In this episode, we set out to travel back in time to bring some humpback whales, er, uhm, wait, wrong IV.

We got an early start on this raid last night, but it was a bad sign when the first three sets dropped no chest at all. We were cleaning house and having a good run but no loot. Finally some loot started to drop and we got a few masters and fabled items (nothing fantastic, but some decent stuff). Then a fairly rare Devastation Master I dropped and our warlock went nuts. This is an AE spell that does 650-800 damage to the entire encounter four times (first cast plus three waves, IIRC). We spent several hours teasing him that we were going to sell it but finally gave it to him.

And then he proceeded to die even more due to pulling aggro. :)

We had the DPS calculator running last night and our monk was doing some insane amounts of damage during fights, far ahead of other melee. I was never near the top of the list, although I did get close to it during a fight where we spent most of the time from a distance and I used all ranged combat arts/bow/spells/dots.

I’ve also heard from some folks in beta that the power regen with the combat changes is going to be group-based for enchanters. This makes them similar to bards and it is likely a group will have a bard or a chanter in the group for power regen, plus they no longer stack. If that is the case, they better seriously increase the amount of power our song regens as it is weak in its present form. We finished out the raid last night without any chanters and power consumption was a serious problem with many folks going OOP quickly. With dirge/troubador being the major helper in MT groups, that could get interesting. Of course, I’ve heard that defense doesn’t do squat, so that’s going to be a change as well.

So much to get used to, it’s going to be an interesting first few weeks after the DoF launch.