Last night was a good night in that I managed to obtain three epic items. Two from LFR and one from Valor Points at the Dominance Offensive quartermaster. The main item that made me happy to receive was a long overdue belt. I had been stuck with a 450 belt for the longest time and was the last item I needed to replace before getting the epic achievement. I believe I might’ve won it from a re-roll, which was great considering that I had been fighting each area for a belt for a while now.
So right now, I’m sitting at a nice 485 ilvl. Immediately, I went to a training dummy to give the new gear a spin. One of the drops was the tier helmet, allowing me to have the full tier 14 set. This set is going to make a huge difference in battles as my Avenging Wrath’s cooldown is reduced by 65 seconds, which is quite a bit in the game. So adding a few gems and a belt buckle, I was able to hit around 80k dps on the training dummy, blowing all cooldowns that I could. Certainly, with food and flask as well as other buffs, I could easily exceed that amount.
It remains to be seen in testing this out in other fights. I still can do a few more LFR runs (Heart of Fear, Mogu’shan Vaults). Having completed the Golden Lotus recently and Cloud Serpent factions, I’ve cut down my daily route so that I can put more effort into other factions like the Dominance Offensive. However, it also implies that my Valor Points will go down slightly, since Golden Lotus does provide quite a few dailies. Not to mention that I periodically will skip some dailies if I find one or two that are annoying.
Where to go from here? I still have a few more slots that I can upgrade like my weapon, chest piece, trinket, belt and boots, four of which I’ll probably end up spending Valor Points. However, it feels really good knowing that I managed to get to this spot with the effort I’ve put in. Admittedly, I have been rather lucky every week in winning rolls. Since I have most of the gear as a retribution covered, I’ll probably just use LFR for Valor Points and armor tokens for my protection spec.
Also, I might start putting more effort into my druid and hunter. My druid has me a bit demotivated. After soloing the second half of MoP as a cat, I switched back to Balance since I wanted to play range. However, Boomkins are somewhat of a pain in the ass to play, which is why I started leveling my hunter. I mean, we’ll see how this all plays out. I’d really like to gear up my hunter since he was my original main and that I’ve been having more fun with him on this expansion than the previous one.