What cataclysm brought was at least new. Whether it was good or bad is purely subjective, but I doubt Blizzard is dumb to produce something subpar. Also, it just proves, once more, that the criers will get more attention than the content or happy ones. People keep saying that DPS has gone down and all I can do is just laugh and ignore them. At the early days I used a Recount battle where dps in heroic five mans was approximating 10k dps and that would abruptly seize all such comments, but not for long, someone else would start it up again and again and I just gave up trying.

This DPS increase however came at a price. My main is a paladin tank and up until the patch I was a competent one. I kept my threat up, strays were picked up almost immediately and I was finally almost perfect in using hands for threat reduction or protection. As long as I was alive no five man heroic wiped and I never caused a raid wipe. I was happy.

Now DPS is all too easy to pull aggro from me. After a lot of research and dummy testing and some friends I pulled in dungeons for testing (thanks guys) I reached my pinnacle of threat generation for this patch and it still is not “quite” there. Furthermore, mobs hit now… a lot. It used to be that I was topped up; uncrittable (543 def), unhittable(103.41 with holy shield), hit capped (8.1% which I was quite happy with) AND exp soft capped (26 exp with the glyphed seal). Now the unhittable part is gone and paladin tanks actually need 55 exp at least for proper threat generation. After a lot of reforging I managed to reach 56 exp, but total avoidance is only 74% (with holy shield).

After a few more days I saw that my threat was sufficient 95% of the time (the other 5% is actually DPS classes on trash mobs that hit other target than the one I’m hitting, although that was not a problem before and hence DPS classes did not “train” themselves to do that – a skill that Naxx trained DPS classes knew), and healers could keep up with my lessened avoidance stats.

So if everything is almost fine, why don’t I like it? Because everything feels incomplete. We are playing a game that uses rules for a game that does not exist yet, aka we are playing WotLK with the rule set of Cata which doesn’t quite work. When items that require level 85 to equip become available, we will see that reforging “works” better, masteries are actually something worth investing in (as opposed to now that I have reforged as many items as I could to reach exp 55 which has left me no room for masteries because the only thing left to trade off is dodge and parry and doing that would lead to less avoidance), and enchants and gems with mastery rating will become available. Reading up on new gems show stats like +80str for JC only gems, a huge increase from now. Remember how it felt when you were jumping gear between expansions? That will be the feeling once more.

So until Cata is actually launched we will have to do our best with new rules that are not supported in WotLK’s itemization rules.