LFG Heroics

Well, it snowed for 24 hours straight and we got ~22" of soft powdery, Christmas joy. This also canceled the plans of my sister & bro-in-law moving most of their stuff into their apartment. Thus I had nothing to do all day Saturday and nowhere was I going. So, WoW.

So I spent the afternoon off & on and most of the evening playing WoW.
I recently created a new character to be my Auction House auctioneer and banker. That means I won't be leveling this character, her only purpose is to check the Auction House periodically for deals for reselling & such, and my other characters will mail her loot that can be sold. She thus holds on to the bulk of my gold and stays parked in the city.

Meanwhile I decided to make use of Patch 3.3's new Dungeon Finder in-game tool with my main Warlock. It allows you to queue for groups of your level across servers. Awesome.
I started with random WotLK regular dungeons since I never did most of them while leveling, was unsure if I was geared up enough to do the Heroic versions (they tend to be 30-50% harder -- ie, mobs have up to twice as much health and hit that much harder), and am out of practice for raiding. So I played several normal-mode 5-man instances. I got lucky and ran thru some of the new Ice Crown Citadel instances (3 runs total) and got 4 pieces of upgraded gear -- iLevel 219!
Then Stevo & I got on Skype and he convinced me to do Heroic versions and I did -- and rocked 'em! >8:-]
I was able to acquire 45 Emblems of Triumph throughout the evening and at the end of the night bought a sweet pair of pauldrons, major upgrade. I socketed 'em and threw an enchantment I bought with WG's Stone Keeper Shards on 'em.

Steve also introduced me to an add-on called GearScore. It shows me what my gear score (adding all the Item Levels of all of my gear), and adds the gear score to the tooltips so I can see everyone else's gear score. It also has a handy chart to show what instances/dungeons are around my level with that gear score! =D


I also learned some things about managing my aggro. That started when I was the overpowering 'lock in Halls of Lightning normal mode with a group of level 78-79ers. If I pulled aggro off the tank on bosses, we'd wipe. And we did. I had to DPS sslloowwllyy to avoid that.
Then Stevo tanked an instance just to mess around (it was late at night) and I hadn't updated my Recount add-on (which shows how much damage I'm putting out) so I only had Omen Threat Meter add-on to determine "how well I'm doing". I reasoned that if I'm pulling aggro off Steve that I must be putting out quite a bit. ;P He confirmed: 2700 DPS on one of the bosses. That's a new high for me. >8:-]