More time-travel

This time back to the Battle of Mt Hyjal, as planned. The class changes with 3.0.2 have us worrying a lot less about class balance when filling a raid lately. 5 dps warriors? No problem. But since we hadn't been back to MH specifically, we weren't sure how the tanking would work. Since it turned out that somebody was going to have to respec prot, I volunteered to tank with Dethno, who was the only other one already prot.

I think I ended up personally delaying the raid at least 10-20m as I sorted through all my tanking gear to set it up after all the stats and mechanics changes. I had to manage the harder def cap, enchant a new tanking weapon and set up the action bars with the new abilities. I stared for longer than I should at my badge tanking gear. I had gotten both the warrior and pally versions of the chest and legs and now they are only subtly different.

I finally got there and we went to work. Rage went down easily. We immediately noticed without much surprise that the dps numbers are through the roof. Harder to spot was that I think healing has gotten a proportionate buff. You can't really measure healing via a meter, you just notice who does or doesn't die. Of note, nobody died to an ice tomb. I don't think our reaction times were that much faster, but I suspect the fast heals people cast land a little harder, making it that much easier to survive.

A better indicator of the differences was seen on Anatheron. First, Dethno died, suggesting that the mobs are actually hitting a little harder now. Dethno and I had been discussing that through the run, it looks like they rebalanced avg melee dmg to be increased to compensate for the removal of crushing blows. Or something. Dethno felt like the dmg numbers scrolling up were bigger than usual all night. But on the other had, when Primux ended up with aggo, he didn't die. He's a dps warrior wearing mostly pvp gear. And the healers kept him upright for ~60% of Anatheron's health. Very interesting. I can only guess that once the healers adjusted expectations to a squishier tank, they were able to keep up with the dmg.

Kaz'rogal posed no particular problems. I was surprised to see that I was able to go pretty much all out dpsing in melee without causing mana problems, even with the nerf to JoW.

On Az'galor, we finally broke the winning streak. Dethno took 2x 9k hits in 2s somehow. We were unable to determine if that was just deeply unlucky or if something went wrong mechanically. Thrall's pets were taking dmg at the time according to Recap, so I wonder if there was a pet parry in there somewhere and Dethno got parry-gibbed in response.

We got it on the second try without much trouble, in spite of the fact that we were very heavy on melee dps, which meant a lot of us were hanging around on the felguard hill chilling most of the battle. However, it also meant a high probabiliy of a relatively useless melee dps player getting the doom, which happened several times.

Then it was on to Archimonde. We managed 3 pulls, but I wouldn't call any of them good. I think the extra time was worth it to the people who hadn't seen the battle before, but it did not appear as if we were in any danger of getting on a roll and killing him. I made an executive decision to call it before it got too late figuring we'll be better off working on it fresh on Thursday.

Several people who missed Vashj/Kael want to go back there too, so I'm thinking we work on Archi first and when we kill him, we celebrate by getting Vashj in SSC for those who still need. T6 and T5 helms all around!

On my personal todo list tonight, I'm going to spend a few minutes fixing up my gear sets on item rack. I also noticed that my spl power trinket is no longer than good for tanking, so I'm going to go make the 42 def tanking one. That's going to shoot me way over the def cap, so then I can look at swapping in dps gear into tanking since more of my threat comes from str now. I'm also going to go do the 2 easiest dailies on the Isle again. I'm idly trying to get the 5 daily quests in a row achievement among other things.

And then I think I'm going to Dustwallow to dance with the dragon for a bit. I know it's possible to solo Ony, but I don't know if it's better to be prot or ret spec, wearing dps, tanking or FR gear. So I'm going to bring everything and experiment. For extra fun, I'm not looking anything up in advance. A bunch of people wanted to kill the new boss in KZ tonight and I'm tempted by that too, but I keep putting off the Ony attempt. I think it's just time to try it.