Breakfast Topic: Sweet relief and sour percentages
There is something about a 1% wipe that simultaneously galvanizes me and infuriates me. It proves to me that a fight is within the group's grasp, but it also says to me that something trivial needs to be fixed, and often that trivial thing is hard to discover and we'll have to wipe several more times until we figure it out. It's like a thumb in the eye, and yet it's a necessary step on the road to killing a new boss.
Frankly, once I hit the 1% wipe, I know the boss will die. There's no way around it. If we can get a boss to 1%, we can kill it. So often, I blame the wipe on the excitement of knowing just how close you are. It's so tempting to lose your composure at that moment, when you see the health drop to that precipice. You can taste the kill.
Galling as it is, I myself have screwed up in that rush of here it is, here goes and found myself saying "Yeah, that was me, my bad." For example, last night instead of Shield Wall, I hit Challenging Shout at a crucial moment. I'd say my face was red, but after everything got done smashing me in said face, it wasn't so much red as gone entirely. Still, we got the kill.
One of the things that's made the transition back to tanking worthwhile is getting to see the same fights from a new perspective, and for that reason, last night's heroic Spine kill was pretty sweet even through that 1% wipe. The focus was high, everyone did their job, and we won. Maybe the 1% actually enhanced the end. How about you? How do you push past that last 1%?
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