Doing the DPS as a Tankadin
I got the new “3rd Tank” set up and decided to test it out. If you recall from last week, this involved going Execution Sentence, Sanctified Wrath, Seraphim, Harsh Words, Focused Shield, Final Wrath and using Seal of Righteousness. Harsh Words replaced Shield of the Righteous in the rotation.
After I set up my spec, and bought about 25 Tomes of Clear Mind, I went to the Target Dummy in my Garrison. I managed about 12k DPS, which wasn’t too terribly off from what I was doing as Ret. I decided to give it a test in the Proving Grounds. I had already completed the Silver Challenge DPS in my Retribution spec, but I wanted to start slow and fired up the Bronze Challenge DPS. That went well, almost easy. Next up I tried the Silver Challenge. This took me 4 or 5 tries as Retribution back when I first hit Level 100. I remember reading somewhere that the Proving Grounds scale up with your gear so the fact I have much better gear now than I did then shouldn’t have a big impact. It took me about 8 tries, but I managed to beat it and got the “You’re Doing It Wrong” achievement.
One big thing I learned, you can’t sit on a Seraphim. Once you’ve got 5 Holy Power, you’ve got to activate it.
With those two tests out of the way, the next thing I wanted to do was to try it out soloing. The Apexis Daily was “Assault on Skettis”.
This has to be the worse Apexis daily I’ve done so far. First, you have to obtain a Talon Key from the Arakkoa that patrol around. Then you have to free the Arakkoa Outcasts. That activates a reputation bar. Each Outcast has a 5 minute timer. At the end of that 5 minutes they will despawn. Outside the area is a Darkweaver in a bubble sort of like the ones we had for quest givers on the Isle of the Thunder. The idea is to fight other mobs in the area with the Outcast at your side to increase the reputation bar and then turn them into the Darkweaver’s bubble. The higher the reputation bar the more progress you made on completing the daily.
This would work fine expect for one itsy bitsy little problem. You remember that early scene in Top Gun where Goose and Maverick walk into the bar, and Maverick declares “This is a target rich environment”? Skettis has just the opposite problem. It is a target poor environment.
There aren’t nearly enough Arakkoa mobs and they don’t respawn quickly enough. The ones that do spawn are killed almost instantly. You almost have to get lucky running around and have one spawn near you or you pick a spot and spawn camp. To add to the issue, the Talon Keys aren’t a 100% drop.
I finished it for the Achievement progression but I’m keen on skipping it the next time I see that as the daily quest. I don’t need Apexis Crystals THAT bad. The good news was that the new spec performed well. I felt comfortable that I was killing stuff about as fast as I would as Retribution. I can now use my Prot spec for both solo and tanking by changing some glyphs and talents. That should mean I can change my Ret spec over to Holy and give that a try.
Of course, I then learned that the guys back at Blizzard HQ aren't too keen on this idea so this "3rd tank" spec is getting nerfed in Patch 6.1.
After I set up my spec, and bought about 25 Tomes of Clear Mind, I went to the Target Dummy in my Garrison. I managed about 12k DPS, which wasn’t too terribly off from what I was doing as Ret. I decided to give it a test in the Proving Grounds. I had already completed the Silver Challenge DPS in my Retribution spec, but I wanted to start slow and fired up the Bronze Challenge DPS. That went well, almost easy. Next up I tried the Silver Challenge. This took me 4 or 5 tries as Retribution back when I first hit Level 100. I remember reading somewhere that the Proving Grounds scale up with your gear so the fact I have much better gear now than I did then shouldn’t have a big impact. It took me about 8 tries, but I managed to beat it and got the “You’re Doing It Wrong” achievement.
One big thing I learned, you can’t sit on a Seraphim. Once you’ve got 5 Holy Power, you’ve got to activate it.
With those two tests out of the way, the next thing I wanted to do was to try it out soloing. The Apexis Daily was “Assault on Skettis”.
This has to be the worse Apexis daily I’ve done so far. First, you have to obtain a Talon Key from the Arakkoa that patrol around. Then you have to free the Arakkoa Outcasts. That activates a reputation bar. Each Outcast has a 5 minute timer. At the end of that 5 minutes they will despawn. Outside the area is a Darkweaver in a bubble sort of like the ones we had for quest givers on the Isle of the Thunder. The idea is to fight other mobs in the area with the Outcast at your side to increase the reputation bar and then turn them into the Darkweaver’s bubble. The higher the reputation bar the more progress you made on completing the daily.
This would work fine expect for one itsy bitsy little problem. You remember that early scene in Top Gun where Goose and Maverick walk into the bar, and Maverick declares “This is a target rich environment”? Skettis has just the opposite problem. It is a target poor environment.
There aren’t nearly enough Arakkoa mobs and they don’t respawn quickly enough. The ones that do spawn are killed almost instantly. You almost have to get lucky running around and have one spawn near you or you pick a spot and spawn camp. To add to the issue, the Talon Keys aren’t a 100% drop.
I finished it for the Achievement progression but I’m keen on skipping it the next time I see that as the daily quest. I don’t need Apexis Crystals THAT bad. The good news was that the new spec performed well. I felt comfortable that I was killing stuff about as fast as I would as Retribution. I can now use my Prot spec for both solo and tanking by changing some glyphs and talents. That should mean I can change my Ret spec over to Holy and give that a try.
Of course, I then learned that the guys back at Blizzard HQ aren't too keen on this idea so this "3rd tank" spec is getting nerfed in Patch 6.1.
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