Gear Will Come

Saxsy raided Dragon Soul last night for the second time in her ten man group.

There was a little bit of a snag at the start when we found out that our warrior off-tank was not going to be able to make it. To see why this is a problem, let me run down our normal raid composition:

• Prot Paladin main tank (and guild leader)
• Prot Warrior off tank
• Rogue (don’t know the spec)
• Feral druid
• Death Knight (frost I think, definitely dps, he has a tanking offset but it’s significantly lower geared)
• Shadow priest
• Fire mage (yay me)
• Resto druid
• Holy paladin
• Priest (I think holy, definitely heals full time)

Our backup tank is a prot paladin. Our backup dps are a fire mage, some sort of dps shaman, and an arcane mage. We have no official backup healer.

In any case, our off-tank wasn’t going to be there that night, and one of our members started complaining, to the point where it looked like she wasn’t going to be willing to go. Her complaint was that our raid composition was bad, because we didn’t have anyone on the warrior/hunter/shaman raid token. I shrugged at this; I’m always of the belief that your raid composition is determined more by who you have available to raid at a given time than what roles would be best. Would it be nice to have one of each class? Sure. Would it be nice for Blizzard to recognize how crowded one of its tier pieces is? Sure. But this is what we’ve got for this time and it’s just something we have to accept. I accepted it.

The run went decently well, though we didn’t get as far as I would have liked. I would have hoped to have downed Ultraxion to be able to devote our time on the new Gunship fight. Morchok went splat without any issue. We still were having problems with Zon’ozz, mostly because our main tank hadn’t done the fight in 10-man mode and was learning how to deal with the ball. We got him down after five attempts. Vor’sahj went down in one shot. We then took our break, and the delay began. One of our healers didn’t return from break, so we had to swap in a new healer. Fortunately, B team hadn’t gotten that far so the healers from B team were available for A team. We got him in and started work on Hagara. A few people still had to learn the fight so it took a few attempts, but on our fourth we downed her, just as our raid time ended.

Two of the tier drops that night were the useless warrior/hunter/shaman tokens. Our raid lead gave them to the complaining person. At that point it was a bit of an “I told you so” frustration, but it didn’t seem like outright anger or anything. A wand dropped off of one of the bosses that Saxsy could have used, but I lost the roll. I can’t get too worked up over a wand, particularly when the valor point wand is better for me anyway.

I felt that my approach to gear had changed. I remember when I was running Firelands I was very frustrated about gear not dropping and losing rolls to other people. This time, I felt okay. I think the reason why is obvious. Back then, I was at the bottom of the damage meters, well behind the other dps and feeling like I was being carried.

Last night I was the top dps overall, by a significant margin.

Now, there are all sorts of qualifiers to that. I killed on trash. I killed on boss fights that ended in wipes (most likely because the other dps were becoming familiar with the encounter). On boss fights that resulted in kills I was between second and fourth, nothing to be ashamed about but not leading the pack. But the upshot is that my dps is contributing and even leading the group. I’d like to do even better. But I’m happy where I am.

That, I think, is why I’m not worrying so much over gear at all. It will come. But I don’t feel I need it anymore. It’s a nice place to be.