Been gearing up over the past few days by various means and am almost entirely in “item level 200” and better gear, which is fairly good but not great. I’ve been reading up a bit on the various armor tier levels, and apparently I have no pieces of it yet. I think the only thing that ‘counts’ for tiers is matching armor that gives set bonuses. Since I’d been spending my hard-won emblems on trinkets and jewelry, I haven’t gotten any of the tier 9 or tier 9.5 pieces yet—in fact, I was quite surprised when I found the salesman for these, since they were in a different building altogether from the reward vendor I’d been visiting. So, now it’s just a matter or deciding which tier to buy (probably 9—it’s so much cheaper).
Ironically, as I get better it’s been getting considerably more fatal for me in dungeon groups. My DPS output has grown nicely, but now “passable” tanks have a hard time holding aggro…which means learning how to throttle DPS after the first few encounters—and if one of the other DPS providers die, my aggro percentage suddenly skyrockets and hilarity ensues.
Tried out arcane on secondary and… well, it was ugly. The single damage output was nice, but losing all of the slows…ice shield, ice block…Steve…nearly all of my “survival” skills, really… led to a series of extraordinarily violent ends. I chalked them up to ‘learning the ropes’, but given that my big thing in dungeons is blizzard AoE damage, I’m not certain that the trade off for single target nuking is worthwhile in non-raid situations. I’ll try arcane again in a few days when I’ve forgotten the repair bills.
For fun, I wandered through one of the newbie instances (Gnomeregan—designed for players in their low 20s) for the sole purpose of getting an achievement for killing the tiny bad at the end of the underground industrial complex that was once the home of the gnomish race. I blithely wandered through refreshing my shield every minute or so. At one point I stopped to open a door and realized that every monster I had met along the way had been aggro’d and was trying to catch up to me. Given they couldn’t dent me, I let dozens of them gather around before dropping them all in a couple of seconds with a blizzard. There’s something about a huge cloud of large numbers that makes me happy I chose “mage”. Shortly thereafter, I earned my achievement with a couple of frost bolts and went my merry way.
On a wild hair, I entered a random PvP queue and found myself immediately in Alterac Valley in a battle-in-progress with our side losing badly. It’s a large outdoor map littered with towers, graveyards, and a handful of mines. The short version is each side gets a few hundred “reinforcements” (read: rezzes). When the opponent’s all get used up, or if you kill the npc “leader” on the other end of the map, your side wins. Destroying towers lowers the number of remaining reinforcements the other side has and capturing mines bolsters your own.
What I was used to from “back in the day” was nearly everyone heading for the far end, mostly ignoring the opposing team to instead focusing on dropping towers and the end guy as quickly as possible. This was...completely opposite. We held a narrow pass as long as we could and held the Horde back with clouds of ice and arrows. In the end, we lost, but it was stupidly close and I still picked up a couple of achievements for the effort.
Now, back to the Heroics!
