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I has sum.
OK, not really. But it's the funniest typo I've had thus far!
With the exception of one gear slot, I've now got the best gear I've been able to track down without having set foot in a heroic or raid, and without PvPing. Apart from my Beast Lord Handguards which dropped a few hours ago, everything has been enchanted and gemmed as best I can afford.
Aside from killing Ikiss another half a billion times to get that bloody ring to drop, the next step in gear progression is going to have to be Kara or Heroics.
According to this Warcrafter profile, once I slap some gems and an enchant onto me gloves, I'll have 1434 RAP, 142 Hit Rating and 22.12% chance to crit.
This is a little depressing given that I've seen people saying that in order to start Kara, you need ~1600 RAP, 142 Hit Rating and 25% crit.
This plays into my next bit of news: I've done my first ever Heroic instance run. I was somewhat surprised that I got into the group as easily as I did. You see, every other time I've ever tried to get into an Heroic group, I've been turned away because I wasn't covered from head to toe in epics. I once asked someone what they considered "sufficient" gear, and the reply I got was "T5/6."
This one didn't even ask what my gear was like; the leader only seemed to want to know whether I had the key and if I could trap. Lucky for me, that's a "yes" on both counts.
When I got there, I noticed that everyone else in the group was in full epics. Not PvP epics, either: proper Kara/ZA [1] epics. All I had in the way of consumables were some Warp Burgers and Kibler's Bits [2].
I expected to come dead last after the healer on the damage meters.
Funny thing happened, though.
I came second, and not by a huge margin. In case you're wondering, K is a mage, M is the pally tank, L is the pally healer, and E is the rogue. No, I have no idea why E is where she is. E had purples from Kara, ZA and even Gruul's.
But what really made me happy was that I was able to keep pace with an epiced-out mage with my (relatively speaking) crummy dungeon and quest blues. I had to play to my limit: I blew my trinkets as often as I could, misdirecting on to the tank so I could open up sooner and harder... but I still did it.
The mage actually complimented me after the run on my performance, which was nice.
But really, the thing that this has hammered home for me is how unreasonable many groups seem to be these days. I've been told that to do heroics, I need to be able to output over 700 dps. In that run, I think I was sitting pretty much dead on 600 most of the time, and yet no one complained that I was being a burden, and the damage meters certainly don't suggest that.
But if they expect people to have full epics to do heroics... how does one get these epics in the first place? And don't say '"PvP;" resilience is wasted item budget in PvE, never mind the fact that S2 wasn't available for honour back when BC first came out.
And as I walked off to plonk my four shiny new Badgers of Justice into the bank, it reminded me of the SM:Lib run I did with a friend a few months ago. She was at the low-end of the level spectrum, I was almost at the top. We went in there duo and cleared the whole instance. I've had people insist to me that you cannot duo SM:Lib with just a warlock and a paladin. But we did. And it was great fun, because we had to actually work hard to reach the end and down Doan. We even had to use strategy.
It feels like people just don't want to try any more. They don't want to risk having to make an effort in anything. In order to begin attempting content, you apparently have to already out-gear it.
And it makes me a sad panda.
[1] Someone is bound to eventually take offence at that remark, so allow me to qualify thusly: PvP doesn't count because I don't like PvP. PvP and I have this little arrangement: it stays safely corralled in BGs and PvP realms, and in turn I refrain from whining endlessly about people who seem to believe AFKing through a few hundred BGs makes them a good player.
[2] It goes without saying I also had bandages as well as health and mana pots. But really, you don't think that little of me, do you?
5 comments:
Most of the numbers people throw around as minimum requirements to do something in WoW assume you have very little to no skill. This is a bit less apt for healers and tanks, but still noticeable. I'm pretty sure you can handle Kara if you have a decent group to go with, and the same goes for Heroics.
There are some cases where the numbers do matter - a tank with 9k health is not going to be able to tank Prince regardless of skill. Especially for DPS, the numbers are more "aim for this" as opposed to "You MUST have this."
The keys are confidence and skill. If you're not gimping yourself by thinking you can't do it and you bring a decent amount of skill to the table, you'll do fine regardless of what the numbers say.
My big problem is that I really, truly hate lying. Making stuff up is fine if it's obviously fake or outright impossible, but I just can't stand misrepresenting something.
The issue is that when someone says "you don't have purples; you're not geared enough," I can't say "but I'm damn good at what I do; I don't need purples" because I don't know that for certain. If I haven't been through there at least once and proven to myself that I can do it... I can't say that I can.
That's why I'm really relieved about this, because now I can say that I can hold my own in a heroic.
(P.S. Blogger lacking an edit button for comments sucks; thank Elune I can delete my own comments and then repost them! :D)
There is something to be said about the difference between theoretically being able to do something and actually doing it. For instance, if I hadn't been there myself I would have laughed if someone said Wailing Caverns can be completed extremely easily using 4 hunters and warlock ranging from level 17 to 22. ;)
If you managed to be second in damage in a heroic--any heroic--you're Kara-capable. Yes, your crit % is a bit low, especially if you're BM, but you have 4 other DPSers to help pick up any potential slack. Cripes, we have T5/6 geared hunters in my raid who aren't hit-capped!!
The problem you run into is people who are on badge runs, and not on progression/gear runs. Those people ARE overgeared, and try to compare you to themselves. Well of course it's not a valid comparison.
Little-known fact: Kara can be 9-manned. So don't let your gear hold you back. You're ready.
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