They all fall down

I’ve been levelling a rogue lately, when I’m not being required to tank raids for my guild. Initially I figured I’d go with Subtlety spec since it seemed to be the most suited to levelling due to lots of up-front burst damage; indeed, it’s quite nice being able to just Ambush-Eviscerate and have most regular mobs die there and then.

But. There was talk in the guild of forming an arena team or a rated battleground group, and, based entirely on hearsay, I’m under the impression that when PvPering, one should spec one’s rogue Subtlety.

Thus, I bought a secondary spec, and made it Assassination, because, um, Combat sounds boring? I don’t really know. So what if only Combat gets to use weapons that aren’t daggers too? Daggers are where it’s at, man. Yes. So little Daera is Assassination, and it’s quite fun too, especially now that she has the talent that makes Slice and Dice auto-refresh.

Onward to The Point: as I write this, she’s level 75 (Tricks of the Trade, woo!), and last night I got Violet Hold as a random dungeon. Now, I only started playing World of Warcraft about a week before Wrath of the Lich King came out, so I’m hardly a grizzled veteran. I do, however, distinctly remember doing Naxxramas as a guild, and having to really push the damage on Patchwerk because we all needed to be at around 1,500 DPS lest he reach Enrage. Some people were struggling to do that, at level 80, and only some of them were rubbish players.

Last night, though! Did Blizzard really change the damage output so much when the Great Stats Overhaul of 4.0 arrived, or is it normal for a partially-heirloomed rogue to do 3,400 DPS at level 75? OK, sure, I used Vendetta and the fight was over before that even ran out, but still, really? We got the ethereal dude who does the balls of light thing, and he died before his first orb got anywhere near us. Must have been down in like 15 seconds.

This isn’t fun, especially not for classes that take a while to get going, like shadow priests. Having completely trivial boss fights means they might as well not even be there, and it means new players are not prepared for raids or Cataclysm dungeons.

It’s quite a long time since I levelled my death knight up through those dungeons, but I really hope the bosses there last longer than 30 seconds each. I have a strong suspicion they will, in part just because most heirloom gear doesn’t scale past 80, so there will be fewer vastly over-powered players running around. I want to use the dungeon bosses as practice for when I get to 85 and can start raiding with the rogue, meaning I want to practice on fights that last a good couple of minutes at least (there’s only so much you can do on a training dummy).