So today's daily heroic for my mage took me to Halls of Lightning. We buffed up and made the first pull. I got about two arcane blasts off before both mobs fell over and died simultaneously. Okay, clearly we had some very overpowered dps in this group. On the next pull I threw a glance at the damage meter and... holy moly, a warrior doing over eight thousand dps! Well, that explained it - except, hang on, I thought we had only one warrior in this party? The tank!
I inspected him and found that he was indeed in full fury spec, kitted out in ICC25 heroic gear, dual-wielding Shadowmourne and a heroic Cryptmaker. I expressed some amusement about this fact and he smiled. Nobody else minded. And you know what? It didn't matter because he tanked just fine. Nobody else was doing even half his dps so we stood no chance at stealing aggro from him, and that aside everything was dying so quickly that it didn't make a difference either way. On most AoE pulls everything was dead before I'd even finished my first channeling of Blizzard (six seconds). General Bjarngrim died after twenty-four seconds, Volkhan after eighteen, Loken after twenty, before he could even cast his first lightning nova. Ionar only survived for forty-one seconds because we couldn't do damage to him while he was dispersed.
We only had one wipe when our tank charged into the first boss while he was empowered and standing in the middle of a group of trash mobs. Our little warrior went splat before anyone could even blink, but everyone just laughed it off and the tank himself summed it up very accurately with "lol pwned". After that he pulled more carefully.
I think it's definitely a sign of the current heroic system being broken when people are practically encouraged to run them like this, but fact of the matter is that it was the sensible thing to do. Even in full dps gear our tank had over 35k health, and with the damage he was doing no pug tank would have been able to keep aggro off him anyway. So why not embrace the fact that you're producing massive threat and can survive a few hits and just sign up for the role you're going to play anyway, whether you want it or not? I thought it was clever. In fact, other massively overgeared dps plate wearers and cat druids who still want to run the daily heroic for some reason should probably take a leaf out of this guy's book if you ask me. Long live the dps tanks! Until Cataclysm anyway.
29/05/2010
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A geared DPS will be 51 or even 64 ilevels above the loot given by the heroics, in addition to it being epic set gear rather than non-set blues. That much more armor and stamina means that even if they are vulnerable to crits, they'll still end up about as easy to heal as a tank in a deent blue set, as we all started with.
ReplyDeleteKeeps the healers awake too, I bet.
That is very boss. I do like when capable people do things like this. One of the best heroics I've done in months was an Ahnkahet run with a Shadow priest who queued as a healer. He put out completely sick damage and had no qualms dropping out of shadowform to spot heal as needed. Very fast!
ReplyDeleteI've contemplated trying this myself on my moonkin/tree but I don't think I quite trust myself.
Also, completely unrelated but I've been trying to get a hold of you through email but I keep having my messages bounced back at me. Clearly I fail at email so would you be so kind as to bounce me a line?