Oddities

I attempted to point out in my last post that my guild achieved I've Gone and Made a Mess on our last venture into 25-man ICC, a fact for which I am proud - it was only our second Saurfang kill, and only our second attempt that night.

I informed my raid leader last week that upon the birth of my child (an event which I expect will force me to take a break from raiding for a week or two at the very least, probably more), I will no longer heal on our guild raids - I will either be tanking with another group or I will remove my healing spec for a feral DPS, but until then I would still have the tree stuff and be available for it.

So this week when we hopped in, I didn't ask, I just tree'd up and off we went.

We plowed our way through Marrowgar and the trash before Deathwhisper (picking up the Deprogramming quest), before I looked at recount and realized we had 8 healers on the run.  I pointed this out, but my raid leader already had a plan in mind - I tanked up to hold on to Darnavan.  Unfortunately some pets and a hunter hit him before I could really get him out of the way, and the damage put in before I could get him back under control made him too weak, and he died about halfway through the first phase.  So I switched to cat form and ran around helping out killing wherever I could and we moved on.

He had me stay in cat form for the Gunship Battle, which was odd to me but since it's a ROFLstomp anyway I guessed it didn't matter.

Then Mr. Imma-vampire-really rolled up... and while he initially told me to switch back to tree (which I expected, as my healing is stronger than my DPS due to my DPS being a tank spec and mostly tank gear), some personnel switched out and he told me to switch back to cat form.

He made it very clear to me that I was to keep Mangle up at all times.

I put out what I think is a respectable 4700 DPS on our second (and successful) attempt.  I actually think the raid-wide 5% physical crit increase had more to do with our success than the Mangle debuff, but that's neither really here nor there.  I put out that much DPS while missing key DPS talents (such as King of the Jungle), having tank-based gems and enchants almost across the board, and having all tank-based glyphs.  Yes, I was far short of the raid-leading DPS of one of our rogues, just shy of 9k, but considering the limitations I was working under I don't think I did poorly.

Examining my performance on WorldofLogs, I had 88% uptime on Savage Roar, 83% on Rake, 43% on Rip, and only 4.9% on Mangle.  I'll have to check, I suspect Mangle is getting overwritten/overruled by someone else's buff somehow.  I had 32 hits/crits of Mangle and it only applied the buff 10 times.  Melee was ~39% of my damage, followed by Rake (15%), Rip (~15%), Shred (14%), and Mangle (10%).  Ferocious Bite and Swipe (why did I Swipe?) trailed down at the bottom.

I need to push that Savage Roar uptime closer to 95-100%, and the same with Rake.  I'm not sure what a good target for Rip uptime is but I've got to be better than 43%.

All in all it was a fun experience and I'm actually looking forward to switching.

Thanks for reading!