(note, I wrote this yesterday, but for some reason wordpress and blogspot sites were all blocked on my interwebs).
It's the Day After The Release of patch 3.3.3, which was a 'minor' patch.
So, how do we feel about it?
As I suggested it might be, it's looking like a big boon to raiding DKs!
Last night, our raid ran ICC25 through Blood Queen Lanathel and did the weekly raid and VOA. We had the infusion of a couple more ranged dps, allowing us to better arrange our comp to the fights.
We one-shot all the bosses (except for BQL when on the first attempt our first bitee d/c'd), but wiped on trash. A little lack of focus, but I still left the night both very happy and optimistic going forward.
Reasons:
1) Mangle lasting one minute. We didn't really have a 'mangle bot' as our kitty struggled to keep it up and dps, letting it drop frequently prior to 3.3.3. With the change, we had it the whole fight.
2) Icy Talons. We'd lost our enhancement shaman a few weeks back, and weren't getting the haste buff. Now we are.
I ran unholy last night (pre 3.3.3 spec as I didn't have time to change it), and as far as I can tell, unholy really hasn't been buffed. I did benefit from the above changes however, and it showed in our WOL parse.
In fact, it was surprising how well we did!
Granted, World Of Logs only ranks parses that guilds post, we have the (fairly recent) 5% buff, and many/most of the top guilds are exclusively in heroic now, but we had raiders ranked in the top 200 worldwide for their class over 20 times. Our Boomkin was #4 on Koralon, our Arms Warrior was 6th and 8th on Rotface and Festergut, and I was 9th and 53rd on Festergut and Rotface, respectively.
That 'perfect storm' of hitting the rotation/priority spot on, good group comp, overall high raid dps, and solid gear came together to deliver VERY solid and pleasing results.
Our somewhat undergeared frost DK did see a big improvement in his performance as well.
I did some live dummy-testing (I know, I know, dummies suck) of frost main spec/unholy subspec with my unholy gear and a fast OH almost matched my unholy dps output. Very promising. I think I'll hold off trying this in a full raid until I have a decent offhand weapon, though.
Now, if we can only put it together on Lich King (normal), we can join the heroic cool kids club. :)
All in all, I'm pleased with what I've seen from 3.3.3, and I hope going forward DKs of all specs will find success in Icecrown and beyond!
