Thursday, October 21, 2010

Sometimes I surprise even myself...

... and if you don't get the reference then you fail, hardcore.

I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts while my ridiculously busy schedule of ridiculousness keeps me from writing anything meaningful.

After our bug-filled jaunt into ICC last week, we decided to start fresh this week even though we only got 5 bosses down last week... And due to illness/inability to form coherent sentences/real life causing low attendance/etc, we waited until Wednesday night to go in this week.

To make a much longer story very short: we smashed 7 bosses (Lower Spire + Fester, Rot, and Princes).  A typical first night for us.

I was surprised by a couple of things during the run, though, that I wanted to share.

First, remember a few posts back?  I said that the death of cat DPS was greatly exaggerated?  Boy was I right.

Now, I realize they thought it was underpowered and made a couple of changes to bump it up.  They may have done so even before I posted my previous thoughts.  They may have done a little before then, and a little after.  I'm here today to confirm that cat DPS is most definitely alive and well, even before the Cataclysm.

For the first time in my experience, I actually led the DPS chart on a couple of fights.  One of them by a good margin.

At the end of the Saurfang fight I was sporting over 13k DPS.  Once I get near my gaming machine again I can try to post up a screenshot - I got one that should show the Recount breakdown to show how much is attributed to melee, Rake, Rip, Shred, and Ferocious Bite.  Much like pre-4.0, the breakdown was fairly even - roughly 25% each going to melee, Rip, and Shred, with the remaining 25% divided up among Ravage, Rake, and FB. 

After a top half performance on Rotface, we moved to Festergut.  We had a mage leading the chart for most of the fight, but I was a close second until we hit 25%.  It is so incredibly liberating to actually have something to do differently when the Raid Leader announces "Kill shot range."  Anyway, mere seconds before Fester fell down I passed him, finishing with 12.5k DPS to his 12.3k.  The breakdown of damage was shifted slightly.  I don't have the screenshots to compare at hand (I will offer more details once I do), but while the same general breakdown showed, it was shifted.  (i.e. Rip had the highest percentage on Saurfang, IIRC, and Shred had the highest on Fester, again, unless my memory is failing me.)

I'm loving Nom Nom Nom, even if it did get the much less cool name Blood in the Water.  Once the boss is in range, your life becomes Shred/Rake to 5 CPs, FB, do this two or three times depending on the time left on Savage Roar, then Shred/Rake to 5 CPs and Savage Roar, wash, rinse, repeat and watch the boss die.  Since you don't really have to worry about refreshing Rip, the only timer you really have to watch at that point is Savage Roar.

Speaking of timers, I was moderately more impressed with my output because I haven't been using a debuff tracker addon.  Last time I tried to load BadKitty, it was broken, and I haven't checked in the past week or so to see if it was fixed.  I suppose it's technically harder to play this way, but given the proclamations of doom and gloom for Kitty DPS I wasn't worried about it until Cata actually dropped.  So I was doubly surprised to find myself on top of the chart.

Moving on... My DPS as a tank seemed relatively high as well.  There were even a couple of fights that I beat out a couple of our lower-geared folks that just must have had a bad fight that boss.  I dunno *shrug*.

Speaking of tanking, my single-target threat has been WAY up - to the point where I'm stealing threat from our other tanks if I don't watch it - while my AOE threat has been way down, so-so at best.  That 6-second cooldown on Swipe is a pain in my arse.  Tab-targeting helps, but having the Pulverize buff fully powered helps as well, and you need to consume 3 stacks of Lacerate to get there, which requires focusing on one target.  I still don't have a good handle on how to get and hold AOE threat, but I also realize that I might not have that until Cata comes and we get Thrash.

In completely unrelated matters, I finally completed the holiday uber-meta.  Picked a candy bucket in Telaar and got Achievement spammed...  Got my Violet Proto-Drake and danced in the... wait, I already spent 5k gold to get 310% flying.  blizz can I have my 5k back?  See, what I was reading over the past few weeks (sorry, I'm a bad blogger and don't have sources to link, it's been too long and I don't remember where I read them to begin with, but Wowwiki confirms it) said that if you already had a 310% speed mount, you got Master Flying for free, but this was not true if you gained the mount afterward.  So, I spent my 5k, and then heard afterward that enough people complained about the holiday meta that they changed it so that it granted the Master flying skill.  Thus I curse my impatience but please Blizzard give me my 5k back.

Anyway.... cheers!

1 comment:

  1. Nice job on the meta for the holiday...sucks that you already bought the 310 though. I just dont have the patience to run around talking to elders and looking candy buckets.

    Its also good to hear about cats being in a good place from a less min/max point of view. I have a good cat set but it is too close to cata to regem that set since i don't use it all that often.

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