Fidelis is, at its heart, a social and raiding guild. They’ve downed the Lich King (once) and host fairly regular runs through ICC with their “core” group. They don’t have quite enough to field the 25-mans, so often pad with outside help. Unfortunately for me, I lack the knowledge and gear to be a successful raider there, so I chatted with a few members for advice.
Several offered to carry me through the run. I was grateful, but declined—I still had not learned the moves for the bosses and one poor dancer on the floor can wipe a raid (LEEEEROY!). There was also the matter of gear. Regardless of everything else, I want to make a good impression and carry my own weight on one of these. Someone suggested I try out one of the Trial of the Crusader (TotC) runs first, and that sounded like a good idea.
One member turned me on to maxdps.com, which helps people select specific equipment, enchantments, and gems to maximize the ol’ damage output. All of the gear I have now is pretty much as good as it gets without spending many thousands in the AH (per piece) or by raiding specific instances and hoping for the best. Blech. Then I figured since I already had my gear to where it is going to be for a while, I could work on the enchantments for it.
My own enchanting skill was around 200 and my goal was to get to 400—which would give me nice spellpower boosts for my rings. These can only be cast on the enchanter’s own gear, so no outsourcing for me. Grimly, I headed to the AH.
Over the course of the weekend, I spent most of my time either farming for gold or blowing it on the AH for enchanting materials. In the end, I did get Enchanting 400 and my shiny rings buffed, but at the price of Strev’s 401(k). I’ll likely be running a lot less heroics and killing a lot more elementals for the next week to make up for it. As a side perk, I’ve found that gems you can buy with PvP honor rewards will sell for around 110-120 gold each and the fights make a nice distraction from mindless grinding.
I’m very well geared for TotC-- now I just need to learn the boss fights.
Anyth continues along nicely and by that I mean “blazing through levels like mad”. I’m thoroughly enjoying playing through all of the dungeons I skipped over back when vanilla was the only flavor available. Having way too much fun with “disengage”, which lets me hop backwards out of melee range and now that I can Feign Death, aggro management issues should be a thing of the past. (“I’m winning on aggro!”)
Funny side note on Recount. So, I’ve been using it a while and had flipped the meters at some point from “DPS” to “Damage” because I liked the way it was displaying the numbers more. I had noticed that I was just not out putting what I thought I should be no matter how much I tried. The tank was almost always beating me out. This came as a surprise, but it was getting more and more annoying as time went on.
The breaking point was when Myrial asked about her DPS and Karthex reported back numbers that were –nowhere- near mine. I had myself in 4th place (not shocking since Myrial has the Blizzard and my AoE is virtually non-existant), but Karthex noted I was solidly first. The hell? That’s when I discovered I could expand the Recount box. Doing so, I found that for the past few days I hadn’t been tracking “Damage”. I’d been tracking “Damage TAKEN”. Hilarious. I corrected it and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that goes in the coming days.
