Back to the task at hand!

Had a Kara run last night. While our guild has struggled with getting ready to staff a full 25-man raid and thus haven't tried Gruul's yet, we're damn near finished with Kara. Our DPS has been off and on, but last night it was most certainly on.

A few months ago I specced out of Retribution and into Holy to allow me to join a semi-serious 5v5 and start racking up points. I was stuck rolling in mostly blues and not particularly looking forward to Kara gear, as the only piece of DPS plate was off Nightbane, and I'd be stuck rolling against hunters for their mail gear, which is never fun. I had a long-term plan of getting all 3 PvP non-set epics, 3/5 Arena 2 gear and 2/5 Tier 4 to flesh out a full set of epics, and I planned on having this take awhile.

And then Despair dropped, rapidly accelerating the plans. I respecced a couple of weeks ago, and I got my 2nd piece of Arena 2 gear and my final non-set epic this week. I swapped out the planned T4 helm with what I could get now, and was better anyways - the engineering goggles - and put together a pretty solid DPS set - 1550 AP, 25.5% crit unbuffed or so, along with more hit rating than necessary (stocking up for a 2.3 re-spec). So I'm nearly finished with my gear and this was the first week to really test out my gear set-up.

Holy cow.

I put out nearly 2 million damage from Attumen through Shade, and stayed at the top of the charts from beginning to end, as well as leading our best DPS to date: we absolutely blew through everything. Curator went down just after the second evocate without a single moment with more than one flare out, Shade down to <30% before poly'ing. In about 4 hours, we had the place nearly clean. Another hour and we'd have had Illhoof and Prince out for the count as well, I'm sure.

So this stellar run put thoughts in my head of what was to come - specifically, what my damage will look like in 2.3. They still haven't brought up threat issues, so I don't know how that will turn out, but everything else promises to seriously increase my damage. Ignoring the threat cap, which I came damn near hitting a few times last night and did in fact hit on a fair amount of trash, I expect another 100 dps increase from the patch, between the 3% to crit and the 6 second Crusader Strike. Throwing out numbers, fully raid-buffed I start hitting between 1000-1500 on Crusader Strikes, good for 100-150 dps (not including crits). Kick it down to 6 seconds, and suddenly it goes up to 160-250 dps. If I'm rolling with 28% crit, this could be a massive, massive increase.

We use a lot of off-specs, so our DPS isn't as amazing as some raids, but even so we put it out tonight, and a Ret Pally was able to lead the way. The changes in 2.3 offer a lot more promising damage, and I expect that I can start consistently challenging my buddy Caylith and his crazy fire mage on the charts. Things are definitely looking up for Retribution.