Weekend (26 Feb) - Saturday Night's NOT All Right for Fighting

Weekend (26 Feb) - Saturday Night's NOT All Right for Fighting

It was amateur weekend. Wild and JB suffered through some of the worst lfr Dragon Soul raids I've ever had the misfortune to be a part of.

It didn't help that JB was trying to improve on his elemental DPS, and that Wild had been asked to consider making his moonkin spec raid ready. More on that later.

Queue times weren't too bad, even when queuing up as a DPS, but the raiders that filled those raids had no clue what they were doing. A sampling of the disasters:

* Wild queued into a raid that hadn't waited for everyone to arrive. The staging area for Yor'sahj had already been overrun by oozes and Wild was parachuted right into the middle of them. Dead on arrival. Nasty wipe.

* On another Yor'sahj adventure there were three straight wipes despite a desperate raid leader trying to give instructions to players who paid him no attention at all.

* Twice the raid queue went wacko, dumping Wild out of the raid and then handing Wild a "Deserter" tag despite the fact that Wild had never left the raid.

* JB had similar foibles. In a raid group on the final boss encounter, Madness of Deathwing, one of the healers thought it diabolically funny to start the fight before anyone was ready. He claimed it a mistake. Then did it again on our second attempt. He was kicked and reported.

* Raids falling apart were the norm. JB and Wild are patient raiders, willing to work around problems and help as needed. At least twice that I recall I simply quit raids that even I could tell were going nowhere.

The icing on the cake, for Wild, was when a good thing became a sad thing. In Fall of Deathwing Wild was having his usual unlucky night with drops. Wild needs Tier gloves and shoulders to complete the set, and just one of them to get his Tier 13 4 piece set bonus. The shoulders dropped, but Wild did not win them. The gloves also dropped, and Wild didn't win them, either. However, the player that did win them offered them up for trade. Wild whispered the player, letting him know I was interested and should something he wanted come Wild's way, a trade could be made. When we finished off the run, though, I figured he would be long gone. Not so. The player found Wild and traded him the gloves for free. Another player had wanted the gloves, too, but had made some caustic remarks earlier in the run, and the guy said there was no way he would give him those gloves.

Wild now had four pieces of T13 lfr gear, and his 4pc set bonus. The catch? Well, the lfr resto gloves are i384, and the secondary stats on the gloves do not have haste. The T13 moonkin gloves that Wild was currently wearing came from BH and are i397. It also has 245 haste. When Wild did the math, he learned he was better off using the i397 moonkin gloves than the new resto gloves. Wild just can't win.

Wild and Bd have been talking off and on about getting a moonkin into our raid. Moonkins bring a 5% haste buff to the raid, and are particularly good against some boss encounters - such as the Warlord, where we are currently stuck at. The feral druid, Wy, has a moonkin offspec, which is a possibility, but her cat DPS is so good we'd hate to lose it. Not to mention that her moonkin gear would have to be greatly improved. We wouldn't normally even consider Wild, as Wild is our best healer. However, the other healers have made a lot of progress, to the point that we felt that they and a good fill in could do the healing job without Wild.

Wild seemed to be the best choice, if we decided to test it out. So, for the past two days I've been modernizing my rusty moonkin spec. Gear wasn't an issue. Resto and moonkin specs can largely share the same gear. As a moonkin, I have way more spirit than needed for the spell hit cap, which I can't change without hurting the resto spec. Other than that, the gear was good, including three lfr tier pieces. Glyphs, addons, and spell management took some effort. When Wild started, his baseline DPS was at 16k. That would barely get him into the raid, and wouldn't beat our lowest DPSer. With practice, Wild is now up to just over 19k dps on the target dummy. I'd hoped to get some moonkin practice in the lfr, but with all the mess of the weekend it just got too hard to get my Wild and JB valor points for the week and play with off-specs. If Wild feels up to it I will run as moonkin in the lfr after the Tuesday reset, and before the Wednesday raid.

JB won no drops at all. JB had her positive moments, although even they were slightly tainted by the army of rookies that descended on the lfr this weekend. JB put up her best DPS numbers to date in a Fall of Deathwing run where her overall dps finished 9th among the 17 DPSers, delivering 26.9k dps. The pic below shows the numbers, and I am also posting the numbers for each boss encounter. Each encounter has to be taken separately because boss mechanics greatly affect the amount of DPS being done. In other words, don't feel too wowed by JB's 26k dps - the #1 DPSer did 43k dps. JB was still very happy to finish in the top ten.

Overall DPS Bosses 5-8 Dragon Soul

The Flying Boat Encounter

Ultraxion Encounter

Spine of Deathwing Encounter

Madness of Deathwing Encounter

The boss encounter order is a little out of sync due to a really irritating problem with moving images around. The correct order should be: Ultraxion, Flying Boat, Spine, and Madness.