Thursday, May 20, 2010

Here we go again

So the intrepid Verech reached level 80 past sunday. That's my eleventh character to reach that magic number. But as everybody knows, that's just the begining. Now starts the hard part: gearing up, getting rep for the different factions, farm some gold for the epic flight... The big problem is all these activities rely mainly on running dungeons. While you can get reputation with some factions by doing dailies (Wyrmrest Accord, Sons of Hodir, some Kirin Tor with the daily cooking), the only way of gearing up and getting reputation with factions without dailies is the old dungeon grinding. And this is the dreadest phase because of pugs... or to be more accurate: the amount of failpugs you can get into.
I almost stopped palying my main characters in Hellscream because I grew tired of the wild fauna you can find in heroics, so now compare the seasoned Turnak, clad in full epic gear (ICC, T10, etc) with the frehsly dinged Verech, wearing mainly crafted and quest blues. Cold sweat runs down my back everytime I hit the LFD. I even dualed him retribution so I could do some runs without the responsability of tanking or healing the place. Just good ole no-brainer dps, simple and plain.
With such a poor gear for today' standards I'm just running normal instances in the hope of building some decent gear even if it's slowly. Yet Lady Luck hates me. First random I got was no other than Forge of Souls. At least was as dps, but my dps gear is totally laughable. I ended the last in dps with 1200 but at luckily nobody complained. And not happy with that we ran the place again. And Pit of Saron too. The party was fairly competent and I managed to survive (I thank the kind healer who kept me alive) without much problems, but this experience showed one thing: why retri paladins tend to get so much damage. This got me wondering in the past. They weren't supposed to get so much damage (unless standing in fire, stealing aggro or in front of the mobs). And still I don't know how could I get damage when I was dpsing the mobs from behind, but my health bar couldn't stay still for long. On any group pull I was getting more damage than the rest (and my pathetic gear made things look even worse). Again nobody said anything but I'm sure the healer was cursing me in silence for needing more heals than the tank.
Anyway, knowing what to do and not being a dickhead is a great step in randoms. You don't screw it when Devourer of Souls has Mirrored Soul up, you hide behind saronite chunks when Garfrost is swapping weapons, you move out of green shit and explosive mines on Ick & Krick, you let the tank grab aggro in the tunnel before Tyrannus and you stop dpsing him when you get Overlord's Brand. Isn't that complicated. And nobody died. Why the hell then some idiots can't do any of these simple tasks right?

3 comments:

  1. As I didn't really get it from your post, could you elaborate on why exactly retri paladins get so much damage? I'm a holy/retri dual specced paladin and every time I go retri (with my wife backing me up as a healer, she could heal a critter through any heroic) I get curses that I take so much damage. And I have no clue why!

    So, please enlighten me :)

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  2. I still don't know, certainly I explained it very poorly. My main is a holy/prot pally and I was always surprised to see retri paladins were taking such amounts of damage. Other melee classes weren't taking as much as the pallies (except rogues when they steal aggro). I supposed it was because they engaged fights in some suicidal manner, standing in the front of mobs (eating hits, cleaves, etc) or not caring much about environtmental damage (poison, fire, etc). Everytime I had to heal a pug with a retri (or more!) pally I knew I had to put special attention on the retri, more than on any other melee class.
    So I still don't know the exact cause, because the only damage I could get was targeted damage (casters pointing at random players) and some environmental damage (until you step out of the fire or use cleanse before the healer does), but this at least showed me it wasn't always the retri pallies' fault. I'll try to investigate more if I get the chance of playing retri, but since I'm also queuing as tank that's what I'm usually doing.
    Do you feel there's any special class that usually takes more damage than normal? Would be nice to see if healers out there also feel the same as me, even with other classes and try to find between all if there's a cause for this.

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  3. Ugh. Pugs.
    PuGs+fresh tank= logging out.
    I feel your pain and frustration.
    I myself have a dorf paladin fresh of the 80 boat. Well, not so fresh anymore. It think he dinged 80 in Jan. I just gave up gearing him because of moronic pugs. We have a mutual friend known as Thor (the doc), who told me that his 40k health druid was put on tanking hold, because he could not be bothered with pugs whining over his gear. a. 40. k. health. druid. bear. from. hell. got. mocked. over. his. gear. How twisted is that?
    My 32k health paladin, will stay in the cupoard collecting dust, thank you very much.

    ReplyDelete