As some of you may know, I play World of Warcraft as a Protection warrior these days, and I've been Revered with the Sha'tar for a while now, which means I can run Heroic Tempest Keep dungeons. After collecting enough gear to have about 495 defense and 12,300 health, I decided to go for a whirl in the Mechanar, an instance well-known for being generous with Badges as well as dropping one of the best pre-raid tanking weapons, The Sun Eater.

The trash struck me as largely unchanged in terms of abilities, first off, which surprised me a little. They sure hit a lot harder than before, though; those bastardous Destroyers especially. One Charged Fist, if not interrupted or reflected properly, can easily wipe not only your melee DPS but you, as well, and we did wipe more than once on these arcanely charged monstrosities. Apart from that, there were few problems; though I think it would've gone a lot worse without a warlock along to enslave/banish those Gan'arg tinkerer groups. I have no idea what I could possibly have done to survive that onslaught of arcane bombs the little buggers toss at you.

Fortunately, all of the three Mechanar bosses are mostly the same as far as I'm concerned, as a tank. Capacitus's polarity charge is only relevant to the DPS folks, and the additional Sepethrea elementals are mostly a concern for the DPS guys as well. We never got to Pathaleon. Why?

Because Nethermancer Sepethrea is a freaking monster on Heroic mode. Not only does she hit like a freight train and have the same annoying abilities as in normal mode, but she now has three fire elementals that move about 60% faster than normal mode. The result is that half the time the DPS can't get at the boss because of flamewakes all over the place, and the healer can't heal you because he's too busy trying not to get burnt to a crisp. To top this mess off, Sepethrea is way too fond of slowing you and following it up with a knockback into an elemental, the end result of which is that your healer is being beaten up for 2-3000 a hit, you're too far away to Intervene, and you're being turned to cinder by a hellfiring elemental that you can't do bugger all about, because her damn slowing effect is making you move at 20% normal speed.

I can't be too clear on how much Sepethrea annoys me. She is hard enough on normal mode, and her Heroic version just makes you want to curl up in the fetal position right away. As a tank, not only do I have to avoid being eaten by elementals (even with fire resistance gear on I can only get to about 200, meaning a measly 35% mitigation—and if I do choose to wear fire resistance gear, it means sacrificing about 1000 health and 40 defense, which means I'm in range for being critted, a highly dangerous state on any Heroic boss), but I have to deal with two abilities that wipe aggro as well as make me unable to act quickly to regain it—either through the outright disorient effect of Dragon's Breath, or by knocking me square across the room entirely. The fact that every attack she makes slows you to a crawl only adds insult to injury, especially if you manage to get knocked into an elemental.

So, after two tries, we just gave up and never attempted Pathaleon, so no Sun Eater for me yet. Oh well, at least I got three badges and a purple gem. But seriously, Sepethrea needs some serious nerf, and soon. Patch 2.2.0 reduced her elementals from being 100% faster than normal to only 60% faster; hardly enough to make this fiery massacre machine anywhere near manageable, and her loot definitely isn't worth the trouble. Next time, I should probably insist we skip her.