Well we’re back and we’re randomly tanking things in ICC today. For those who have had the opportunity to do most of the weekly ICC quests, arguably the most annoying one is Lady Deathwhisper’s. Done in a conventional way, you remove an entire player from your team to go OT/babysit Darnavan, to keep him alive without letting him slaughter your raid. Fortunately your raid has a hunter with a properly specced Tenacity pet! Or at least it should.
The method for OTing Darnavan with your pet is simple, I used a Crocolisk, but any properly tank specced Tenacity pet can do what Lubriderm does. You can and should use your dps spec for this, SV is great because your pet naturally gains a bit more stamina than MM, but either is fine.
After a wave or two of adds spawn, if your raid has accepted the quest, Darnavan will spawn with the adds. Immediately sick your pet on him, after a few bites, a growl and some bad attitude, call your pet back to you at the bottom of the stairs, or some other out of the way place within healing range. You can certainly keep mend pet on him, but a raid healer should be able to keep him up with limited effort.
After this just go back to clearing the adds as usual. It is advisable however to make Darnavan your focus target, if he gets below 50% health, tap passive and stay on your pet to prevent killing him. Your pet should have enough threat lead at that point to stat ahead of healers, but keep an eye on it. If he starts slipping, throw a growl and hit passive again. Repeat as necessary.
As far as I can tell in my experience this has been the best method, tanking him with a player pretty much requires most of that player’s time, effort and dps to go to waste, and the same can be said for the exhausting chore of trying to kite Darnavan.
Do your raid a favor and get them 5 easy Frost Emblems!
Happy Tankering!
– Solaryn
Great Strategy, I used my ape for it and it worked great. Normally we had a holy paladin tank him but blood of rhino and the avoidance a pet had made easier on the other healers.
Interesting … might have to try that sometime. If the raid leaders will listen xD