Skip to my lou... er.. i mean Skip to ToC 5mans

My warlock, who i've stated before, has been leveling through northrend dungeons and have hit 78 just last night. actually, while waiting for an instance q, she decided (yes, she decided all on her own) to fly to the tuskar encampments and do their daily quest. so off she went to borean tundra to collect supplies. bam! revered! awesome. one small step closer to Pengu. oh and she picked up the recipe for an herb bag. nice! i dont know how well these sell, but i'll find out soon enough. then, she flew over to dragonblight to collect 12 pups. ding! level 78. =] i didnt even notice how close she was to 78. and now, my thoughts were, do i get the pvp garb just for kicks? or stick with some of these instance loot items that's really keeping my dps up? well i wont waste gold on silly pvp starter gear if im not going to pvp. but, what these items have is something i might need for the next two levels. Stam. Stamina increases my health. that's 10 health for every stamina. With pvp gear inherently having more Stam than instance loot, i might consider making them. but why stam?

I am thinking of skipping the 78-80 instances and just q-ing for ToC, FoS, PoS, and HoR (regular/normal mode, ofc). i've had many friends jump into ToC at least, at 78, hoping for a nice item level 219 piece to drop. actually, for an epic piece to drop in NORMAL mode instances is unbelievable. it helps those who are truly determined to skip old content get a jump start on gear. actually, its probably one of the best ways to gear up between 78 and 80. In preparation for 80, not only will my devious warlock have several purple drops from these NORMAL instances, she will also have much more emblems of triumph. as a level 78 character, she will be able to collect one EoT for each boss killed. That's three in ToC, two in FoS, three in PoS and 3 in HoR.... over, and over, and over again. Normal instances have no lockout, and so after running the daily random, i can specifically que for these instances and collect more emblems, enough to basically replace several of the purples i may have picked up along the way. In terms of time, i think ToC and Forge to be the fastest, with Pit and Halls the slower of the four. Halls due to the 10 rounds of mobs then a chase scene, and pitt due to that guantlet up the hill and through the tunnel. Ick and Krik's fight is pretty long too, as there's plenty of gimmicks in that fight. Overall, i am guessing i can quickly knock out ToC and Forge with Pitt and Halls reserved for level 79-80.

I did have a problem with this method of gearing up back several months ago when some friends of mine decided to go at 78 into ToC (this was before ICC 5mans) and had asked me to join them to help carry them through. the friend was a druid tank and his wife was a dps something or other. i was asked to come and heal them on my drood. my drood at the time was a level 80 in some really cool conquest gear and maybe one level 245 item and one crafted bracers that was, i think, also 245. or was it 232? i dont know. and then something off Koralon. i knew it was enough to fall asleep through heroics. in any case, i went to help them out, althought i thought that they were nuts because there's no way they can really use any of that gear at their level. Really, instead of going into utgarde pinicle or Oculus, or halls of lightning and culling, where some of the drops can actually make them better at 78 and 79, went to TOC and annoyed the hell out of me. Sure i could have dropped group, but it wasnt like these guys were terribad. they were just very undergeared and played it like they were geared. Especially the tank, who knew now to tank "OK" but not "good" or "great" (he certianly wasnt bad, but not extremely good), played like how he saw others play in heroic ToC while he was on his mage. actually that was me. he was taking after me as i used to tank as a bear while he would nuke from afar.

Anyway, 3 level 78, one of them a tank, a level 80... s.priest who's somewhat geared for this encounter, and me, a level 80 druid overgeared for this instance, all together in normal ToC5. the friend's wife was a dk, now that i think about it. the other 78 was a dk. yea... how awesome is that? three melees, two that offer no buffs to the group and one was tanking. so as we start, i can foresee death coming. but that's annoying is that the dk would mouth off about things. well i let him die a few times. i think he had a change of ways after dying several times on Paletress and Black knight.

in any case, healing the druid was terrible. as much as i like healing as a druid, there was very little i can do besides nourish spam him to life. it was extremely stressing with three champions up and got a lot better when we downed one of them. paletress was annoying as hell, as our dps was so craptastic that paletress' renew negated all of our efforts. quick question, of the five people there, who was able to dispell that renew? no one? maybe the shadow priest? not sure. but for sure, there was ZERO interrupts on champs and ZERO dispells on the walking nightmare thingey. i could have healed the asshat dk, but instead, figured that if he was getting killed it was because paletress thought he needed to repent more. and so i focused on the tank, who was taking constant damage. imagine healing him to full, then seeing his health bar drop to 50%, then healing him again, only to have it drop to 60%, then 30%, then healing got him to 90% only to have it drop to 50%. ugh. i had zero downtime. it wasnt even the fun kinda healing as mentioned last week in FoS. this was the... you're so undergeared if i spam heals on you... one person might live. the rest will die.

did i mention that our dps (2 dks, 1 spriest) was doing crap damage? i mean 1k dps crap damage. why? miss. miss miss miss. leve 78's trying to hit a level 80... will miss.... often. especially since no one geared or gemmed for much hit at that level. lets be honest, we dont really gear for hit at 78. if there's hit, then we take it. if there isnt, then so what? not only that, but hits and spells do not hit for as much. there will be more glancing blows and more obsorbed magic damage. why? the 2 level difference. im sure that if they were doing culling, their dps would skyrocket above 1k, 1.5k maybe even. but miss dk was at 1k dps. and mr asshat dk was at less. maybe 800 iirc. i forgot about the spriest b/c she wasnt really of much note. so apart from the squishy tank, the abismal dps and everyone taking way more damage than they should... i quiteded. totally. we couldnt get past paletress' renew. seriously. i thought to myself, why the hell are these guys here? they cant do the content, so why try? why not run the instance when you're ready? have they been so used to handouts that they think ToC, with a good healer, can be done? sure, yes. it can. but at the cost of someone's sanity. and for what? gear you cant even wear. srsly. so yes, i quit and got on my dk tank. asked the s priest if they can heal and we rocked the instance. why? bc my dk tank added about 2k dps. paletress got some renews up, but they didnt hurt as bad any more. once we defeated the dark night, black knight, whatevers, i dropped group and logged. i did not want to talk to anyone for the rest of the night. it was pretty frustrating.

so why am i talking about this now? because i want to be that 78 who thinks they can handle a level 80 instance. not just any level 80 instance, those are easy, but a normal level 80 instance that makes half of the heroics look easy. srsly, ToC on normal is like heroic HoS or HoL. so why do i want to do it? Because each boss drops an emblem and maybe some gear i cant equip... yet. so am i being hypocritical? maybe. but i look at it from my point of view. one, i dont stand in fire/poison clouds/etc. two, my dps is pretty decent already (2.5k-3k aoe, and 1.4-1.6k boss). so with already decent dps and a tank's spatial intelligence, i think i would be ok going into, at the very least, ToC, and work it like a fat chick does a pole. that made no sense, i know.

So in any case, hopefully i will be able to q for this instance in the LFD tool. if not, this whole post can be summed up as follows: it annoys me that level 78 undergeared people want to run a hard instance for gear they cant even use yet. so in the event that i am able to q for normal ToC, i will do just that and place my butt in the q. hopefully i can do decent damage and stay out of fires enough to not be a liability to all of the other 80's out there who are looking for those nice and easy purples. superior purples, i might add. superior to all the other heroic purple drops that existed before ToC appeared.


Edit: so i cant use the LFD tool to join normal ToC. i can, perhaps, look around for a Pug.... that works too. will try it out in a day or two. =/