If there was any doubt, I don't have any anymore. We did a quick and easy full ZA run last night where I edged Sherider in both total dmg and total avg dps over the entire run (all the way through Zul'Jin). There are many reasons why this shouldn't be. First, Sherider is one of the highest dps players in all of the l8raiding group (maybe the highest, although he leeches off Wiseman whenever he can). Second, he's been raiding as dps for far longer than I have and should have a much better intuitive sense of aggro management (although he was also in a new spec and tanking works a bit differently than it did last week). Third, his gear should be a touch better since I've mostly collected mine off-spec and through badges. None of this should be any reflection on Sher. We were both going all out, even though I think we were both trying to be appropriate about our non-dps abilities (cleanse, nova, sheep, etc). No, I think this attests entirely to Blizz balancing things a bit in favor of the Ret pally.
Well, whatever, I'm running with it for as long as I can. If the nerf bat comes hard like some predict, I can always shift back over to tanking (or hell, healing, I don't care). It's about optimizing. When Warlocks ended up 20% higher for pure dps, I didn't complain about it -- I got them into my raids. :)
Side note on dps last night: Taalo and Sirtank were both just another hair behind Sher and I. Which made the run super fast and easy even though the other 2 dps lagged quite a bit. I was wondering if the Mages had a big AoE dps advantage, but curiously, it was Sirtank's dps which spiked most noticeably on AoE fights. Sherider tended to be ahead of me on single-target boss fights, but I stayed ahead on trash (via Divine Storm, I think).
Something interesting was happening on healing, too. We had two alts healing: priest and shaman. But no real trouble staying mostly alive (except for really egregious aggro pulling). Even on the Lynx boss where inexperienced melee dps (i.e., me) was slow to get to the totems and we lost the priest at around 60% -- the self-described "scrub alt" shaman was able to solo heal the fight for 2 minutes. Curious.
I think I can get a bit better about sustaining dps throughput, too. I did fix up some UI issues and get my trinkets macro-ed into the regular ability cycle before the run. I also started getting my Judgment decision-making more contextual -- light when we needed healing, wisdom when we needed mana. I was not doing a good job getting the HoJ stun and SoC judge into regular sequence yet. I was able to remember to switch to Seal of the Martyr for boss fights since you can't get the uber stun spike. I gradually got better about getting Hammer of Wrath into the cycle as soon as the mob got down to 35% -- it hits for 3k virtually every cast and it has a 6s cooldown (!!! -- yes, that's 500 bonus dps at the end).
I did some quick dps tests on the dummies in IF before the run. Over about 3m, SoC dps came out around 1250dps (max casting Crusder Strike, Divine Storm, Judgment and Consecration, self-buffed with Ret aura and BoM) w/o using HoJ. Seal of the Martyr came out around 1300dps. Then I realized you could stun the dummies and found SoC+HoJ came out around 1340dps. Optimal dps is probably using SoC whenever you're going to get to cast HoJ during a battle and SoM all other times.
For ZA, I just kept SoC up on all trash and SoM on bosses. SoM does self-damage and I didn't want to distract/pressure the healers. I think I might be able to heal most of it back by alternating Judging Light and Wisdom. I'll keep experimenting.
On a completely irrelevant note, I was meaning to mention that we were looking into signing my 5yo son up for language class through our school (as an extra class taught before school starts in the morning). He had originally asked about learning Spanish -- probably because his big sister is taking Spanish in high school and/or from watching the Dora and Diego tv shows. But apparently there weren't enough kids for the Spanish class, so we got to choose between switching to French or Chinese (Mandarin). Which made me smile because I feel like I hang out with people fluent in each of those languages a lot in the evening (and some in both :). In the end, we decided on Chinese. I was in favor because there's some evidence that if you practice difficult phoneme discriminations (e.g., the tonal elements of Mandarin) at or before age 5, you might always be able to hear them (whereas I'd have to practice a lot to learn them as an adult). My son was in favor because his current best buddy in school is in the Chinese class, so everybody's happy.
Maybe I can learn some phrases from him. All I can say so far is 'ni hao' and I probably say even that wrong.
1 comment:
I was doing some heroics with Dethno tanking, Snapdragon healing and Wiseman and Lym doing dps the other night. We cleared 3 or 4 instances and i was monitoring the dps meter and on both trash and bosses my dps was significantly higher than both Wiseman and Lym. Perhaps this was because Wiseman is trying out a new arcane spec and Lym is still getting geared up. What I hope is that it's not Ret Pally's being OP. Or at least if they're OP now, they're not at 80 (I have read some things about how Blizz balances for lvl 80, not 70)
On the flip side it could also be because i'm a noob. I pulled agro a lot and died despite Snap's heroic attempts to keep me alive. So it could just be that they're holding back more and not riding dethno's threat so much.
Btw, i LOVE Every Man for Himself!
Post a Comment