Halls of Lightning. Regular. Only reason I joined up was for the daily, and I’m in desperate need of Kirin Tor rep. Cooking dailies do not suffice.
Me. Level 80 Arcane Mage.
Tank, level 80 Prot Warrior. Decently geared, blues, some greens, a few crafted epics.
Healer, Holy Priest, decked out almost entirely in solid blues with a few old 70 PvP epics. Level 77.
Two Death Knights, both level 79, mostly in blues and greens.
Hit the priest with Focus Magic, AI, summon a table, and off we go.
A few trash pulls in. It’s obvious I outgear the tank; I’m riding the guy’s threat like Daddy Tickler in Epic Bust 8. How’s me DPS?
…
Apparently, better than everyone else combined.
To be blunt, the two DK’s were producing atrociously bad DPS. One of ’em couldn’t break 500DPS, the other was struggling to keep his above 700.
And then there’s me, sporting 2200 DPS, having left ALL my cooldowns and trinkets untouched for fear of roaring over Mr. Tank in threat. I quite often simply stood there doing nothing (or casting Ice Lance) if I got a “lucky” string of crits.
The one who couldn’t break 500 DPS played like he was trying to play on a laptop, sans mouse, with one hand tied behind his back and the other was taped to a wooden spoon. He used the wooden spoon to play. I mean, seriously, how does a Death Knight end up with 32% DoT uptime?
I don’t know what was wrong with the other. He was competent, Death Gripped when asked to, didn’t stand in things, and generally performed very well. His damage was just very poor. Probably just didn’t have a rotation figured.
So we flailed through the instance. Mr. Tank led the way confidently, marking mobs, giving out pertinent info when required, and was suitably embarrassed when he mistook my Polymorph: Turtle spell for a non-combat pet.
Little miss level 77 priest healed her holy arse off. Somehow, this skilled little bugger managed to keep us all up through boss after boss after AoE. I don’t know how she did it. She was specced for Imp. DS, and so didn’t really have all the tasty end tree Holy stuff. She had Lightwell.
And she had 12k mana. Buffed.
Yet somehow, we got past almost everything without a wipe (plenty of single deaths, though). A trash pull shortly before Loken went wrong, due to one of the DK’s accidentally aggroing a second group of mobs.
Loken himself, of course, we wiped plenty.
The plan was simple. Eat the first Nova, one of the DK’s can drop AMZ to absorb it. After that, we do the dance.
The problem was simple. The Loken fight deals a lot of damage. A level 77 priest with 12k mana can only heal so much. And when you only have one strong DPS, the healer’s mana bar will run out long before the boss’ health does.
About two hours after we started, the two DK’s decided to move on, log out, whatever it is people do when they aren’t playing WoW.
So Mr. Tank went to /g and asked for a couple more DPS. We got another DK and a Survival Hunter ready to go almost immediately. Both 80.
Trash mobs had respawned. We’d have to reclear them all to get at Loken again. So Mr. Tank reset the instance, so we could do the boss fights over again. More Stone Shards and lewts!
Please let the DPS be good, please let the DPS be good…
Zone in to dead Loken in slightly under twenty minutes. The Loken fight himself lasted a mere 61 seconds.
In the past, much was made of having a good tank and a good healer. The importance of having good DPS was something severely underrated. Proponents that skilled DPS players are needed just as much as tanks/heals were derided and openly mocked.
Well, now I have proof that skilled DPS is just as important, not that I need it anymore. I’m pretty sure the whole Deathtard thing has showed everyone the folly of having subpar DPS.
No tank? No instance.
No healer? No instance.
No DPS? You’re better off with no instance.
From two hours to twenty minutes. From a brick wall, desperately pounded on, to a pile of leaves contemptuously kicked aside.
Yeah, I still topped the damage meters, but at least if you added up the other two you’d get a number higher than me.
We’ve entered a new world, my friends. A world where a DPS player needs to be much more than a warm button pushing a couple buttons.
Embrace this new dawn, and enjoy it.
Critical QQ 