Watchkeeper Gargolmar... DOWN!

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The kids and their trophy.

This zone really helped me see just how much work I have ahead of me. The trash packs were a constant problem, mostly because I was still working out keybindings for the individual characters. I may further simplify them in the future, but for now I seem to finally have a working set of about 16 keys that trigger only the abilities I want, and do not have some sort of side effect (such as causing the healer to select the wrong target... argh).

I now have a set of keys that correspond to each member of the party. Pressing that member's key will cause the priest to cast a heal and the paladin and mage to attempt to decurse that party member. I will probably change the priest's macro to cast Renew instead. This allows me to quickly shift attention to an affected member momentarily then get back to the primary task on hand.

By the time I was ready to pull Gargolmar, I had everything working and had realized that the best use for the Focus command was to set up a CC target, which I did on my mage. Watchkeeper Gargolmar has two adds, level 59 NPCs that will heal him during the fight. Thus the strategy for taking him down is to DPS down the adds first, then concentrate on killing Gargolmar. I set one of the adds as the mage's focus target, and modified her Polymorph macro accordingly, then set about pulling the group. I targeted the other add so that the group could assist me, then the paladin targeted Gargolmar and stayed on him while the group burned down the add. When that one died, I targeted the other one, assisted the paladin, and switched him back to the boss while the group took down the other add. Then I turned their full attention to the boss and finished him off. It went pretty much perfectly.

He dropped the Pauldrons of Arcane Rage, which was mildly disappointing. I was hoping to get the plate BP for the paladin first. Gearing him up is critical for me, the better he gets at taking a sustained beating, the easier it will become to run instances with him. My healer will definitely be grateful for that!

Anyway, there is a lot of practice yet to come, and two more bosses to down in this zone. I'm sure I'll continue to learn and get better as I go, with plenty of deaths to mark my progress (as it were). But all in all I'm pretty happy with the results, and am looking forward to clearing my first instance with a level-appropriate multiboxed group!