Deathwing Down on Toon #5

So I managed to kill the LFR version of Deathwing on my fifth character yesterday, Joarnak, my mage. So that now makes for warlock, death knight, druid, hunter and now mage. I'm working on gearing the rogue for it next, and the paladin won't be far behind, priest likely after that. I've never really healed on the priest, so I'm thinking of giving it a try as either holy or disc. We'll see how that goes.

So the above toons are all obviously over 372 ilvl at this point, since they've been through the raid finder at this point, but here is where everyone else stands:

Joarstab (rogue) 371
Joaridan (pally) 364
Joarvyk (priest) 364
Joarbek (shaman) 348 (say he has 357 in his bags, so I may have gotten something that I just haven't equipped yet)
Joarmama (warrior) 349 (wouldn't have guessed in a million years that he was slightly better equipped than the shaman).

I need to make a new weapon for the warrior in the worst possible way since he's still sporting the Axe of Earthly Sundering from Deepholm. But I should be able to craft him up something nice, which should make a huge difference. A nice set of JP bracers should make a huge difference for the shaman. Neither of those are geared enough for the hour of twilight heroics yet, so the key is going to be acquiring or crafting enough stuff for both to push them over the edge for those, then just keep running those until enough drops that they can do LFR. Shouldn't be too bad.

While the rogue is at 371, there's really a ton of PvP gear going into that calculation, so I really won't be looking to jump into LFR until I've replaced a lot more of the PvP gear. I don't want to be "That Guy". Although heck, combat is so good these days, I'm already just about outdpsing my 381 ilvl warlock.

New Goals for LFR

So this past weekend, I was able to do full runs of LFR and kill Deathwing on 4 different toons. While I had a few groups that were a bit of a struggle, on a general basis, most of the groups were pretty decent.

On top of these 4 toons, I've got two more toons that are close to being geared enough to run LFR. Given that I've never before killed an end-boss during the actual patch for that boss, I've really enjoyed the LFR process.

One goal that I'm thinking about setting for myself is to kill Deathwing on all 10 of my level 85's before the expansion hits. This would be the most challenging on the warrior, who's gear is pretty bad at this point, but can be quickly supplemented with BoE JP gear from other toons, at least to get him to the point where he can start running the new Hour of Twilight instances.

I'd also like to switch the shaman from enhance to elemental given the gear drops that I've seen, but not sure how easy that would be to do.

Initial Thoughts on New 5 Mans and LFR

So over the course of this weekend, I managed to complete all three of the new 5 man dungeons on 5 of my different characters as well as getting valor capped on all five of those characters. That just boggles my mind. Given that I'm not a serious raider, I very rarely get valor capped on any character, much less 5 in one week. Gearing this patch is going to be much easier than it has been.

I was also lucky with some 5 man drops on 2 of those 5 toons and managed to get their iLvL up enough to run the Raid Finder version of Dragon Soul. I found the raid to be very enjoyable on both toons. In both cases, we wiped a couple of times, but managed to finish all four of the new bosses in under two hours. For me, that's perfect.

I didn't manage to get any gear at all on the warlock, but on the death knight, I got two pieces of tier gear. Imagine my excitement at that! During the last patch, it took me the entire patch cycle to accumulate two pieces of tier gear, so to get that within the first few days really felt great.

So needless to say, I'm enjoying the new raid finder. The Darkmoon Faire has been interesting, but not enough to distract my attention from the new dungeons. I enjoy the new profession quests and those have been good for my engineer, who still isn't quite done. But beyond that, I think I'm just beyond caring about new pets or mounts.