What a complete turn around from our last raid. We went through the opening stages of Ancient Port Warehouse like a knife through butter. There was no raid wipe after every mob and only a very few people pulled aggro off the main tanks.
I was late due to being told by the wife that as there was a raid break, there was also a play break, so I haven't been online at all since late December. I logged on to find myself in Martok on Kojan where I had been practicing Diplomacy. So to reach the Southern Swamps, especially now that Rudolph no longer flies, was going to be a long run!.
I was so excited I forgot to get pics of the first Boss!. Never mind I will pick some up next week as we will have a full pop next week for Wednesday. This was only a very short week as we really only came back on the Wednesday night. We cleared through the early part of the zone extremely quickly. The only deaths we had were from the usual suspects *cough* sorcerers*cough* who weren't keeping an eye on their aggro.
One thing I think people don't quite understand is that each tank has an extremely different way of gaining and holding aggro. Warriors have a lot of snap aggro, Paladins have a lot of powerful rescues and Dread Knights take some time to build rage. Each tank classes aggro abilities need to be handled differently by the raid. Once I have good aggro it becomes very hard to take it off me, but it does take me some time to build it up to a level at which the DPS classes can unleash.
Our first target of the night was x77 (which I forgot to get photo's of) he dropped as clean as a whistle. Next up was an enraged x83. Now I really like this fight, theres a tank rotation and you get bounced about 40 feet in to the air. Its a fairly straight tank fight with a twist. Hell I'm just loving the tanking. Raid tanking really is everything I thought it would be. I get butterflies every time we engage and a huge buzz when the target goes down.
After some more clearing of trash we got to General Vicus. We haven't killed him yet but we get closer with every try. I suspect that we will find when we finally get to the central Hub of APW that there will be a shortcut to most of these mobs and we will be able to avoid a lot of the trash. However we haven't raided together, in some cases for years, so all the trash clearing and general raid discipline is very good practice. We are definitely getting better at it and its getting a lot easier to clear through the crap. Everybody is learning their classes a little bit better and what they can and cannot do. We are learning about aggro control in APW (very different than WoW and EQ) , how the game handles different scenarios and where the bugs are.
We will get there, its all good practice and its all good fun!.
General Vicus in the dim distance 
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