Gear Score Lamentations

Yes this is another gear score rant. Like so many others out there, Svenn decries gear score as one of the pervading evils of our time. His reasoning however, differs some from the main complaints- it doesn’t tell you if they can play or not, if they are specced/ gemmed wrong, etc. Those are all true, but that is not what Svenn has a problem with.

In a time before gear score, Svenn assumed that if he performed poorly on the meters he needed more gear. Likewise, he assumed as much of others as well. Occasionally he would inspect other toons to see just what their gear was like to help explain an especially bad performance, but by and large, he too accepted that performance was a function of gear.
Gear score shatters that illusion. There is no way to hide from the little popup box with numbers, be they Red, Orange, Purple, or Blue. Sure Svenn could uninstall the addon, but others would still run it, others who may not be as considerate in their feedback.

The true tragedy is not the mindless “LFM Uld10 must have 5k gear score” spam (though it is completely stupid). No, it lies in the good players who manage their way into a raid with a low gear score, outperform everyone else there relative to their gear score, yet get no recognition. It lies in the quantification of a toon’s worth based on a sum of items assigned values arbitrarily according to lvl. It lies in the loss of innocence we once had, and assigning everyone the benefit of the doubt. That being said…

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Mr. Awesome DK lolz Tank,
Thanks for bailing on my group because the gear scores were to low. I would have been the best heals you ever had. The 3.5k gearscore hunter in some ToC/craftable epics and quest blues (Hanka) does ~3K DPS! We finished the run in 16minutes with the next tank in the que. Everyone to include the healer (me) did over 1.5K DPS. I hope your next run went smoothly and took less than a 60 seconds, considering your 15 minute deserter debuff.

With Bubbles and Renews,
Ottar

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Penance is for DPSing and last minute saves when I tab back in from /4chan. Silly tank :)

Merrily Melting Faces

This week FIST has pressed the pause button on raiding due to the Midsummer Holiday event. This has been good; Svenn, as well as the rest of the raiders I'm sure, needed a break. So while Svenn has gone into hibernation, emerging only to do a few choice dailies, Ottar has stepped onto the main stage.

Playing Ottar has been a nice change to tanking. While he is dual specced, I made the decision to gear him first as DPS, picking up healing gear when the opportunity presents itself. Melting faces has been a fun diversion from the frantic finger mashing of tanking. Ottar enjoys not having his health bar yo-yo up and down like a meth squirrel on a backyard trampoline. While his DPS still isn't great, this week off from raiding should help with that.

Last night, Ottar did an alt run with Cam (Qwen), Hanka (Grayce), and Janus (Saiff). Faeris was kind enough to come heal/ chaperon. He nailed down a spell rotation which, while not incredible for damage output, results in good up time on vampiric embrace and mana regen for the party with vampiric touch + mind blast. DPS output was a little over 1.4k; about right for were he is gear-wise. Hopefully that will go up significantly with the addition of the Azure Cloth Bindings, which obligingly dropped last night, as well as the Sash of the Wizened which Ottar can now get from last night's rep gains. The extra hit rating from the sash should bring Ottar close enough to the hit cap that he can gem the rest and start in on Naxx runs (when Svenn isn't needed for tanking of course).

Recap, Replay, and Relief

Recaps:
Svenn is woefully behind on his updates. He scored a round trip ticket to the Hospital the beginning of last week and took his sweet time recovering. Apologies for his absence, I will try and not let it happen again.

That being said, here's the rundown:
Ottar came of age, dinging 80 this weekend. Svenn hooked him up with the Titansteel Guardian, and the ever generous Hamm made him a Titanium Spellshock Ring, thus starting him off with a couple of epics.

Cromm power leveled alchemy from 0 to well into the 400s. I had most of the mats from Haager's grind to 450 Herbalism, so I didn't have to sink too much gold into it. Cromm also brushed up his cross-stitching skills, leveling to 430 or so in order to make Ottar some gear (no epics yet.)

Svenn sat on the shelf for the most part, rooting for his "Alt" buddies as they made significant gains. All in all, it was pretty quiet, not feeling well makes for poor decisions so there was not to much action on the heroics/raiding front.

Replay:
Ottar walked into a guild OS run last night and came away with the T7 Gloves. With no Paladins or Warlocks in the group, and Shadowbreeze and Qwenivier already having them, I didn't even have to roll. The run went very smoothly even with both our regular tanks (Svenn and Corday) on their newly minted 80s; Bombadil and Gnastie did a fantastic job tanking. Ottar needs to work on his hit rating and spell rotation as he is well below the cap still and only putting out about 1.5k DPS.

Relief:
Svenn is happy to be feeling himself again, and returned to productivity both in and out of his misadventures in Wow.

Ottar heals VH

Last night the regular Violet Hold, which we had been trying to orchestrate for 3 days now finally happened. Ottar activated Holy Spec and headed into VH for a run with some other Alts from the guild. He has healed some of the lower level Northrend instance before, but usually had 3 or 4 level 80s to help out. This time was not much different in that respect, Shaka was kind enough to tank for us on the DK, and the ever fabulous Grayce brought AoE frost damage (both level 80s). Corday and Blue Chicken both had alts that needed it and brought a Rogue and Mage respectively.

What was different was the pace of the encounter, with portals opening at set intervals whether you are ready or not. Mana regen was an issue for me early on, luckly I had stacks of mana pies from the 2 mages and was able to eat on the go without the worry of burning up too many consumables. As the fight wore on Ottar became better about mana conservation and OOM was less of an issue.

We did have a death at the first boss. Moragg took an immediate shine to Emma (Corday's Rogue) and soul linked her every chance he got- talk about a fatal attraction, yipes! I couldn't keep up on the spike damage from SL unfortunately, but we dropped him with plenty of time for a rez before the next portal opened.

From there, things went smoothly. The second boss, Xevozz, tossed around arcane damage like beads at a Marti-Gras parade, but the group downed him so fast that keeping up with AoE heals wasn't a problem. We closed down the rest of the portals and waited for Cyanigosa to make her appearance.

She too went down without to much of a struggle. I had some problems with positioning after each Arcane Grip, and as such fell behind in healing. With that particular spell, Cyanigos pulls everyone under her and wipes aggro. The aggro wipe wasn't a problem (Shaka did a great job regaining it quickly), but I had to stop healing each time to reposition and found myself on the opposite side of the dragon from the ranged DPS more than once. This meant that my Circle of Healing/ Prayer of Healing were sometimes out of range of the casters. To fix this problem for next time I think I will hit a Holy Nova and a Circle of Healing before repositioning. This should top off the group's health as well as allow me to determine which way to run, so I can stay in range of the casters.

Ottar picked up the Band of Eyes, some pantaloons, as well as 42k XP from turning in the quest. I also learned a bit more about healing and will hopefully be ready for Heroics when I hit 80.

The Roster

I have been playing WoW since the beginning of 2007, shortly after the release of the Burning Crusade Expansion. I created a myriad of toons during that time, but ultimately settled on leveling a Warlock (Cromm). I leveled to 70 with my wife (Holy Pally), who started playing shortly after I did. It was fun for a while and I managed to deck Cromm out in epics, which he still has on as May 09.

Why does Cromm still have Epics from TBC, you ask. Well, I got bored with the pew pew ranged DPS thing and went back to scratch to level Svenn, a Paladin. Again I leveled with the wife (Hunter) and hit 70 shortly before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion hit. I took Svenn straight to 80 as a Tankadin and have been playing him ever since.

My next endeavour was to level a Priest as the guild was short on healers. So, I solo leveled Ottar from 30 to 70 over the course of about 2 weeks. Things slowed down in Northrend, mainly due to raid schedules and Svenn hanging out in Naxx a lot. Then dual spec hit and interest in Ottar resumed. He is sitting at lvl 77 right now and should hit 80 before the end of the month.

There was a Death Knight leveled to 80 somewhere in there (Haager), but he is mostly for picking flowers and skinning dead animals. I am not a huge fan of DKs, but they are convenient toons and easy to level.

So yeah, that is the toon rundown for now.