Smaken wins!
Flame Leviathan 0 – Smaken 1
Razorscale 0 – Smaken 1
Ignan 0 – Smaken 1 (although he did cook me in his pot, but the rest of the raid finished him off just as I died so it’s sort of a tie)
XT-Deconstructor 0 – Smaken 1
Auriyia 0 – Smaken 1
The Iron Council 1 – Smaken 1 (we had a mishap where the raid ended up wiping, but we got it done the next attempt)
Hodir 0 – Smaken 1
Our guild has a plan that I might have mentioned before. The plan is to let the lower geared folks and alts run through the first bosses of Ulduar up to Hodir on one day. On another day, they have the high geared raiders take stabs at the Keepers on Hard Mode (we’ve already done Hodir). This effectively benefits the whole guild because our more hardcore raiders get to take cracks at the hard stuff and the folks that miss raids, are behing on their gear or who can actually still benefit from loot drops off the first bosses can actually advance their characters gear-wise.
It’s a great system.
I asked if I could bring Smaken into the raid instead of Lannister because Lannister really doesn’t have a lot of upgrades available to him in there and I wanted to see how I could do with Smaken in a raid. As you can see from above he did well and only died (on a boss) in one fight and it was right near the end.
Smaken had a gear score of around 3000ish, under that a bit I think. He was in all blues except for a green trinket, purple gloves and a purple gun (courtesy of Tim’s Engineering). For enchants he’s got a step down from the best – huge price drop – where I could find enchantments, a step down on the shoulder inscription (don’t have enough Hodir faction for the best one), no head item enchant and no enchant on the staff I am using. For the few items that have gem slots, I’m using what was affordable focusing on +Hit mainly.
Despite that I can manage about 1800 DPS on solo mobs when I cranked it out so I was a little unsure. For the raid I cranked out between 2100-2300 DPS (except where freaky buffs were in place). The raid leader was impressed with the DPS knowing full well my gear was pretty weak.
As a point of reference, Lannister has a gear score of about 4500ish and does about 3000-3500 DPS, sometimes higher on certain fights or when facing multiple targets.
For loot it works in this order; main character main specs roll, alts main spec roll, open roll for alts/mains second spec. I rolled on one ring I didn’t win and ended winning a roll for something else which I passed on when I saw a rogue wanted it (I believe it was leather so better for him).
I walked out with a new shoulder armor piece (I was using some crafted leather shoulders – blue), new gloves (leather), and two new bows. Yes, I said two. I was the only Hunter there, no one else used bows and they didn’t want to shard the second one because our guild bank is loaded with those things.
Overall, it was a lot of fun. There were several encounters I was worried about, Hodir being one of them but I survived!
After the raid I realized I was one Emblem of Conquest away from getting the top of the line neck item (as far as non-raid drops go) so I ran Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle with some of the big guys. I realized I had never been in there with Smaken so I picked up the two quests at the door. My DPS was much lower since I was using white ammo (instead of blue stuff) and my bow skill was only 365/400 when it started. Of course, I was also distracted running around picking up the quest items – hehe. No complaints, we mowed through everything there, I got the Emblems I needed, completed both quests and the Heroic Daily Dungeon quest and also scored a trinket off King Ymiron. Oh, and got a bunch of achievements too.
Now the temptation is burning to switch to Smaken as my main.
