Of course I’m talking about my Shaman again. I hit RR51 last night which means only two more RR until I can wear the Invader Shoulders that are already paid for and sitting in my bag. I fully expect to alienate half the people that I normally run scenarios with when I go DPS, but it’s just what I’m good at. I’m not a healer at heart by any means, and every healer I’ve rolled has been a hybrid, even my twink Runepriest. Yeah, I twinked a Runepriest for DPS in tier 1, and it worked out pretty well. I think he’ll be even more fun after the Zealot/RP changes in 1.3.6, but we’re getting off on a whole different tangent. My real issue today is collecting my loot.

Currently I’m about 10 scenarios away from picking up my Conqueror weapon which will fall in line a tad bit early. I’m also reconsidering wearing 2pc Bloodlord for my DPS gearout as I can swap to 4pc Invader for an extra 2% crit and better overall stats, albeit less Intelligence. Not to mention it’s a fair sight easier than trying to get a group together for a Bloodlord Helm and Chest run. For one, the middle wing of BS can be tricky at times and if you get overconfident on the Stairs PQ you get kicked back out to the bottom. Typically it takes a good 30m just to move through the PQ again, and hardly takes 10m to get up to it. The Helm boss, extremely similar to the Bloodwrought Enclave middle boss, is easily the most difficult boss as well. Part of the design is having aggro tables reset which makes life rough for the squishies if he decides to ignore both taunts and detaunts. The chest boss is a cakewalk, but I wasn’t planning on that for my second piece anyway.

Then there’s the city siege bags for more Invader. This basically goes two ways, I can run with a premade warband of guildies and alliance members and beg them to opt out on the first run increasing my chances for Gold. Chances of this happening are slim to none as I seem to be in the Alliance of Assholes for destro on Iron Rock. The second option would be to get with a smaller group on a later city siege run and hope for less opposition or more lockouts on my realmmates that already ran it today. Chances of this are a bit better, but might also result in facing a larger amount of opposition and blowing my chances for any bags. At least with a full Alliance warband I can be 90% confident of a victory. Ideally there would be a third option where the Alliance warband would stay together for a second city instance and would swap me in. This would more or less guarantee me Gold bags on each stage of the city since everyone I would be running with would be locked on them. Chances again are low as most of these guys run for the bags since Officer medallions have been royally F’ing screwed due to the conversion changes.

That’s the last issue there isn’t it? With Officer medallions no longer getting a nice 5:1 conversion from Conqueror crests (let alone the whole chain being affected similarly) it’s a serious pain in the ass to buy gear anymore. It also means that if I ever plan on getting Warlord or Sov on any of my toons I’ll probably get stuck doing the city quite a bit. Hopefully the difficulty in acquiring set gear is going to be counterbalanced in the future by more purchaseable (by gold mind you, not medallions) renown gear like we’ve had through the entire game until you hit T4. I think that’s what is really missing. There’s no clear cut progression once you hit RR40. Everything just turns into a grind for medallions or insignias, or you pray for lack of opposition so you can win bags be it from keeps (Anni), LotD warcamp(Conq), or the city siege(Inv, War, Sov). With the amount of players in end-game gear on either side it makes for a lot of prayer that you don’t run into them so you can similarly get geared up. I think what I’m getting at is more dispensary options for loot to get more variety in the end game set gear.

Perhaps a post for another day.

Cheers!