With my Warrior’s new found riches in gear, it was time to get them gemmed and enchanted.\u00c2\u00a0 Except I wasn’t quite sure what I should be gemming or enchanting for.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Now my Hunter, I know I try to get my hit capped.\u00c2\u00a0 After that, everything goes towards agility and crit rating, with some default stamina.\u00c2\u00a0 I occassionally consider putting it into intellect, usually after I’ve run out of mana.\u00c2\u00a0 Agility is almost always prime, since it does wonders for a Hunter’s offensive and defensive stats.\u00c2\u00a0 And crit…because I like seeing those big numbers roll up, and because I have certain things that proc off criticals.<\/p>\n
Now my Warrior, I’m not as sure on.\u00c2\u00a0 In her dps spec, she’s Fury, which means she uses Titan’s Grip<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 While this does all sorts of goofy things to her hit table, special abilities still usually require only 8% hit.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 But beyond that?<\/p>\n Her Protection spec is a little easier.\u00c2\u00a0 Defense is primary.\u00c2\u00a0 After that, I know I need Strength and Stamina.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0But beyond?\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe\u00c2\u00a0some trickle into Agility or defense specific values like Dodge or Parry?\u00c2\u00a0 And where does Expertise fit in to it all?<\/p>\n Now in the middle of all this tinkering, I get contacted by Schr\u00c3\u00b6dinger’s Cats who wanted to do an alt ICC run.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And my Rogue and Mage, the only other 80’s I have, only have gearscores of just over 3k.\u00c2\u00a0 So I didn’t have a single alt ready for ICC.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Since I wasn’t going on the raid, and in full upgrade mode, I decided to run some random dungeons.\u00c2\u00a0 So the first one I went into was Gundrak.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 As a Warrior, I just go to town on the boss.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I also managed to squeeze out the Snakes.\u00c2\u00a0 Why’d It Have To Be Snakes?<\/a> achievement.<\/p>\n 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.\u00c2\u00a0 For Moorabi, I was trying to Pummel<\/a> him each time he started his transformation but he managed to finally transform near the end of the fight.\u00c2\u00a0 Lastly, we took out Gal’darah, skipping Eck completely, so I only earned the Gundrak<\/a> achievement but not the Heroic:Gundrak<\/a> one.<\/p>\n I ran another random, this time it was Utgarde Pinnacle.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately, it shows up quite often for my Hunter’s random dungeon, so the fights were fresher in my mind that the Gundrak ones.\u00c2\u00a0 This group, again I was under geared compared to everyone but I held my own on the dps numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a relatively quick run and at the end of it, my Warrior managed to net the Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi<\/a>, My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time<\/a>, Utgarde Pinnacle<\/a>, Heroic: Utgarde Pinnacle<\/a>, King’s Bane<\/a>, and, almost as an odd tag to it, the 50 Dungeon & Raid Emblems<\/a> achievements.\u00c2\u00a0 Quite a lot of achievements for an unmemorable run.<\/p>\n Lastly for the night, I ran a Violet Hold.\u00c2\u00a0 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!!!”\u00c2\u00a0 That’s not really the kind of bullshit you should be doing, if you sign up to be a tank, be a bloody tank!<\/p>\n And while we didn’t wipe, we did lose people during the first set of portals.\u00c2\u00a0 I know I had to break off my attacks once because two mobs got distracted by the “epic heals” the healer was putting out.\u00c2\u00a0 So, with some grumbling, he finally shifted from his cat to bear form and started playing it straight.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n It still annoyed me though.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 So I stuck it out and managed to pick up the Lockdown!<\/a> and Looking For More<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0achievements.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n That was enough for one night, but I tried for another random the next night.\u00c2\u00a0 This time, I got pulled for a Heroic Halls of Lightning.\u00c2\u00a0 And this time, I wasn’t the lowest gearscore person.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, except for one person over 4k, the rest of us had around 3k, which worried me.\u00c2\u00a0 I always considered Halls of Lightning the most difficult Wrath of the Lich King 5-man dungeons.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n And this run almost was as bad as I expected.\u00c2\u00a0 And ironically, also a good example of how things can go bad when a tank isn’t up to snuff.\u00c2\u00a0 For instance, he quickly pulled more mobs than the group could handle and we got overwhelmed.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And what does he say?\u00c2\u00a0 “Well what happened?”\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n So, two wipes, just in the very begining of the instance.\u00c2\u00a0 Never a good start.\u00c2\u00a0 Volkhan was sort of easier, except for the fact that his adds kept going after our healer.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The other dps broke off to take them on while myself and the tank just focused on Volkhan himself.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n In the Hall of Watchers, we again wiped.\u00c2\u00a0 This time, when we got hit by a fear, two of us got feared further down the hall where we activated even more adds.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s not the tanks fault?\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately, I went and picked them up off the healers and dragged them back to the tank where he picked them up.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Ionar, wasn’t quite as dicey.\u00c2\u00a0 The main problem was that when Ionar did his little lightning spider split trick, the tank didn’t run with the rest of us.\u00c2\u00a0 Which wouldn’t have been bad except the healer lagged behind to cover him, exposing the healer to the spiders as well.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately, we didn’t wipe but again, I was a bit annoyed by how this tank was playing it.<\/p>\n On the way to Loken, we wiped once more.\u00c2\u00a0 And this time, it was once again the tank not paying attention to a patrol.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And once again the tank acted totally surprised!\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n