I admit to having too many alts.   I reached the alt cap on World of Warcraft (I think it might have been 50).    I can’t wait for Cataclysm, although I’m going to have to delete some so that I can play in the new starting areas.    I love levelling.   I love starting areas.   I love trying out new classes.

So my warrior tank keeps getting neglected when I suddenly get an urge to play on some of my other alts.  It’s so confusing.  I thought it might be fun to practice playing my warlock so that I could give a go at playing a random dungeon at level 80.   I’d left her in Icecrown (what a miserable place that is), and set off to smash some skulls.   What a joy after playing my warrior!   The kills were so quick.   I felt uberpowerful.   I was all set to queue up as DPS on the dungeon finder.

Then I decided to have a look at recount.  Oh dear!   My damage was rubbish.   I had read that 900 was a terrible amount of damage at level 80, and yet I was only hitting that occasionally.  Usually I was about 800 and something.   Also my damage didn’t really kick in until the end, when my dots added up.    I could imagine that running through a dungeon with quick kills it would be even less than 800 – more like the 500 or so it is nearer the beginning of a fight.

Now, I suppose I don’t have very good gear.   It’s all quest rewards apart from my goggles (engineering), and I think my robe was bought from the Kaluak.    I thought that improving my gear might make a difference.   So off I fired up my Ultra-Safe Transporter to Gadgetzan and flew up to Darnassus to hit the Auction House.    I couldn’t see much that I wanted at a low price, but I bought a purple robe, and blue shoulders, and then some gems to put in them.   I also bought some glyphs, some spellpower thread for my trousers, and some spellpower elixir, then went back to test it all out.

It wasn’t much different with the glyphs and the new clothes.   I ended up switching back to the blue turtle robe over the purple gemmed robe, but whatever I did didn’t help much.  I fiddled around with the order of my spells, tried switching shadowbolts for drain life and so on.   Not much difference.  The one thing I haven’t tried yet is the spellpower elixir and food.

Much as I love the dungeon finder, I wish there was a way to queue up as a ‘noob’.   I could try queueing only for the lowest level dungeons where my lack of dps wouldn’t be felt so much, but I don’t really want to do a level 70 dungeon at level 80.   What I want, what I really, really want is to do a level 80 dungeon with a group of equally bad players in equally unimpressive gear.  It would be an interesting challenge, and I wouldn’t feel as if I was being boosted.

As an aside, back in the old days, I didn’t used to worry too much about DPS on my warlock.  I thought of the warlock as the crowd control class or the utility class or the bag of tricks class.    I didn’t do huge damage, but I could soulstone, healthstone, summon, seduce, buff, debuff, dot, fear and if needed, tank (with my voidwalker).   Being an engineer, I could also whip out a shrink ray, exploding sheep or mechanical harvest reaper when needed.   (The shrink ray was great!).   I didn’t really want to dps – I wanted to do all the other fun things.