More OS-10 3D Musing

I've seen it first hand in the whelp tank position, now I can talk turkey. I specced protection for the encounter - the guild's usual prot paladin doesn't usually do 10-mans so I got to fill in. 'Cuz I'm awesome like that.

I was in a group that was stacking magic damage, like so. You'll notice a ret paladin in there, which I was envious of since I was toting a shield on my back that evening. The ret was more for a blessing than for anything else, since he didn't fit the schema of magic stacking. Also, an unholy DK was used to tank Sartharion. Myze contends that a feral is just as good if not better, but the DK is a guild officer and one of the best geared tanks in the guild, so he's the one that got the nod.
We got nearly through the second drake a few times, but ran into a few issues:

1. Enraged fire adds gibbing me.
2. Fire adds aggro'ing healers while my screen is full of whelps.
3. The warrior had to move the drakes around to pick up adding drakes, which put people in danger of eating a shadow breath when the drake was turned.
4. Threat on the drakes was a razor-thin buffer.

I think I can solve all those problems with some fancy raid comp shuffling. First, holy paladin and a BM hunter in for the ret paladin and disc priest. This will address all 4 problems:

1. Hunter can tranq shot fire adds if I have trouble getting them out of the flame walls.
2. Holy paladin healing with Righteous Fury up will draw the fire adds to him, making them easier to find and pick up. Plus, the holy paladin is less likely to get gibbed by a fire add than most other classes.
3. Misdirect can either shore up the threat or save the drake tank the trouble of moving.

So, issues solved without loss of anything buff-wise besides Inspiration and 3% raid-haste. The raid comp would look like this. As long as the holy paladin grabs Kings in his/her spec, the tanks would have Sanctuary/Kings, and all the casters would have Wisdom/Kings. I'd want the holy to either be 51/17/0 +3 for Divine Guardian, or 51/5/15 for super-happy-fun-time buffage.

If the guild had a dependable boomkin and a resto shaman on hand to sub in, I would prefer something more like this, but beggars can't be choosers. That comp has 2 Heroisms, Insect Swarm, 2 blessings... everything but a healthstone, and the raid could have a warlock parked outside to give us those.

Some notes for the encounter on stuff I did and stuff I should do, in case there's a next time:

• Visibility was poor when the whelps were up. I broke out the ol' Archimonde "zoom the f*ck out" camera command to help for next time:
  

  /console CameraDistanceMaxFactor #

  ... where "#" for me was something like 30 to allow me to zoom out however far I liked.
• When Tenebron's portal is up, have a Consecrate overlapping the portal, shading toward one of the healers, and stand in between the portal and the healer. This ensures that the whelps stay clumped and don't go wandering off, making pick-up a b!tch.
• I'm going to use Seal of Light next time instead of a damage seal. Single target TPS didn't matter for me, my stuff wasn't getting DPS'ed until I had put down at least 2-3 Consecrates worth of AoE threat on them, and all the damage that was being done to my stuff was AoE.
• Once the whelps are AoE'ed down after Tenebron is killed, don't help on the drakes. I tried to help DPS on one of the drakes, and the second I hit Hammer of the Righteous I pulled the other drake off the drake tank. Shadow breath on the resto druid, all went to hell. I are stupid. Just stay out of flame walls and pick up fire adds, DPS them down myself.
• Pay more attention to the flame walls. I started moving a bit late on a few of them and got some fire adds enraged. Especially considering there was no rogue or hunter to tranq them, that was bad news. Any time I died before a healer or tank bit it, it was because I had one or more enraged fire adds on me.
• Block value is king for whelp tanking. My 10-man raid armor with Holy Shield up stood up to the mass of nasty better than a 25-man geared death knight tank, according to a few people. Plus, Blessing of Sanctuary on the other tanks is verra nize.
• If I need to, I can drop my defense a little for additional pure avoidance, block value, stamina, or block rating. The whelps/fire adds are not level 83-equivalent like a raid boss, so I don't need 540 defense to make sure they won't crit me.
• Make a macro for the Sartharion tank to bubblewall him:
  

  #showtooltip Hand of Sacrifice
  /target *insert tank's name*
  /cast Hand of Sacrifice
  /cast Divine Shield
  /targetlasttarget

  I have Divine Guardian in my tanking spec, so when I use this, I'll redirect 30% of the damage on everyone in the raid, tank included, to my now-immune self, plus I'll redirect an additional 30% on the Sarth tank into my Divine Shield. Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Guardian stack, right?
• I need to make a mouseover macro for Righteous Defense, there were times when a healer said "I've got whelps/elementals on me" and I couldn't see jack sh!t past the whelps I had on *me*, so I wanted to just hover over that person's name in my raid frames and taunt 'em that way. But, the usual functioning of Righteous Defense is hit the hotkey, click the target, unless you're targeting a hostile. So it got all borked when I was trying to tank a bunch of things AND taunt things I wasn't targeting. I think a simple one will do here -
  

  #showtooltip
  /cast [target=mouseover, help, nodead] [] Righteous Defense

I can't wait until I get another shot at this. Once I get this done, I'm nearly guaranteed Glory of the Raider, since I know that I can do undermanned Malygos/Sartharion and handle 6 minute Malygos.

EDIT: Changed the RD macro slightly due to a reader comment.