see.

After each submerge phase, another big add pops up that must be tanked.  Rinse, repeat.

If the boss dies near to re-emerging, then take care to watch for an add because sometimes it glitches and spawns anyway.  Tank it, kill it.  You can’t loot the chest while in combat.

This DOES need a healer spec/gear to heal and a tank spec/gear to tank.  Please don’t try to tank or heal as a dps.  That’s already caused issues in several groups for me this morning with people that thought they could.

A couple other trivia/pet peeves thus far:

1. Tanks, don’t let the healer tank the little adds in favor of dpsing the boss on the submerge phase.  Secure the adds FIRST, then dps the boss.  All dps should go immediately to the boss.
2. Hunters – your pet isn’t going to get heals if you send it on the boss.  I recommend to keep it on passive and send it in on the big adds and the submerge phase.  Same goes for melee who dps the boss while he’s not in submerge phase.

If you’re not sure about your tank/healing sets, just give it a single go and pug it.  Worst case scenario is that you get cussed out by people you’ve never met and will never see again.  Big whoop.  Best case, you practice your skills at tanking and healing, get a faster queue and possibly some loot.