I spent an overabundant amount of time playing my paladin the last two days, especially yesterday. He had been neglected for some time as I’ve spread my love of my toons all over the place. But my paladin sorta is my favorite and I really enjoy pushing him the most. So I finally had the opportunity to complete all of Throne of Thunder LFR on him, winning a few items in the process. Last night, I spent far too much time getting valor capped for the week so I could both pick up a new 522 belt and allowing my other toons to get a much needed 50% Valor Point boost for the rest of the week.
But the best thing was being able to play with Yoni the past two days. Usually, I play by myself. I have a few friends that I occasionally play with but I tend to do all my LFRs on my own since everyone has their own schedules. I thought it was really cool being able to hang out with one of my Twitch TV heroes, even if it was for something like LFR. But that to me is the point of livestreaming where people can interact with their favorite streamers. Also, getting to help others via livestreaming is another big thing to me. I really like providing advice and getting advice from people to improve my game play and their’s.
For me personally, I thought it was interesting going into LFR with Yoni because she also plays a Retribution Paladin. So I thought it would be good to compare someone well versed in PVP with myself who has reasonable PVE gear. I kept my eyeball on Recount and was pretty amazed to see how she kept up or pretty much would beat me in the DPS meters at times in various encounters, even though she’s geared in pure PVP gear. On boss encounters, I tended to fare better just because I’m a little over the expertise and hit cap as well as not having stats like PVP Power on my gear. My only other advantage in LFR outside of gear is having a reasonable idea of most of the encounters. I’m certain if she had the same gear, she probably would beat me consistently because she probably knows the class better than me. Either way, it’s good to see how I can improve my game play by watching someone else and gives me some motivation to do better in the future.
Going back to my paladin, one project I had been working on is gearing up his protection side. Right now, the only thing I’m missing is a shield. But I managed to obtain all the other pieces such that he probably could tank most of the older LFRs reasonably well from a gear point of view. Not sure if I would fare all that well since I’m only familiar as a DPS with the encounters. But at least I have an option to play as a protection paladin in the future.
After all this I’m hoping to get back to leveling my mage. After reading the patch notes, it seems like the Golden Lotus dailies are disappearing. So I think to take advantage of things before patch 5.4 I’ll have to really push the rest of my toons to 90 (except my monk). I feel like I’m so behind on everything and lack focus. But it’s one of the consequences of managing so many toons.