Speaking of Overgeared

Tuesday morning. Holiday weekend, so you wake up thinking its Monday. Nope, servers are down.

So, rather than doing the dishes for my GF, which would have been nice, and they're 90% my dishes anyway, sorry :-(

Rather than doing the dishes, I check out the armory and putz around for a little while. I still wear two pieces of Leather armor, Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation and Midnight Legguards.

I'm very happy with the stats both pieces give me, but I figure that my next focus for gear progression should be in those two locations.

You see, the other night in Karazhan had me thinking.

Kill Curator. Glorious Day .... Garona's Signet Ring AND T4 Hunter/other guy/other guy gloves drop. Only one other guy needed the gloves. I usually out DPS the guy by double so I passed on the gloves. The ring...I've got better from Badges and from PvP.

Pew Pew Pew.

Kill Prince. Glorious of Glorious days. Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix AND T4 Hunter/other guy/other guy helm drop. My Gladiator helm is better than the T4, and I've got the 150 badge crossbow, so SBotP is a giant down grade.

On principle I took the Bow, mostly to show the other hunter who has been drooling over it ever since we got to the upper reaches of the tower. Sucka. I threw a void crystal into the guild bank for good measure.

And that's a somewhat typical night in Kara for me. First night we ever did the Opera Event, Legacy dropped for me. I already had the S3 Axe, so I took Legacy and hung it on the wall. Looks great there.

Looking at my be.imba thingie (sorry for no linkie, if you believe this, i actually lost it and can't search for it here at work) it says I'm geared appropriately to raid Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. I dunno, I've never set foot in those places, and I think my stamina and mana are a little low, but it does give some perspective. I do put out a pretty consistent 1000-1100 DPS on most boss fights. I don't know what happened, but Illhoof has recently become my whipping boy, as I happily broke 1300 and then 1400 DPS for that fight in the past two weeks. I'm assuming this is low for those higher tier dungeons, but for the content I'm facing, its OP. Also broke 1000 DPS for the overall run for the first time during this week's upper kara raid.

So this Tuesday non-dish washing morning, I took a gander at the Armory and their "Find Upgrades" feature.

For once, the Armory was running super speedy. Twas very nice. I usually get a 5 second delay for each mouse-over popup.

Looking through the possible upgrades, its doesn't look pretty.

Quite frankly, for most slots, the only upgrades will be at the MH/BT level. Even the stuff that drops in Gruuls, SSC, and the like, all that stuff was very minor upgrades, if at all. Ok, the T5 bonus that heals my pet would be out-f'ing-standing. And there's a few badge items that're equivalent that I'll be getting over the next 3 or 4 weeks.

So, without ever setting foot in a real 25-man raid, I'm over geared for all of the content I'll reasonably expect to see in 2008.


I'm more and more threat capped every day. Take for instance Illhoof. We start off killing Kil'rek, then switch DPS over to Illhoof. The tank on 'hoof has ample time to build some solid threat. When I switch over, within 10 seconds I'm about to pull aggro. If FD resists, its all over. I have to stop attacking and just sit and watch the fight go on. Even if it doesn't resist, in the 30 seconds of cooldown, there's a pretty big danger of pulling aggro again. Even late into fights where the FD reset leaves the tank with 40k threat advantage. Man, a FD resist during Phase 2 of the Prince, major SNAFU. Hmmm, maybe I should get that T4 stuff :-P

Its pretty crazy. And the thing I like about my gear is that nearly none of it is based on lucky drops or lucky rolls. Its all badges, honor, arena points, reputation stuff. I think 3 of my pieces are drops, 1 from heroic and 2 from kara. Oh, and the Hourglass, but that's just special.

And the upgrades to gear for the foreseeable future are all badges and honor, no drops in sight. The only issue becomes the hit cap, so if I can get my hands on some of the S3 vengeful gladiator stuff that comes with +hit, its just insane.

Makes me wonder what WotLK will be like for me, when the content is still new and Blizz isn't giving away what I will refer to as "more reliable" paths to gear. Aint no welfare. Other than the 40 arena losses over 1 month's time for my ax, I've worked my @ss off to put this set together. Its just that it hasn't been overly dependent on the Random Number Generator.