My First Trip Out

Well, I was able to raid Kara last night as Enhancement. This is the first time I've done any kind of instance since accumulating my PVP gear. I had a few concerns.

1 - Since I haven't played enhancement in a PVE setting, my aggro would be all over the place.

2 - If I didn't heal someone they would be pissed (residual healer-itis)

3 - My DPS would blow chunks and all the time I spent trying to get the best gear I though possible would be for naught.

Things actually turned out pretty good. We had a paly for Salvation which was nice. I still was riding a fine line with the aggro meters but I only died once the entire instance and not from drawing aggro.

Our healing was top notch so no one even notice that I could heal.

My DPS was good. I think there are some things I can do to improve for sure, and I still have some upgrades coming but I was pleased overall.

Without further ado, I present the anonymous WWS report. We didn't get Curator because I had to bail unexpectedly. (I'm Parma btw)

http://wowwebstats.com/6fx2x3ou4hj3m

My DPS on Attumen kind of sucked because the offtank was just OK and I had to be really careful on Midnight. After the merge our resto druid refused to get on Attumens ass and kept getting charged so people were running around and such. Also this was the first 15 minutes or so in to the instance so I was being really cautious about pushing the aggro meters.

Moroes was better and my DPS was good. We had one shackle, a trap, and some paly fear as CC. Our DPS was good enough that things didn't really live long so not having more than one shackle wasn't really an issue.

Maiden was a joke. She was dead in what felt like seconds. Shamanistic rage cut down on the damage I was taking. I just kept twisting Grounding and WF totems to help eat her holy fires and basically just DPS'd the crap out of her.

Romulo and Julianne went down easy as well.

After that the plan was to move on to Curator before calling it a night. Unfortunately I had to go unexpectedly and I heard this morning that they didn't get him down. I feel bad but there was no choice, and besides we'll get him Thursday.

The only unfortunate thing I can say about the run was that we didn't get to start the run on time and we still needed to PuG like 3 - 4 people. Our core group from the old guild just isn't on and it stinks. If we had the people that were attending previously combined with the new guild we would have been set.

I think it will be better going forward though, once the run actually got off the ground and really started rolling, people realized that the weekday raiding team might not necessarily equal the "B" team. People can be very hesitant to commit to something if they think it won't work out and be just the opposite once the ball has started rolling. I think that will be the case here, or at least I hope. We have the second part of the run scheduled for Thursday. If we can start on time I see no reason that we couldn't down Curator, Aran, Chess, and one more at least.

Wish us luck!

Another long absence

Well, As you can see I haven't posted in forever.

After the Holiday break Kara stopped running on a regular basis. Our guild was just too small. As it was, we had to bring in 2 - 3 non guild members per run. When our small core stopped attending with regularity there was just no shot.

We have since merged with a new guild and are waiting to see how it all shakes down. They all seem nice and value the same things the previous guild did, the major difference being they have many many more members.

The one hiccup could be that they tend to raid on weekends. Our core group were almost exclusively weeknights. I hope that there are enough people that had wanted to go during the week but couldn't from the new guild that the two groups can come together and pull it off.

I'll keep you posted.

In addition I respecc'd out of Resto. At the end of it my healing was a tad below 1800, my mp5 was over 135 unbuffed and my mana was over 10k. I just got burned out on healing. Like nearly every other guild we were short on healers and if I didn't want to heal it basically meant the run didn't happen.

As it stands now when I put my healing set on I'm at 1599 healing and close to 120 mp5 unbuffed.

The second you start having to ask yourself, "Am I in this for me because I want to have fun, or am I in it just so I don't ruin someone elses good time only?" You're pretty much screwed. So I respecc'd elemental while I farmed PVP enhancement gear. PvP'ing as a shaman is hard enough, trying to pvp as enhancement when you don't have any pvp gear is just about as laughable as is humanly possible.

Thats an exstensive and entirely separate topic right there, but I'll sum it up in a couple of sentences and hope to delve in to it deeper in the near future. To sum up, Enhancement Shaman suck in PVP. Fighting an equally geared player of virtually any other class is highly highly difficult. We have no CC, we have no escapability. We have limited ways to break CC on ourselves, our ability to close on targets is dang near impossible (Frost shock and Earthbind ftwtf??), and we are easily focus fired in PVP and arenas. Huzzah! Is that a whine? Yes it is. Am I complaining about PVE ? nope. But in PVP we just don't get it done. Although pwning those new to PVP and undergeared is still satisfying it isn't the same.

So anywho, I farmed a bunch of gear from PVP so I can PVE. Basically aside from Tier gear there is no mail gear tailored for Enhancement shaman. There just ain't. Not in Kara, not in ZA, hardly anywhere. We derive our AP from Strength, good luck finding mail items with Int, Str, and Crit in Kara. You can't because they don't exist. In addition to this, we aren't terribly close to clearing Kara and moving on to 25 man content. So rather than make due with hunter or druid gear, I decided to go the PVP route, yes I lose some stat points due to an abundance of Stam and Resil but I still come out way on top when it comes to AP and Crit compared to someone at the same level of progression that neglects PVP.

Right now I have 8600 hp, 26% crit, and 1228 AP. Also keep in mind that because of my reward choices while leveling my trinkets suck. I'm working on getting the Bloodlust Brooch and The Darkmoon Card Crusade. If and when that happens you can basically tack on another 200 or so AP. Also, I'm rocking a bunch of green gems because I've been focusing on the PVP and enchants and money is tight. (Some stats may be off because I can't access armory at el worko)

Problem is, I haven't been able to see what kind of PVE numbers I can put out because we haven't been running Kara. Thats supposed to change tonight. I'll be running a webstats for tonights raid and will post results tomorrow.

So why didn't I post while all my Enhancement research and PVP adventures were going on? Well I'm lazy and because I need a new logo and sig I decided to hold off until I was ready for the big switch.

I hope to be back with more regularity (this is like the 5th post I've said this in) and that all my hard work wasn't for naught.