My First Impressions of WoW Patch 3.2

Content as a whole, including new items, and gear, as well as new areas and quests was a welcome addition. The Coliseum was fun as well. But my DPS on as a ret pally was absolutely putrid. I was about ready to throw my keyboard through the window.

I have a lot of changes coming to all the stats, gems, etc. pages, so they should be up soon.

The first thing I did was to buy heirloom gear for my Paladin Heirloom Project. I'll be posting on that as well, too. Here's my brand spanking new level 1 Paladin with her Polished Spaulders of Valor, Polished Breastplate of Valor, and Bloodied Arcanite Reaper. Going to see how long it takes me to level her (in /played time) to 80.

The second thing I did was run the new 5-man heroic, and we followed that up with the normal version. One thing my guild likes to do is discover fights out and the mechanics therein as we progress through the dungeons and raids. This time was no exception, and though we wiped a few times in the heroic, we knocked out both versions very easily. No usable loot there. My overall DPS was not terrible, but there was tons of group AoE, so I'm thinking my numbers could have been a bit inflated.

Crusader's Coliseum 10-man Raid

Finally, I closed out the night by running the 10-man Coliseum. Gormok the Impaler took a couple tries, but we got him down. From my viewpoint as a dps paladin, we opened on Gormok and took him down as much as possible until his adds were jumping off his back onto us...literally onto us. The were piggy backing us until we killed them.

The strategy we used was once they jumped us, we broke of Gormok and killed them one by one. Theoretically, it probably would have been easier had we grouped them up and AoE'd in addition to our single target dps, but we did it as they came.

We used two tanks to switch off on Gormok. There was a debuff that got pretty ridiculous for the tanks if it got past 5 stacks. While we took down the adds, they were safely swapping aggro.
We burned him the rest of the way down after the adds were dead.

Then, out came Acidmaw and Dreadsacale. The first encounter is 3 beasts of Northrend until you clear the pahse. So, this was number 2, and we wiped...and wiped...and wiped. All I know is I saaw some poison clouds, and then death. Our tanks were just dropping in one or two hits, so it looks like we have a lot of work to do.

That said, there were 3 ret pallies in this group, which would normally have been considerably decent dps, but with the SoV nerf, it was taking FOREVER to get our 5 stacks up. My dps was more or less craptastic, and I'm pretty fumed. After I finish updating what I can on this site, I'm headed back to work on some numbers. I HATE being low on the dps charts.

Will update when I tweak everything up a bit. Elitist Jerks retribution paladin 3.2 forum is still coming out with info, so I'm watching it closely.

Khor