Lo-Quality WoW

Been in an odd sort of slump lately. I just don’t seem to have direction for any of my characters. So I logged on without any real idea of what I’d be doing. I puttered around Dalaran for a little bit before my attention wandered and then I decided to take a trip into Shadow Labyrinth since I was pretty close to hitting Exalted with Lower City.
I cleared out Hellmaw easily and was clearing the room for Blackheart when I get a whisper out of the blue asking if it was for normal or heroic. I wasn’t sure if he was asking about the instance I was in or one of the ones I had put myself up for in Looking for Group, so I quickly replied “huh?”. Turns out the guy wanted to run his Death Knight through Shadow Labs. I told him sure he could join in but I wasn’t sure if I was doing a full clear since I was just puttering around grinding rep and I knew people from the guild would probably be logging on within the hour and want to do something.

So his DK showed up and we cleared the half of the room I didn’t finish. The fight with Blackheart again wasn’t any problem, and I again it was either because my shots were in cooldown or he just doesn’t know what to do with a hunter but I barely pinged the DK while under mind control. A few mobs after that I hit exalted but I figured I’d go and see if we could finish the place.

The Grandmaster Vorpil fight I wasn’t sure on since I remembered that the fight usually involved us moving him around the room, and I don’t have that fine of control with my pet. So we just dps him in place and managed to kill him before too many of the voidwalkers got to him. Then we got to Murmur. I generally hate that fight, even though he dropped the coolest spear at the time, the Sonic Spear. But we barreled through again. I forgot about his little exploding trick and most of the damage I took was from being flung into the air and coming back down. I rarely see my bar get that low without a wipe. But Murmur went down, the Sonic Spear actually dropped, and the DK was very happy to finally finish off some quests he had. Good all around I guess.

So I was then in Shattrath trying to remember if there had been something I wanted to buy now that I was exalted with Lower City. But I see the call out for a Vault of Archavon 25, again with the familiar leader so I volunteered. It just so happened that the PKT druid also came on just then and we were again off with the Agency to do a VoA run.

I used to remember when Emalon was such a pain. But doing the fight with this group meant they knew what to do which makes it so much easier. Of course, when Emalon went down, he dropped two sets of the Hunter tier 8 pants and there were two hunters, myself and someone else. Unfortunately, I already had the pants. If it was most other groups, I wouldn’t have said anything, taken the pants and just sold them but they’ve done so much to help me upgrade that I was honest with them. I’m pretty sure they didn’t need the DE items but hey, if it helps them.

On the way to Archavon, the other hunter admits he just ran out of ammo and if he could borrow some arrows off me. I don’t know if it’s because hunters are just not keeping track as much since we switched out our quivers and ammo pouches for regular bags but I’m starting to run into this situation more and more. (For the record, at the beginning of the night I usually make sure I have close to 4K “regular” shots and at least 2K “boss” shots on me.) So gave him a stack of my “regular” and we proceeded to Archavon.

Archavon want down easily as well. Then lo and behold, the hunter PVP chest drops, the Deadly Gladiator’s Chain Armor. We both roll on it and I beat the other hunters roll. He grumbles slightly but I point out that it was probably karma from giving him a stack of arrows. The ironic thing is that I really don’t PvP as much as I used to, and using that chest piece drops my hit by a full 2%. I’m trying to think of a good way to make it work as part of my standard gear set but I just can’t think of one.

We talk story for a bit and then I go back to Dalaran. And naturally, as soon as I get there, I get an invite for a VoA 10. So it’s back to Wintergrasp once more. We take a few minutes to form up and then we go in. As we go in, someone remarks “hey, we don’t have any duplicate specs!” Wasn’t sure what he meant until I looked at the raid page and saw that he meant that we had exactly one of every class. I’ve never seen that happen before.

Which meant that nobody was gonna argue when class specific gear dropped. With the DK and the paladin as tanks, someone asked who the three healers were. Well, with the paladin occupied, that left the druid, shaman and priest as healers. Leaving the rogue, mage, warlock, warrior and my hunter to act as dps. We also had a vent up but there were only four of us on it. Two of them knew each other and when one asked “who’s in here with us?” “The hunter and the priest” I just laughed. Because we didn’t even have to bother with names, since we could just call everyone by class. (You laugh but in the VoA 25, they were pronouncing one characters name three different ways and it took awhile to figure out who was being addressed.)

It turned out that not only were we balanced class-wise, we probably hit some sort of Blizzard balance sheet jackpot. The top two damage dealers were myself and the warlock at 18% each. (I had a higher dps score but he beat me on overall damage by 700 points.) The other three average between 16% and 17%. So about 86% of the damage for the raid was being dealt by the dps members. That left 14% for the two tanks and three healers, and I know that at least one of the healers was doing damage of some sort, about 1%.

Okay, I’m not sure if that’s Blizzard’s number set but in my head, I expect the dps in a group to provide at least 80% of the damage and the tanks to provide about 12-18% with maybe a percentage or two from the healers. And to have all the dps within 2% of each other? That practically boggles my mind since I generally never see that. I usually see a 5-10% difference in damage numbers between the top and bottom dps members of a group.

Now, gear does play a significant role in how one performs, but it’s not everything. Your ability to utilize your characters traits also plays a role. I’ve often outperformed guys with gear better than me, and that’s because I’m pretty darn good at what I do with what I have with my hunter. With varying levels of gear and play skills, you get widely varying numbers. So having us all within 2% of each other tells me that we were all relatively geared the same or the few that weren’t as highly geared, knew their character well enough to compensate. It’s nice to play in that kind of group.

Seems like I’m gushing, yes I am. Read yesterday’s post where myself and a warlock did 50% of the damage. That’s ridiculous! And after being plugged with the ridiculous, having something to compare it against, puts everything into perspective. I’m funny that way.