So how about a little more about my adventure in the realm of DPS?

I replaced my tanking cloak (with this) and neck (with this) last night, and finished getting some basic enchants put on my items. I don’t want to pay for the big big budget stuff until I have an Epic I will keep for a while. In all though, I have one tanking ring left. I have DPS enchants on all my gear, and the only gem I am missing is my meta. Not to bad. I am now sitting at about 3000 attack power; I don’t know my other stats off the top of my head. I would guess they are mostly the same.

So last night I ventured into Heroic Utgarde Keep with a team from my guild. Our Bear tanked, we had a shaman healer, a BM hunter, and an affliction lock for DPS; as well as myself of course.

As soon as we walked in the door, I proceeded to rip agg off the bear on the very first pull and DIE painfully while our healer laughed at me. After they cut down the mobs, and got me back on my feet we proceeded to pull number two... where I did the exact same thing.

At this point I started thinking about what I was doing. As a tank, as soon as I make the pull I drop my AoE in order to make sure everything is collected. As DPS I found I was doing something like this....

1) Bear Pulls
2) Bear starts doing whatever it is bears do.
3) I run in and drop Consecration
4) I pop divine storm
5) Everything but the bear’s main target turns to me and rips me to shreds while the healer laughs and makes jokes about how fast I drop.

So I changed up my skill order. I made sure to check on the first kill target by asking on vent (sometimes we mark, sometimes we don’t), and I started to wait an extra 3 or 4 seconds before joining the melee. It went something like this...

1) Bear Pulls
2) Bear starts doing whatever it is bears do.
3) Bear continues doing whatever it is bears do.
4) I run in, and cast Judgement on the first kill target.
5) Cast Exorcism on the first kill target
6) Cast Crusader Strike on the first kill target
7) Consecrate
8) Divine Storm
9) Start playing "Wack-a-Mole" with my cooldowns
10) Own face

So this pattern worked pretty good. I worked the guilds somewhat undergeared offtank (aka The Bear) to the max, tried to keep one eye on omen and one on my cooldowns, and was generally more carefully with my AoEs. The instance proceeded pretty well for a while... Then something else happened...

Our Hunter... pulled agg. My tank reflexes kicked in immediately, and before I even thought about it I was pressing “1,” aka Hand of Reckoning. Well... the bear saw the wayward mob, saw it turn around and start coming back, and assumed the hunter had used feign death. Well needless to say, I quickly found myself taking my third dirt nap. This time however I did find it amusing.

The same exact thing happened one more time before we reached Ingvar. So for those keeping count, that’s 4 deaths to me for the run... all four basically self inflicted. The warlock also died once. No one was quite sure why, but these things happen. All in all not a bad run though.

So final outcome? Ingvar dropped the epic bow... “This is not the epic you’re looking for.... move along.” It got sharded. I put out a very respectable 1950 DPS for the instance coming in second to the hunter at nearly 2100. To be fair to our warlock, he can blow both of us out of the water, but we where killing things so fast he could never get all his DOTs up. Repair cost, 16g. I’m not complaining. 4 deaths in my Prot set would run me close to is not over 40 easy.

In all I was pretty happy; I went in hoping I would at least beat The Bear. I came out number two with what I consider to be a very respectable DPS for someone who has been ret for 3 days.

I’m looking forward to giving it another go tonight. Ingvar has a Belt and Legs that I want. I also installed all my glyphs last night... AFTER the run... and I should be getting my meta installed today, so I want to try those out as well.

So that’s all I have for now. For the Light
~Bloodgarde