Last night our guild dipped it's toe back into ICC to see what it was like. Mind you, none of us had beta accounts so we really only had our experience on the PTR as preparation for this patch, and since we raid pretty solidly during the week, we really didn't have a lot of time on the PTR even.
I ended up tanking, but I would have done that by choice, as I'm not entirely happy with the general "feel" of the fury rotation anymore. I don't know if it's the ability queue system interfering with my ability to capitalize on procs, or the fact that we have so much more of our rotation linked to unstable procs than before, but one way or the other, I've found that even when the RNG swung my way and the numbers were good, those "good feeling" rotations didn't last more than one or two stretches. It's a strange combination of having a very tight rotation (BT every 3 seconds, means one button press in between, which is supposed to be one of Raging Blow, Instant Slam (both procs, and uncertain) or WW for multi-target situations, and hit Heroic Strike or Cleave when you have 50 rage or more -- yet another proc) along with having so many parts of that tight rotation that can't be counted on to be available. On the PTR I ran once through Heroic UK and literally only used Raging Blow about 3 total times. Not because I didn't want to, but because I never enraged. Admittedly, I could have used Berserker Rage or Death Wish to patch over some of that, but I wanted to see what the rotation felt like without having to resort to using cooldowns. I would go into combat, hit BloodThirst, and by the time I got another button to press (usually Bloodthirst again) most of the pull was dead. I lost count of the number of times I finally enraged and had the opportunity to hit Raging Blow at just about the same time that everything died. I normally am a huge fan of warriors sundering just to help, and I've made MANY posts and comments to that effect, and suddenly I find that I don't want to sunder any more. It doesn't help as much as it used to, and more importantly, I don't have the gaps in the basic rotation to slot it in any longer.
Tanking, on the other hand, was great. I did not find it to be tougher than it was Monday, just slightly different. I definitely had to go into it with an open mind, but once I was comfortable, it was really very much the same as it had been.
If I had any complaints at all about tanking, it was that I occasionally felt like I was made of tissue paper, but I found myself wondering if this was a bug or something. I would go for long stretches of time and be perfectly fine, and then all of a sudden, I'm dead with no warning at all. I went back through my combat logs and I only see evenly spaced hits coming in ranging in the 6-8k damage and not even too frequently, so since I'm reasonably sure I was being healed at the time, I really can't say what happened. I don't see any huge spikes, nothing.
But so much of that kind of thing will happen, we encountered at least 3 bugs just getting up to halfway through the blood quarter that we're glad we only decided to bring a 10 man group to raid with. As an example, during the Gunship battle, one of the Alliance sailors (that should have been dead) apparently went invisible and came onto Deathbringer's Rise with us. All through combat it was attacking some of our ranged dps, and we couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It also kept putting us back into combat after we wiped making it impossible for us to rez or even take the transport to the rise (which we can't walk to). Finally someone found the spot that the invisible sailor was in and we killed him and things went smoother.
But all in all, things went much smoother than I'd have thought. Bosses went down very quickly, which had me a little concerned. Damage numbers weren't really "higher" than usual, but our 10 man was setting speed records on every boss we downed, and half our dps were really not our "best" dps. No one was over 11k, including our lead Fury warrior who usually sits pretty comfortably at 18-20k sustained average with the ICC buff.
If you're worried about the 4.0 patch and it's effects on the game until December, let me caution you to wait. They're going to fix all these strange inconsistencies, because the last thing Blizzard wants to do is tick off everyone who plays one particular class and lose that richness of uniqueness that makes the game fun.
I can understand if Fury warriors are having a tough time right now, I am too. They've already announced that they're buffing our numbers, but for me it's more of a feel issue. I'm just not happy with my basic rotation yet, and until I can get comfortable there, I don't know that having bigger numbers will help as much as they might think. I know when I was dpsing I was seeing melee damage at 30%-38% of my overall damage, and that just hurts my feelings. At that point it almost feels like I shouldn't bother even hitting buttons, since just standing in place does almost as much damage as trying to accomplish something. But, this is now common knowledge, and they're already fixing coefficients and adding to baseline damage of abilities and doing everything they can to make this right for us and ret pallies and kitties. I don't know if rogues are suffering at all, and I know that DK's are still seeing massive numbers, so those all seem ok.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to welcome little Perppy to my 80 club. In addition to my two other plate wearing alter-egos, I now have a fun loving little rogue of my own to play with.
Of course, she literally just hit 80 on Monday, so this may be the perfect opportunity for me to take some time and find out how to play a rogue post 4.0.1, since I won't have the pre-patch misconceptions clouding my judgement.
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