FoS: Fun times again

Last night i hopped on to my warlock for a quick emblem run. She's 77 and has amassed about 40 EoTriumps thus far. by 80, i believe she can purchase two tier gears or maybe a ring+tier gloves. that would rock. Or maybe i should buy the BIS triumph gloves/shoulders. they have haste. i think. i know i bought them for my druid who preferred haste over crit. cloth gear with haste, leather caster gear with crit. wtf?

So i ran it with a friend that i've played with for the good part of a year. he's on a mage that's level 75, and loving the ranged dps thing. i think he's found his niche. We ended up in VH, where we did decently. We both were top two dps with a DK at 775dps. yes. the dk, level 75, at 775 DPS. what the hell? how the hell can you be so bad? i was doing 775dps in underbog/slavepens at level, 63. and its only that low because of all the "miss" strikes. once i hit 64 or 65, the dps shot up to almost 1k. about 800-900 for most pulls. whats interesting is that the dps stayed the same as i progressed to utgarde keep. i think possibly because of the "miss" effect, plus the group composition (ie. no pally for kings, shaman strength of earth cancels my horn of winter, etc). but overall, the dps increase has been steady with my dk. but level 75.... with 775dps. some may say its better than the 80 dk in blues or even purples with 775 dps. and that's true. but still. 775 is at least 50% below your potential. Why? Because the night before, i ran with a level 75 DK, doing 1500dps. 1500 dps x 50% = 750dps. so yes. about 50% below his potential. We were in halls of stone and i was having trouble keeping up with his dps. Although there were some fights where i enjoyed the seed/tab/seed/tab/seed/tab = 4k dps (warlock thing). but on single or two target encounters, he would beat my dps hands down.

in any case, just wanted to share that you can do 1k dps at 75. please aim for that at least. you can get 1k dps even before that (both aoe and single target combined). i actually had a very enjoyable Nexus group where everyone was about 70-72, doing 1k minimum dps.

ok im just complaining about the lack of information blizzard gives us about maximizing our damage output in groups vs. well, doing ok enough to complete your quests. it appears that there is no explanation given at some points. for instance, for dks, someone should say that icy touch and plague strikes do very little damage. actually, make it do ZERO damage. but they should point out the fact that IT/PS are only there to provide a debuff (also a DoT debuff) and that the major players in our arsenal of attacks are Obliterate for frost dks, Scourge strike for unholy dks, and heartstrike for blood dks. this is the same for our runic dumps too. i think. haha. but what's annoying is that most dks never really stop to read their tooltips and say, if my tooltip says i get more damage for every disease up (paraphrased), then maybe i should keep my diseases up, and then do those specials. but no. they start with icy touch and love it. why? because they do not evolve through the whole beginning zone from a lowly dk who's limited and under the lich king's control, to a better geared (with talent points) dk that's participating in the 300 event.

listen, dk's, you've been duped. bliz gave you a char at 55 and expected you to understand that, although you're using icy touch and plague strike for most of the intro zone, you will not be using it as your main damage attack... ever again. then why didnt we get scourgestrike in the beginning? desing flaws. geez. its talented and at 55, you dont have enough talent points until you go through most of the story.

dorknights, deathnoobs, deathtards, etc. these are the names we receive because at level 58, icy touch and plague strike rocks. and also, deathgrip is awesome fun and death and decay can kill your mobs while you stand there to make a sandwich. add to that some plate armor and you get a class that's stupid-proof until northrend. but seriously, how the hell do you do 775 dps at level 75?? i want to take my resto druid and drop him five levels, and see if i can out dps this guy.

so ok... with that topic out of my system, let me talk about what i really wanted to talk about. FoS. yes, the title of the blog. omg i almost forgot.

So my mage friend decided i should check out his tanking gear on his dk. i did and it looked fine. although he needed about 40 more defense to be crit immune, his gear was mainly a mix of solid tanking gear mixed with his dps gear in slots where he hasnt been able to get replacements (shoulders, chest, trinkets, weapon). So i made him some elixirs of defense and asked him to q for NORMAL FoS. its not only because of his +def shortfall, but also he needed some tanking experience. FoS would have been a great place to learn. especially trying to tank four casters who will not step into your DnD, or deal with that blinking phantom that keeps blinking behind the healer. overall, it would have been tank and spank with a bit of running. which, is a great experience for tanks.

Now, we q'ed and didnt get an instant reply. wow, i thought, a tank and healer q-ing and no instaqueue? porque? turns out, my mage-now-dk friend has queue'd as dps. not only that, he signed us up for HEROIC FoS. how annoying. but its fine. once i figured it out, i wispered him to tell him to go dps. which he did. then we proceeded to rock the instance. actually we had a very new 80 mage who was losing 50%-80% of his health on random/aoe damage. it was really fun keeping him up tho. the shaman in our group was doing about 4.5k dps, and my dk friend (who's been in raids maybe twice, so all of his gear was emblem gear) was doing about 3.4k dps. i did zero dps. and the warrior tank was doing about 2k dps.

we were rolling along just fine with aoe and random damage going on everywhere. i always wondered how the hell other healers can do this instance. its like... crazy. but i did it. one tree, heal. and heal i did. it was amazingly fun. much more fun than heroic gundrak? or heroic anything else. even heroic ToC sucked to healing this. i had to use everything.

First, i started off with rejuv (which most druids do, i would assume) on the tank and pretty much all the melee, which is the shaman and dk. for some reason the mage was taking a lot of damage so i had to rejuv him as well. then i'd nourish the hell out of everyone. the first pull was easy. but the second pull, with five mobs, was where the fun began. mage's health dropped like a rock, tank's health steadily spiked down (steadily spiked? oxymoron, no?) dk took major damage at times, and so did the shaman. so after keeping up rejuv's, nourishing as needed, swiftmending as needed, and reapplying wildgrowth, all without stopping to breath, i realized that maybe my mana bar was depleting. sure enough, i was at 50% at the end of that fight. +endless mana pot and we're off to the next group. regen kicked in and i was at 80% for the next pull. i innervated myself about three times. once before jamesbrown. errr. whats his name again? once during that fight, and once on trash after that boss fight. braunjams dropped something useless for us all, which everyone greeded.

i used a NS+HT once when everyone was taking major damage and i had to get the tank up asap. i used swiftmend quite often along with wildgrowth. what i need to practice on is to, especially on the tank, apply regrowth before swiftmend so that the swiftmend healing comes from my rejuvenate instead of regrowth. what? yea confusing. also i need to prioritize more hots on the tank. although adding a lifebloom would add even more cooldowns to watch, i kind if want to just add one stack of lifebloom sometimes as a set-and-forget spell. just in case. i dont know how much less mana efficient that would be compared to a fully stacked LB, but at least i'll be getting more healing in. besides, if i end up with 40% mana at the end of the fight, then of course i know i will have enough mana to waste for just a little more healing. so mana cost shouldnt matter in this instance.

we ran into the ghosts right before the devourer of souls and i saw my first purple bar. OMG what is this? dispell!! so that i did. and omg, the tank said, "heals, good job with the dispells." wait what? isnt that what im supposed to be doing anyway? so i felt good about that. although i was really really really enjoying the healing. im not bored-ass-heals anymore!! screw daily randoms. i just want to pick FoS, PoS, and HoR from now on! ok back to the instance at hand... we ran into the devourer's room and started the fun. people were taking crazy damage everywhere until mr. devourer dropped well of souls. that gave me a bit of a break. then he did that crazy sonic mouth blast of uber bad breath. everyone got out of the way and we ended up beating him shortly after that. crap i didnt want dropped and we all said good group and left.

what i love about this instance, or at least this run in particular as a tree healer: crazy aoe. lots of random damage. low health mage, two melee dps who probably took more damage than they should, and a tank that kept aggro for the most part. i also liked that i had to drink some pots and innervated myself several times. i like the fun that this gives me. its sooo much better than running heroics with t9. my tree heals is in, max, 245 gear with a bunch of 232 gear. some 219's maybe. i dont know. but i felt "appropriate" when healing that instance. healing the older heroics felt like crap. they're boring and repetitive rejuv fests with the occassional nourish.