Frosty Windshield

Not the first time I've been part of a team taking Murmur down, but it was a fun one. Log in with the intention of doing the cooking daily, and then grinding netherwing rep, but a few seconds after log in, get a whisper to run Shadow Labyrinth. Ok, why not? Run with friends, have some fun, take a stab at a Sonic Spear.

Get in there and discover that the place is cleared and the former group that was trying had wiped on Murmur 5 times so they're calling in for some subs. Eh, could have used that information a few minutes earlier, but still, a chance to play with some friends, even if just for a boss encounter.

I was a tad reluctant, because just for giggles (ok, not for giggles, but rather for a focus frame because I was fiddling with my macros to use my focus target), I installed Perl Classic Unit Frames addon just prior to logging on, so at this point, my screen is filled with these giant unit frames and the frames of everyone's target, and across the top is my target, his target, and his target's target. And to make my life really fun, I've also got a focus frame and the target of my focus in the lower right.

This all happened so quickly, that I didn't have time to figure out how to configure Perl. I have since figured that part out (type "/perl" and play with the gui config widget) and have a much more managable screen to deal with, but at this point in time it was like I was getting into my car that was parked in a snow storm and only took the time to scrape a little tiny hole in the ice to look through before speeding away (not that I would ever advocate driving under these dangerous conditions. Especially not in a high speed dash to the volunteer fire department to respond to an alarm. Nope, not ever. And really especially not in Buffalo where it just NEVER snows. Nope, not ever).

For the Murmur fight, honestly, my vision isn't that important, basically just stand there and DPS pew-pew, only really moving to step forward onto the lip of Murmur's circle and get line of sight to my pet so I could cast Bestial Wrath. The hardest 2 things for me were:

1) My cast bar used to be bottom center of the screen. Now its up in the top left. I'll get used to it with some repetition, but at this point, I had a rough time monitoring my Steady Shot and Aimed Shot progress.

2) I couldn't easily find Murmur's cast bar to know when to recall my pet from the sonic booms. But I figured that I had fed Cringer some Sporeling Snacks, maybe the extra +sta would help him out.

Bam Bam Bam. Murmur goes down with not too much fuss. Drops a nice plate armor and a nice shield, both of which are upgrades for the tank, so there was much rejoicing.

After the w00t's were over, I pop up the damage meter to see how I did. This is the first time I ever ran DM just for a single boss event, and other than a couple of times Murmur silenced me, it was basically a straight forward blast-o-rama with little interruption.

Plus its the first time I'm looking at my numbers since getting my Valanos Longbow.

Plus-plus its the first time I was trying out a pretty much Steady Shot/Auto Shot shot rotation. Up until this point, I've pretty randomly rotated my shots, giving a priority to Arcane Shot whenever it was cooled down, and Multi Shot if there was no CC I might break. Thinking that that might be silly and not very mana-efficient, I figured I'd try out just plain old steady/auto in a pretty much 1:1 ratio, doing my best to not clip shots, even with the new location of my cast bar from Perl's restructuring my screen.

And to add to the changes to my routine (plus-plus-plus), its also the first time I'm running with both claw and bite on autocast. In the past I've only had bite turned on, but was reading yesterday about the benefits of activating both.

DM showed my DPS to be 579. Not sure if this is good or not, specifically whether its good enough for heroics or kara. But the next closest DPS'er was in the high 300's, so I'm thinking that either my numbers are OK, or my party members are NOT-OK. I'm suspecting a little of both.

I think its time for a trip to Dr. Boom and try out some controlled DPS experiments to see how some small changes can impact my overall numbers, without quite getting too deep in theorycrafting.