334: Vault of Archavon

Yesterday I finally got to try to new boss in VoA.

First I tanked 10man. Our group tried two healing it which caused us to wipe once but we got it on the second try pretty easily. As a tank the fight's extremely easy, you just taunt back and forth with the other tank at 3-4 stacks while making sure to let your debuff fall off. You'll want to pull him toward the back of the room some to give DPS room to spread out and kill the orbs that spawn.

Later I got to join a group as kitty DPS. They said "5k minimum" DPS. 5k is pretty low in a 25man and I was confident I'd be fine but I still don't have a full cat set - had to use my tanking cloak and one tanking trinket. Before I joined the group I had been practicing on a target dummy and was consistently between 4.1k-4.3k. Since raid buffs make a huge difference, especially for crit levels which cats are extremely dependent on I knew I'd be a lot higher in a raid.

Before we pulled the new boss, the raid leader said "If we wipe and anyone's low on DPS I'm going to boot you. If two people are rolling on the same item and one person is at least 2k DPS higher than the other person, I'm giving it to them." Again, DPSing is easy and people are idiots so I thought even with my sub par gear I'd be okay. But since I'd never really DPS'd on my Druid before I was a little nervous.

We pulled once and wiped because tanks didn't pull him back far enough and DPS were dying. But it was a fast wipe so not enough to really judge DPS. Our second pull went fine and the fight was simple enough. I was pleased to see myself #5 for DPS at 6.4k. This isn't exactly worthy of flexing my epeen, but for only having about 50% crit unbuffed, under 1k ArP, a tanking cloak and one tanking trinket, I thought it was solid. The cat "rotation" is also starting to feel a lot less awkward - it helps when you have a warrior to keep up the 30% bleed debuff.

I didn't end up getting any loot from any of the bosses but the extra frost badges were nice. And it was good to see that my DPS is coming along. I think gear is holding me back more than skill at this point. There's definitely still room for me to improve but I'm getting decent uptimes on rip/rake now (I'll start posting WoLog reports soon). And when I get some more gear - particularly the trinket from H FoS things will really start coming together.

One final thought - I'm considering getting some the i245 DPS craftables made. Crusader orbs are going for a cheap 160g nowadays and they'd be HUGE upgrades. The main thing holding me back is that even 10m ICC has drops better than them. My DPS doesn't seem to be too terrible but we'll see. The higher gear score will make it easier to get into pugs so that's something to consider.