Last night I logged in on the desktop and fell in love with the game of WoW again. Now it's funny that such a thing as graphics and computer capabilities could make a difference, but I really am not a fan of this game on my laptop due to issues in Dalaran and feeling less useful in groups on the laptop. The game is so much prettier on my desktop and there's no limits on raiding and such. Well Monday nights is a big PUG night on my server and every server, so I logged in with a couple hours to play and immediately got plugged into a ToC 10 man raid PUG. I was the only clothie in the group, which bodes well for gear. Sure enough, I would come away with a huge upgrade to my wand, which is something I have not upgraded since Naxx. Probably should have picked up a second upgrade to pants as well, but I was slow on the rolls and did not want to give up my tier 7 benefits. Probably a mistake in retrospect, but oh well.
The group one-shot every boss in the instance except for faction champions, which we really struggled to get past. Our struggles against faction champions and other things made me question...just who is the hardcore raider now? The Illuminati has switched to 25 man only raiding now and all I've ever done in ToC is 25 man. Now I've also done Naxx and Ulduar on 10 and 25, but not as quickly in succession as my last two ToC runs. It seemed like a done deal that 25 man raiding was harder because you get higher level gear and you have to manage higher health pools and more people. However, now I'm not so sure.
In a 10 man raid, the "bad things" that happen during boss fights to individuals seem to happen a lot more to you because there's less people to bother. I was really struggling to stay in a healing rhythm thanks to all the distractions and such. Furthermore, your margin for error is much more slim when you have 2-3 sets of healer eyes and ranges on one tank rather than 5-6 sets. If I fall out of range, that's one of the major cooldowns we may need at a critical juncture. Even if these are just balance issues in my head, the faction champs absolutely positively has to be harder on 10 man. You see, it's simple statistics. Six bosses versus 10 means there's over a 50% chance you will be harassed constantly by a boss. 10 versus 25 means less than 40% chance of being harassed (discounting healers on the other team to an extent). For me as the token clothie, the Horde rogue was on me all the time because we were low on CC classes ourselves to take care of the mage and the rogue. There's only so much you can do as a priest against a rogue in PVP style combat. So even if my theory is wrong on other boss fights, it seems like 10 man raiding is way more hardcore for sure on the faction champions. Perhaps it is the 10 man raids who should get the higher ilvl gear for that one.
We did get the speed kill Salt and Pepper achievement as well as the achievement for downing ToC 10, so another 20 points in Ekat's irrelevant total. It might be irrelevant but oh it feels so good. The bag business is back again as my friend Mike sent me a bunch of netherweave cloth from his Outland rep grinding and it reinvigorated the business. So we're grinding a bit of gold up again and I'm ready for the next alt after the DK for epic flight and such. No real news on the leveling front otherwise, but more to come later.
Welcome back to Azeroth :)
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