Saving Hyjal, Post-Patch

My poor guild. After being 5/6 SSC and 1/4 TK for the longest time, we finally set foot into Mount Hyjal after 3.0.2 hit. We've had people that were geared for BT and even fine to start Sunwell, but being "casual" raiding means that you simply don't have the push from below to keep going. Well, with the expansion barely a week away. some people decided they had to see T6 content before we outlevel it again, and so over the course of two nights, we went 5/6 Hyjal. I know it doesn't count, per se, but it's still not a bad haul for people who's never been there before.

I like the instance, actually. If you'you have to clear trash anyway, it might as well be in waves, where the trash comes at a predictable, brisk pace. And none of the bosses, with the exception of Archimonde, really seem that hard. It's also steeped in lore, so I got to see Nordrassil and even took a dip in the Well of Eternity, which is probably the blood elf equivalent of the pilgrimmage to Mecca.

My mage was deep fire and rolling with the Spellfire/Spellstrike set before the patch. I had 1124 damage, 29% crit, and I was hit capped. Even then I could barely pull above 1k dps on most boss fights. Since deep fire became boring post-patch, I respecced frost and swapped into some SSO badge vendor gear. My hit rating took a beating (I always thought it was a silly stat to have to gear for anyway), my crit went down to a paltry 22%, and my spell damage stayed about constant at 1100 even, unbuffed. After properly enchanting my gloves as I was supposed to long ago, I finally settled into a hit rating of 155 -- still 20 something off from the new cap, with 3/3 Elemental Precision.

Pretty big difference. Frost, like fire, is all about using the cooldowns at good times. With fire, you had Combustion, Icy Veins (if you were specced for it), and a trinket to juggle. As frost, you have the elemental, Icy Veins, and trinket. The elemental comes up pretty often overall, with Cold Snap. I was pulling 1.2k - 1.3k easily on boss fights, when I got lucky, and I was even more surprised to see that my crit number on frostbolt was much higher than I expected. I was critting every 2/3 bolts. With numbers like that, I can afford to swap in the Lightning Capacitor over Quagmirran's Eye, which despite being a low level trinket, I still use because I like the haste proc.

I only missed 1% of the time, despite the hit rating-- probably because we had shadow priests and elemental shamans in the raid. My frostbolts go in the region of 4-5k damage each -- no 6k fireballs, but they have a shorter cast time. Overall it makes a big difference, as I was actually doing more dps than another mage who never missed. AOEing is when the frost mage truly shines; despite the fun AOEs in the fire tree, a lot of them require you to be close up to execute, which is never good -- and nothing beats out frost-talented Blizzard (except a talented Seed of Corruption, apparently. Damn those locks). And of course, my general stats went up a lot -- I went from only 8k health to about 10k raid buffed, and 11k mana. This combined with the innate survivability of frost made me a lot more confident that I would live to see the fight's end. I think I could afford to be second instead of first on the damage meters if it meant I had a smaller repair bill :)

Speaking of meters, I wasn't first or second -- averaged over two nights I'd say I came in about 3rd overall and 5th on boss damage alone. Who did I lose to? One warlock (because of SoC), some ret paladins, a hunter, another mage. And that was taking into account some bad lag on my part, a lot of timing mistakes, and some stupid deaths. Overall, I'm quite pleased. It could have been better, but for a first raid I'll gladly accept those numbers.

And I got Nethervoid Cloak to show for my trouble.