Lo-Quality WoW

With my Warrior’s new found riches in gear, it was time to get them gemmed and enchanted.  Except I wasn’t quite sure what I should be gemming or enchanting for. 

Now my Hunter, I know I try to get my hit capped.  After that, everything goes towards agility and crit rating, with some default stamina.  I occassionally consider putting it into intellect, usually after I’ve run out of mana.  Agility is almost always prime, since it does wonders for a Hunter’s offensive and defensive stats.  And crit…because I like seeing those big numbers roll up, and because I have certain things that proc off criticals.

Now my Warrior, I’m not as sure on.  In her dps spec, she’s Fury, which means she uses Titan’s Grip.  While this does all sorts of goofy things to her hit table, special abilities still usually require only 8% hit.  I actually give her a bit more than that because nothing’s more depressing then seeing a whole lot of “miss” roll up on your screen.  But beyond that?

Her Protection spec is a little easier.  Defense is primary.  After that, I know I need Strength and Stamina.  But beyond?  Maybe some trickle into Agility or defense specific values like Dodge or Parry?  And where does Expertise fit in to it all?

Now in the middle of all this tinkering, I get contacted by Schrödinger’s Cats who wanted to do an alt ICC run.  Unfortunately, even with all the upgrades, both my tank and dps specs for my Warrior are just under 4k gearscore and I know that in general, raids want people with 5k gearscore.  And my Rogue and Mage, the only other 80’s I have, only have gearscores of just over 3k.  So I didn’t have a single alt ready for ICC. 

Since I wasn’t going on the raid, and in full upgrade mode, I decided to run some random dungeons.  So the first one I went into was Gundrak.  As a Hunter, during Slar’ran’s fight, I hang back and try to protect the healer as much as possible while still doing dps.  As a Warrior, I just go to town on the boss.  And I was actually a bit happy in that I had the lowest gearscore but the highest dps output, so I must be doing something right.  I also managed to squeeze out the Snakes.  Why’d It Have To Be Snakes? achievement.

The Drakkari Colossus was interesting mainly in that if the tank forgot to move it out of a puddle, I had to back away so that I wasn’t getting hit.  For Moorabi, I was trying to Pummel him each time he started his transformation but he managed to finally transform near the end of the fight.  Lastly, we took out Gal’darah, skipping Eck completely, so I only earned the Gundrak achievement but not the Heroic:Gundrak one.

I ran another random, this time it was Utgarde Pinnacle.  Fortunately, it shows up quite often for my Hunter’s random dungeon, so the fights were fresher in my mind that the Gundrak ones.  This group, again I was under geared compared to everyone but I held my own on the dps numbers.  There really wasn’t much to the run that stood out in my mind other than realizing my Warrior had never been in there, so I had to do the two quests in the begining.  It was a relatively quick run and at the end of it, my Warrior managed to net the Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi, My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time, Utgarde Pinnacle, Heroic: Utgarde Pinnacle, King’s Bane, and, almost as an odd tag to it, the 50 Dungeon & Raid Emblems achievements.  Quite a lot of achievements for an unmemorable run.

Lastly for the night, I ran a Violet Hold.  Which pissed me off a little since the first thing the tank, who was a druid, says is “no tank, epic heals and max dps!!!”  That’s not really the kind of bullshit you should be doing, if you sign up to be a tank, be a bloody tank!

And while we didn’t wipe, we did lose people during the first set of portals.  I know I had to break off my attacks once because two mobs got distracted by the “epic heals” the healer was putting out.  So, with some grumbling, he finally shifted from his cat to bear form and started playing it straight.  He did slip into cat a few times, but usually it was on the portal guardians and between him, myself, and a death knight being the top dps, we could each take a few hits without dying.

It still annoyed me though.  I briefly considered switching over to my tank spec but as much as I haven’t quite figured out my dps rotation, my tanking rotation is even more vague.  And frankly, that’s why I’ve only been doing randoms as a dps, a bad tank can screw up a 5-man faster than almost anyone else.  So I stuck it out and managed to pick up the Lockdown! and Looking For More achievements. 

That was enough for one night, but I tried for another random the next night.  This time, I got pulled for a Heroic Halls of Lightning.  And this time, I wasn’t the lowest gearscore person.  In fact, except for one person over 4k, the rest of us had around 3k, which worried me.  I always considered Halls of Lightning the most difficult Wrath of the Lich King 5-man dungeons. 

And this run almost was as bad as I expected.  And ironically, also a good example of how things can go bad when a tank isn’t up to snuff.  For instance, he quickly pulled more mobs than the group could handle and we got overwhelmed.  Then he didn’t account for General Bjarngrim’s patrol path and we ended up pulling him and his guards while we were still fighting a group of mobs.  And what does he say?  “Well what happened?” 

So, two wipes, just in the very begining of the instance.  Never a good start.  Volkhan was sort of easier, except for the fact that his adds kept going after our healer.  Well healers, since we had a druid as the main healer but the shaman who was supposed to be doing dps also helped out with heals.  The other dps broke off to take them on while myself and the tank just focused on Volkhan himself. 

In the Hall of Watchers, we again wiped.  This time, when we got hit by a fear, two of us got feared further down the hall where we activated even more adds.  But that’s not the tanks fault?  It sort of is, because when you’re tanking mobs that fear, you pull you and your group further back where it’s safe to prevent a fear from causing that exact same problem.  Also, the tank ran a little ahead of us, which would be fine if only the watchers in front activated but some activated from behind.  Fortunately, I went and picked them up off the healers and dragged them back to the tank where he picked them up. 

Ionar, wasn’t quite as dicey.  The main problem was that when Ionar did his little lightning spider split trick, the tank didn’t run with the rest of us.  Which wouldn’t have been bad except the healer lagged behind to cover him, exposing the healer to the spiders as well.  Fortunately, we didn’t wipe but again, I was a bit annoyed by how this tank was playing it.

On the way to Loken, we wiped once more.  And this time, it was once again the tank not paying attention to a patrol.  We were in the middle of a group of mobs when the patrol came into aggro range, ran over and slaughtered the two healers and then killed the rest of us.  And once again the tank acted totally surprised! 

After all that, ironically, the Loken fight was the easiest and most straightforward fight.  Why ironic?  It’s the fight I absolutely hate as a Hunter.  I did end up with the Timely Death achievement but I was so glad to get out of there.  However, the whole instance took almost 90 minutes, much longer than any other run I’ve done this weekend.  It’s always bad pug experiences like that that make the randoms a chore, but like most chores, there’s a reason you do them and you just got to deal with it.