Tuesday (1 Feb) - Dragon Soul Time

Tuesday (1 Feb) - Dragon Soul Time

Where to start? Tuesday night was a night full of highs and unexpected lows.

The First High - On Tuesday night, JB entered the queue for the looking for raid (lfr) Siege of Dragon Soul. JB was only a little nervous. The first boss, Morchok, is well known and JB knew how to handle him even as melee. This was JB's first test of her fully capped +hit and +expertise gear, and it would be against and end game boss.

The Second High - JB did a great job against Morchok, keeping the hits coming on the big beast, running to the safe spots when the black death flowed, and surviving the massive Stomps. JB had killed her first Dragon Soul boss, and was now blooded in two raids, DS and Baradin Hold. Who could have even imagined such a thing as little as a month ago?

A Low - Wild complained often that when Tier tokens dropped, the list of classes that could roll on them so rarely included druids, but always seemed to list shaman. JB can now complain that all three of the tier token drops from Morchok failed to mention shaman, but the druid class appeared on them all. Luck of the dice, and all that. It was even kind of funny, in a way.

Another High - The trash mobs for the second boss, Warlord Zon'ozz, was a rather cheap thrill. I don't think JB's DPS amounted to enough to attract the attention of any of the twisting and twining tentacles and eyes that we were killing. As for the boss himself, the fight was a game of catch between tanks. There was little to worry about when Wild healed it, and not much more to worry about as a DPS. I'm sure there were others doing the necessary things so that JB could focus on her DPS.

A Low that Shouldn't Be - JB won the LFR Tier 13 Gloves token. That should have given JB quite the warm and fuzzy feeling of success. But, JB is already wearing the T12 gloves, as well as the T12 chest, and needs both to get the two-piece buff. With a sigh, JB banked the T13 token. For now. When she gets a second T13, then she'll make the swap. But why couldn't it have been the boots? Or Helm? Or Shoulder?

A Strange One - We killed the trash - a bunch of oozes - and engaged the third boss, Yor'sahj the Unsleeping. JB's job was of course to bang on the boss, but also to kill the oozes and other nasties that spawned. About halfway through that battle JB started to wonder why this seemed so easy? Yes, JB was under the aggro radar of the boss and the other beasties for the most part, but there was plenty of AoE and other directed damage that just seemed, well, lessened, than Wild's recollection. The boss died. No loot for JB.

The Last Boss - Raiders had been coming and going throughout the run, and most of the time we had less than a full 25 raiders during the boss fights. The tanks weren't waiting for the spots to fill, and to this point it hadn't mattered. On this last boss, Hagara the Stormbinder, we were down to twenty raiders. We started the fight anyway. JB got in trouble on this one. There are many mobs running around before the boss engages, and they drop a lot of AoE damage. JB got just a little too focused on trying to keep mobs targeted and let the AoE kill her. Once the battle moved out of her area, JB reincarnated and rejoined the fight. I personally like the Hagara fight, and it was fun with JB, too. The battle goes back and forth between attacking Hagara directly, and running around the outer ring of the chamber destroying things while being chased by a wall of ice shards that is instantly fatal if it catches you.

We killed Hagara with twenty raiders. JB should have been ecstatic at completing the first half of Dragon Soul. Sadly, though, the epic feel of that kill just wasn't there. That was an unexpected low for JB.

Why? Two reasons, I think. Ok, just thought of a third. (1) The gear levels of those farming DS have reached the point where the fights, while not trivial, are easier than when we first started; (2) JB's DPS was pretty trivial, so in part JB was carried through this fight. Had all the DPS done the same level of damage JB did (JB's DPS was 18.6; 5 DPSers did over 30k), we would not likely have killed a single boss; and (3) the Tuesday maintenance set the first DS nerf - a 5% reduction in mob/boss DPS and health.

None of that diminishes JB's accomplishment, though. On 3 Jan, 2012, JB reached level 85. JB's interface was a mess, and she knew next to nothing about how to be a DPS in groups. JB's equipped gear score was a modest i321, and she wasn't sure what she wanted to do next, if anything.

On 31 Jan, 2012, a mere 28 days later, JB defeated the first four bosses in lfr DS, the end game raid of the end game for all of Cataclysm, the Hour of Twilight. JB's gear score was i362, a 41 level improvement that had swiftly sped through and beyond the gear level plateaus of i325, i346, and i359. In JB's first dungeon run, she did 8.0k dps. In DS she did 18.6k dps. And she had learned to raid as an enhancement shaman.

Now that is a HIGH.