I had a fun experience when I was trying to valor cap on my paladin. I figured that while I required a few hundred valor points to cap, I might as well do some of the older LFRs since they are pretty easy these days. Fortunately, they’re still being run by people looking to gear up or perhaps, like myself, valor cap. I totally destroyed Mogu’shan Vaults part 1, only getting some level of competition in DPS against a slightly lesser geared monk and death knight. But part 2 was far more interesting for me.
Originally, I was thinking about just running Terrace of Endless Spring to get some of my remaining valor points. Terrace of Endless Spring is still a pretty fun LFR to run, as long as your group is willing to do something. Mogu’shan Vaults still has some mechanics that can confound groups. But for myself the one thing I ran it is the shield that drops off the first boss, since I never was able to get it the entire time. I figured that it might be a good opportunity to see if I could finally obtain the elusive shield.
Of course, we got to a pretty fast start in going after the first boss. The first boss has that nasty cleave mechanic where people need to stack up to share damage. My thought the entire time was to nuke him down as fast as possible. Right now, with my paladin sitting at a nice 14k haste, I was hitting the first guy endlessly and probably took a minute or two to bring him down. After that the only guy I really had to worry about was the one that caused insanity. Despite the fact that you need to use some AoE to clear the madness debuff he puts on the group, I did something different in just tunneling him since I was sure that my AoEs would probably insta-kill most people in the raid. Either way, the first boss (or 4 bosses rather) were nuked down pretty fast with only a few deaths. Best of all, I finally got my shield! (w00t!)
As we approached Elegon, someone mentioned how incredible my paladin’s DPS was. Quite honestly, my DPS isn’t that spectacular compared to other players in the world. But for an LFR Mogu’shan Vaults run, I pretty much was carrying the group. I noticed that I was doing roughly 20% of the DPS. I didn’t mind because I was just enjoying myself the entire time. So I was eager to see how Elegon would fare. Naturally, people died pretty fast to the disappearing floor mechanic, including the tank. I figured I might end up tanking a portion of it just because my DPS was too high and could easily pull threat off the other tanks. But the nice thing is that my armor is pretty high and I have quite a few defensive cooldowns that I could use in case of emergency. The second time the orbs popped out, we managed to go through 3 groups as I tried to nuke down as many as possible. But we were pretty much destroying Elegon. It didn’t take long to get him down and when I looked up, once again I hit 20% of the raid’s DPS, doing around 200k for the fight. Needless to say, I was pretty damn happy thus far.
Now, came the fight that often times would make me have a DPS loss, which is Will of the Emperor. When I originally did this boss, I typically would stay on the adds because I could not for the life of me handle the avoidance mechanic. Of course, as I played more of my melee toons on this boss, I improved vastly. Part of it was a desire to master the mechanic since I had so many issues initially.
Once again, when the twin bosses came out, I went straight for the adds. However, there was a horrible problem: the tanks really had no clue how to handle the fight. I was doing my best to get down as many adds as possible. But eventually one of the tanks died. So I knew what I had to do: I had to tank the boss. Could I do it as a retribution paladin? Sure, my ilvl is at 541 but would that be enough to take care of this encounter?
Surprisingly, I managed to hold aggro, keep myself up with the help of some of the smart healers and did the mechanics properly, doing 3-4 of the big swings. At a certain point, I think the raid noticed that I was soloing the encounter to a degree. I kept aggro, had the boss in the right spot, avoided their devastating arcs, took very little damage, healed myself at the right times, kept my defensive cooldowns going and was still top DPS. One guy complimented me in calling my paladin “Chuck Norris’ son.” Another person was like, “I don’t know what’s sadder. The paladin is taking less damage than the tanks and is near 250 million damage on the encounter.”
I have to say it was glorious. I never said anything except that I had fun and lol’d at someone complimenting me on my DPS. But internally I was having an orgasm. I sucked so badly at the start of this expansion and struggled to get better the entire time. It felt like this encounter was almost full circle of the growth of Girafetoe, the Retribution Paladin. I didn’t need to brag or anything because people were saying things for me. I was too happy and wanted my actions to speak for me. One guy even mentioned in passing how he was happy to see my DPS so high because his main was a retribution paladin as well.
But to me what this is about is that you don’t have to rip on other people to shove your ego down others’ throats. Instead, you can just act and do things to prove whenever possible that you’re capable and be an inspiration. I know people rip on LFR and the people inside of LFR all the time. But it’s because of how you have negativity breeding itself. Instead, I wanted to just go in, have a good time and see what I could do. The fact that I could carry the encounter and hopefully impress some people will inspire others to do their best as well. I’m not the best player but if I’m giving the ball, I’m going to try running with it as fast and hard as possible.
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