Beta Test Adventures - Day 14

I was all about ready to go crash my sleep deprived arse into bed last night when the beta servers came back up and I got sucked back into playing.

Mostly I tooled around Terrokar for a bit, and then headed back to Zangarmarsh to do a few quests. I had respec'd over to a mutilate build which is a heck of a lot more fun than the straight combat-sword build I have been leveling with. Needing some idea of my DPS I installed both the beta of DamageMeters and SW Stats. I already hate SW Stats, and DamageMeters does not appear to be working properly, or I have some sort of UI positioning window because I can't get it to reopen. ;) While I used to use DamageMeters exclusively, I unfortunately have really adapted to using Recap. - Mostly I am missing the readout of DPS for the last fight.

So - Mutilate. The basic premise of the build is you open up with a cheapshot, wait a tick and hit drop a mutilate on them. Mutilate hits for both weapons+101 damage and delivers two dots. So basically, after cheapshot/mutilate you're sitting at four dots. Now mix in a little deadly poison into that. With deadly poison on both weapons and all the poison talents out of the assassination tree, your target should be looking at least 2-3 applications of deadly poison already on them. It's sort of luck based, but if things are going well, you can drop an eviscerate or a gouge and be at five combo points and five applications of deadly poison. Master poisoner increases the damage on envenom and with a full five point envenom, it's around 1000 nature damage. - In other words, it goes *right through armor*. With the cold blood available, you're looking at 2k of nice burst damage. I like. Very niice. Overall, solo pve-wise, if you don't get the drop on a creature it's a bit harder to build up mad combo points since you can't use mutilate from the front, and you don't get the two points from cheapshot out of the gate. Fights where I aggro'd trash were noticebly harder and I kind of got the feeling that combat swords was better soloing dps.

After doing a little talent testing in Terrokar I headed over to Zangarmarsh and pounded out three quests that I had been sitting on for awhile. Killed a named sporebat and firefly/wasp/thingy, and found a missing (dead) scout. The female nagas apparently no longer immediately crash wow when you tab target them, but I wasn't really in the mood to finish off my still sizeable library of Zangarmarsh quests, so I accepted a quest to head down to Nagrand to reinforce the Maghar down there.

I used to expect Nagrand to be like the barrens. It's not. The western side of the zone is over my head with level 67 mobs. The orcish town of Sunspring Post is overrun with aggressive Broken, and when you get to the main horde town, it's all filled with refugees from the two encampments that have been driven out via the efforts of the legion. Plenty of quests were handed out, but the only one I really completed was to head north to the Throne of the Elements to talk to some shaman from the Earthen Ring there.

There's a Nessingwary's Expedition on the northeastern entrance to the zone with some easy hunting quests, so I got started on those, before getting bored and headed back to Orgrimmar to respec back into combat swords for some more pwnage leveling. Fighting elementals (who are immune to poison) was a total b*tch. Got to org, and spec'd to a more-poison, less-combat build, and hearthed back to shattrath city.

After 3hrs+ of sitting in the 'LFG' panel with a bejillion other rogues, mages and hunters I finally got a group tell for the slave pens. Shit. I shoulda stayed mutilate, but it was late and I was giving up on getting a group.

Slave Pens run went ok. We had a warrior who was tanking with a two-handed sword, a shaman and two warlocks. We were all fairly high level for the instance, so we tore through it fairly fast but choked on the first boss. We ended up with a surprise start and the tank dropped early. I was doing a decent job of pickup tanking the boss, but as soon as one of the warlocks decided to back out and bandage instead of killing the totems, the totems dropped me pretty fast.

Second attempt went smoothly and he dropped a caster sword.
The lobster dude dropped a wand, and shortly afterwards one of the two warlocks went linkdead. We finished up the dungeon with just four folks, and didn't have too much trouble on the last boss. He dropped the plate chest. Then I went to bed. ;)