Incoming Nerf

Dragon Soul is supposed to be nerfed starting this week.  It will be a 5% reduction in boss damage and health, and that number will gradually increase.  It doesn’t affect our attack power or abilities, so our damage output should stay about the same.

For rogues, this nerf has some small effect.  It means that bosses will die quicker, so you might not get to use your cooldowns as often.  This might have a small negative impact on our damage totals.  Be aggressive using your damage cooldowns.

Here’s something interesting you might try.  On Ultraxion in 10-man normal mode, the Hour of Twilight does 300,000 damage.  Presumably that will be nerfed down to 285,000.  If you hit your Feint, reducing AoE damage by 50%, that should only hit you for 142,500.  If you’re in 378/384/397 gear you probably have enough health to survive that, assuming that your healers are keeping you topped off.  If you’re feeling adventurous, see if you can live through an Hour of Twilight without hitting the Heroic Will.

Of course, if your health is below 142000, or if you time the Feint wrong you’ll die.  If you manage to survive, that’s extra dps time.  You might give your healers and raid leader a heart attack, though.

Rogue drops in Dragon Soul

Am I just incredibly unlucky?

I’ve run Dragon Soul now about 6-8 times in normal difficulty and a handful of times in LFR.  That’s a total of 40-50 boss kills split between 10-man runs and 25-man runs.

So far, I have gotten exactly three drops.  I got my first DS tier piece in LFR yesterday.

I’m not too surprised by that.  What I’m annoyed with is not that I’m being outrolled, but that I almost never even have a drop to roll on.  I’ve gone entire guild runs without ever typing /roll, and entire LFR runs without ever hitting Need or even Greed.  Its become kind of a joke.

Am I just amazingly unlucky?

Satisfaction

In LFR, fighting Hagara…

I have a lapse in concentration and the ice wall catches me from behind.  I die.   /facepalm

AssjerkMcPallyPants spends the next few minutes berating me in raid chat.  I don’t even know how he can play the game with his hands typing so much.  There’s no end to the insults that he spews.

Next ice wall, AssjerkMcPallyPants dies.

What’s Been and What’s Coming

The (recent) past:

I’ve been grinding along in game.  No new posts recently because nothing interesting has happened since the fun little questline early on the path to the legendary daggers.

For what its worth, I am just 1/3 of the way done with the Dragon Soul collection quest, Cluster Clutch.  Since this is the last raid in the expansion, and I expect interest in WoW to gradually wane as people get bored with this content, it seems reasonable to me that I will not have a shot at getting the legendary daggers.  I simply won’t be able to run DS enough to get through the two collection quests.  This is as I expected.  In general, casual raiding guilds just don’t kill enough bosses to get the legendaries.

I spend most of my time working on gold making.  I’m just about to hit 500,000 gold, which was my goal.  The gem market has bottomed out because people aren’t getting much new gear anymore.  As the lull between now and MoP stretches out, more people will play alts so I’ll always have the glyph market to rely on, but I don’t think I’ll be raking in the gold any more until we see pandas.

The (near) future:

My guild is 5/8 in DS on 10 man normal.  Blizzard announced that DS will be gradually nerfed, so we’ll get through the rest one way or another, either pre-nerf or post-nerf.  After that happens, it would not surprise me at all to see some of our long-time players drift away from the game.  Its sad, but its life.

This blog will probably continue the zombie-life that it has.  I made only 58 posts in 2011, and considering the new raids and such that really is not very many.  With the homogenizing of the game, there is very little rogue-specific information for me to convey.  Between the Dungeon Journal and LFR in game, there is less need than ever to tab out of the game and find information.  What information is needed is covered nicely by Elitist Jerks.

I’m keeping the blog alive so that it can return as a valued source of information when Mists of Pandaria hits.  I did the one-year commitment, so I’ll still be around.

Besides, I’d like to see the blog hit 1,000,000 pageviews (not counting feedreaders) and that will happen in another couple of months.