Kinks and DPS

Still working on setting this whole blog up properly. I apparently fail at understanding how to set it up as an rss feed instead of the default atom one.

Quick note, though, regarding something I observed with a new guild. We entered Hyjal with a few greatly undergeared people (including a priest with +900 healing and a warlock with less than 600 shadow damage). I didn't have high hopes but as the night progressed we replaced the bad healer with a greatly geared shammie and things picked up. Rage eventually went down and we cleared the trash to Anetheron twice, wiping on last wave once and on Anetheron next.

What I found intriguing was that I was outperformed dps-wise by a warlock in greens and blues. (*** not the previously mentioned 600 shadow damage one, another one with at most 950 dmg ***). In fact, he was the top dps. I have pretty good gear. I used to destroy Hyjal's dps charts in the past with my last guild. I now know why... the tank's gear was much better than mine, at the time. This time not, and despite my much higher dps rate and average hit/crit, I was finding I had to stop myself or I would pull aggro after a few seeds of corruption. Instead I would tab through all the mobs and curse them appropriately (Weakness, Tongues...) since I figured every little bit helps and is better than standing around. Not that the tank was bad, just that my dps is too much for him aoe tanking. This other warlock in mostly greens and blues would cast his first SoC pretty much right as the tank got close to the pack of mobs and would cast continuously, pausing only to lifetap. He would pull aggro only in the most unlikely of scenarios of crits right from the start. So while he had a constant SoC that would hit mobs on average for only 1500 health, it obliterated my sporadic SoC with an average of 1800 simply due to sheer amount of seeds cast.

By the end of the trash waves on Rage, I was 3rd in dps as two warlocks, worst geared than me, took advantage of their worst gear to actually perform better.

My e-peenz was hurtin' :D

Of course, on Anetheron's waves, when mobs would be tanked slightly differently and more care would be taken with isolating certain ones, my superior gear blew the hinges off the dps charts as my 8k shadow bolts took the day coupled with the massive SoC dps I could throw out (I'm nearing 3k dps with current gear), but still... it's nice to know that sometimes having worst gear is actually more beneficial to the raid. I'll have to keep it in mind for next week's Hyjal and gear up differently.

The box is opened!

I had a really long entry written up for this first post... explaining the mythology behind Pandora's box and explaining my whole WoW career so far... and then as I was about to hit submit, I realized nobody really cares about those things so instead, here's a quick hello! I'm expecting to use this primarily to voice some thoughts relating to actual gameplay instead of theorycrafting or simply rehashing of old websites and concepts.

We'll see what happens!