Pet Project Time

Pet project: I want enough primordial saronite to last me a lifetime – or at least finish the quest for the legendary I’ll never use.

See, the problem is lately that I am not entirely sure what to do. I am still trying to collect my 100 mounts – which means another 45 days of icecrown dailies. I am still gearing up my tanking warrior of main-ness by doing the one daily heroic for emblems of frost.

However apart from that – and the weekly raid – there is not much to keep me occupied at the moment. So of course the alting set in. As always late into an expansion (err.. or into the original game, but that makes the sentence so much more complicated).

Now I’m in the lucky position of having several level 80 alts. A druid tank, a deathknight tank/dps, a warlock tank/healer! (err.. no wait) and a shaman dps. All of them are currently trying to do the daily heroic and the weekly raid. In theory, that means I get my first primordial saronite after 9 days – and then some more in the future (and frankly the math is too complicated - and I might miss days - for longer predictions).

The amusing thing is that I did not run into any of the bigger problems posted by others yet. I have not yet had completely ridiculously overpowered dps, I have not had tanks that were out of gear level with the rest of the group (on either end) and I have not run into a healer who could not keep my “main” alive in a normal heroic yet.

So far, I have to say, my gear level was matched appropriately to the rest. Allegedly this is something Blizzard planned on. Of course, there might be a recursive effect here: If I queue as a tank straight away and play with the first group that is assigned to me – and all of them got into the same group at the beginning – then the gear matching probably works well. If the previous tank dropped out and the rest of the group got assigned to the front of the queue, it might all go to bits instead.

To provide some data for my cunning theory:

My warrior tank usually is fitted with dps in approximately iLevel 232+ gear. Their damage usually hovers around the 3k to 6k marks – depending on the amount of AoE and the attention they pay.

My druid tank usually is fit in with the group doing around 2k to 3k damage. They all fit well, no one complains and there definitely is no “Lol you n00b” stuff going on.

My warlock and shaman end up in the “just around 2k” group. Their tanks are usually closer to 30k health and sometimes people openly admit to not having done fights before. People still roll on blue and epic drops in heroics. In the weekly raid I occasionally get a snide “Great gear” comment, but oh well …

I have to say, I’m quite happy with the matchmaking of WoW. Come to think of it – this is where I met my wife, too.  Either than, or I just continue to be lucky :p

P.S. Oh final note: “Interesting gear – but no worries, this is only Naxx, you’ll be fine” was a comment I got in the weekly raid last night. If you have a look at my shamans gear you’ll see that the comment was completely fair. However, the general niceness of “you’ll be fine” was something that only happened to me once. Must have been roleplayers - they are different people after all.