How Many Times Can A Mage Die?

This was one of those playing nights when things started off well but finished brutally. I decided that it was time to start focusing on more heroic runs as well as my daily batch of daily quests. According to an amazing website, Be Imba it said that I should be able to handle instances beyond heroic Naxxramas. Me, my other priest and fellow follower of light Bloodyhealin going as shadow, Paganstix our dps druid going in to tank, Pottymouth our undead warlock and an old friend of mine Deb running her mage Cyrenitee. We got to the instance and went to work. We quickly found out that Pottymouth was a dps machine and kept ripping aggro away from our druid Pagan. Potty wasn't running a threat meter so he had no idea what the threat level he was causing. Pagan couldn't hold the aggro and potty couldn't help but rip it away from him and we wiped once or twice. Potty and I had to go do something in real life so we called it, said our good byes and hoped to get back to the run.

An hour later we were back trying to put the group back together. We brought in an outside player to be the tank and let Pagan run as his natural dps'ing self. Our tank was an undead death knight. My old friend Deb came back with her warlock Wiccad. Our group was me, our dps druid Pagan, our pug tank, and Potty and Wiccad as warlocks. This will be great I thought. It was. We blew through the instance with a death here and there but for the most part it went well. I received the '50 Stone Keeper Shards' achievement. I also got a nice epic bracer for my face melty spec. We decided to keep the party going and do the heroic daily: Halls of Lightning. Pagan bowed out of this run and we brought in another old friend of mine Frank running his mage, Fact.

We went into the instance and it was disastrous from the beginning. This DK tank thought apparently thought that he could aggro the entire instance and just keep on going. He never waited for the casters (which all of us were other than him) to mana up or to be 'ready'. Fights would start and I would be at 1/4 mana. We died a lot. My new found healing confidence was now lost as I kept thinking it was me. It may have been a little bit but it was brutal. We got passed the first boss okay but we must have wiped 4 times before the 2nd boss. When we got to the 2nd boss we wiped once but got him on the 2nd try and received a 'Shatter Resistant' achievement. We continued to die and wipe at least 3 more times on the way to the 3rd boss which went down without much trouble. Going on to the last boss we must have died and wiped another 3 times at least on our way there. As soon as I would get the group standing back up it seemed like the mage Fact would die over and over and over. At one point I was putting 'renews' on him to try and keep him up before the fights started. It didn't work. I even apologized at one point for him dieing so often. The mobs kept throwing these spears at us and taking Fact and I out causing the wipes. I was a part of the worst run of my wow playing career. It was that bad. This was the worst tank that I have ever been associated with. Fact died so many times that I actually lost count.

We finally got to the last boss and took him down within 2 minutes so I received the 'Timely Death' achievement along with the 'Heroic: Halls of Lightning' achievement. I was so physically and mentally exhausted when I turned in the quest that there was no chance of continuing to play. Fact and Wiccad logged out as soon as we came through the other side of the Dalaran portal that Fact left for us. I was never so happy to log out of the game. I went to sleep that night thinking that I had a lot of learning to do.