Looking Ahead

Looks like Phase 4 and Zul'Aman drop next week.

Go figure.

And here I thought I had an opportunity to chill for a while before I started to feel the pressure about Zul'Aman runs.

I guess that means that Wrath Classic will drop in the Fall, probably in the October/November time frame.

***

I'm not sure what to make of all this. One one hand, if I wanted to get back into progression raiding when I finally am no longer drinking from a fire hose with all of my new job stuff, now would be a good time. On the other hand, I'm simply not wanting to rejoin the raid and find myself back at the bottom of the DPS stack again. 

Let's look at this with a critical eye rather than a sentimental one. 

To be "good" again, I would need upgrades to just about everything I'm carrying. 

Before anybody calls bullshit on this, here's the Phase Three singular best piece I have, courtesy of seventyupgrades.com:

My best piece was bought using
Badges of Justice.

 

Now, to be fair, seventyupgrades doesn't handle trinkets very well, and yes, I do have the Dragonspine Trophy (DST for short). Before you ask, I almost didn't roll on it because I wanted to defer to others who had better gear and DPS than me. Think about it: if someone with better DPS gets the DST, they'll do significantly better compared to me winning it. If there's a similar percentage applied to crits and DPS, the one with the larger DPS pool will benefit more than one with less DPS. That was my thought process about not rolling on the DST, but I was pretty much beat over the head by people wanting me to roll until I finally did. And I actually won it.

Yes, it's a nice little trinket, but you have to combine it with the Bloodlust Brooch and then pop both the Brooch and Shamanistic Rage at the same time to get full benefits from it (mana back as well as all the other nice bonuses in a fight.)

 

But outside of the trinkets, this is my singular best piece of gear for Phase 3: 

Yes, the Tier 5 gloves. No, I don't have
four pieces of T5 gear to get the highly
sought after T5 bonus. I only have two pieces.

 

Oh, and the Edgewalker boots that drop in Karazhan. They're almost as good, proportionally speaking.

Most of my other pieces barely register on the charts. 

For the record, I checked the listings after I added the Zul'Aman raid into the mix, and hardly any ZA pieces register. A cloak, a belt, and maybe a ring, but that's about it. So for me, "catch up" is a relative thing as I've already got gear that's as good or better than what drops in ZA.

And that's kind of sad, really, because it means that I'd need SSC/TK and Hyjal/BT runs to get geared.

Without a Kael'Thas kill, Phase 3 raids are pretty much off the table anyway, and it's actually hard to find a SSC/TK raid that fits into my schedule.

***

All of this was just to show what an uphill climb I'd have ahead of me to actually get some real gear to get out of the basement in the DPS listings.

The couple of crafted pieces that use the Nether Vortex are possible, but when it was presented to me as "upgrades" in a long list of ways to improve my DPS, I was told "it'll get me 10 more DPS" for each piece.

Whoop de fucking doo.

When your DPS is 200-300 lower than most everybody else, and I'm told that I should be getting in 3+ more Stormstrikes over the same time frame to bring myself in alignment with other Enhance Shamans, then I know the problem isn't just with gear, it's my own physical abilities. I'm being compared with people who are young enough to be my own children (or grandchildren, for pete's sake), and I know I don't have the same physical skills I had when I was in my 30s. (Or 40s, for that matter.)

So why would I rejoin a progression raid when I'm going to be reminded that I'm old?

***

I do receive a couple of whispers or Discord messages every so often, telling me that I'm missed in the raid. Which is nice, but I've seen how the sausage is made, and it can't be unseen. 

About the only reason why it would make sense to come back from a critical standpoint is because they want me for my body.

"Not this again. Shush, Card.
It's not what you thi-- Oh, nevermind."

Right now, the raid is hamstrung in their DPS utility classes. As in there aren't any.

The raid does not have a single one of these classes present:

• Enhancement Shaman (Enh Shammy)
  
• Retribution Paladin (Ret Pally)
  
• Balance Druid (Boomkin)

And not for lack of trying to recruit, either.*

If you know how TBC progression raids work, all of this adds up to some significant DPS being lost. Your own DPS might not be great, but you make others in your party/raid better. 

Yeah, like this BASF commercial from 1991:

And apparently in Mount Hyjal, the Archimonde fight** has a steady stream of fears being cast that are alleviated by Shamans in each group dropping Tremor Totems throughout the fight. That means a minimum of five Shamans per raid team, because of 5 groups of 5 in each raid. 

Our raid team only has three Shamans.

My presence would make it four, which would go a long way to getting the raid team over the hump and finishing the Mount Hyjal raid. 

On the flip side, they'd have to bench someone who was bringing a significant amount of extra DPS to the raid. And I'm not sure even my presence, doing a rotation that keeps the melee boosted in DPS, would overcome that DPS loss. After all, TBC Classic is not a very melee friendly expansion to raiders.

***

And now with Zul'Aman on the docket, it seems that my Karazhan raid might be squeezed out anyway.

I awoke this morning to find that the Friday Karazhan's sign up page in Discord was renamed to the "other" raid's "Thursday ZA Run".

I was initially annoyed, and posted in the raid leadership chat that I was planning on running the Friday Karazan until there's no interest --badges are badges after all, and it's hard to beat Karazhan for the sheer volume of badges-- but I have no idea if it'll get changed back. If not, and I've been squeezed out by a GM who pre-epmtively did this, then there's literally nothing keeping me in the guild anymore. Especially since my time is considered so unimportant that nobody thought to inform me that I was going to get my run yanked before it actually happened.

Well, I guess I'll find out today what's going to happen to the sole raid I have left.

*There simply aren't a lot of those three out there that aren't currently raiding in TBC Classic. I've likened finding an Enhance Shaman looking for a raid to finding a unicorn. Usually it's people looking to raid an alt, and given the transition from Classic to TBC Classic, a lot of those looking are classes that used to be on the hit parade for Vanilla Classic but have fallen a bit to the side: Warriors and Mages. To be fair, Mages still do good DPS, but there were so many of them progression raiding in Vanilla Classic that there's not enough space for them all in TBC Classic.

**The final boss in that raid instance. Yes, the demon from Warcraft 3.