Thoughts on Survival

Against my better judgement, I respecced Survival for our guild's 10man Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad kills tonight. One of the new healers who'd just dinged - a CoH priest - was complaining of going oom halfway through the fight because we didn't have a Replenishment class. So I decided to take a dive into the deep end and throw dps out the window while I did so.

So I dragged my ass down to IF, respecced, and banged on the Heroic Training Dummy for a while, figuring out a good rotation. Right after that, I got asked on a heroic Halls of Lightning run, where I was mildly surprised by the dps output it was doing, especially on boss fights. (Hello, 10k Kill Shot crit!) Funny story... we actually killed Loken 5 minutes before the instance reset and I didn't manage to loot my badges, Stone Keeper's Shards or the quest item... boo!

Anyway, I rock up to Sapph, and we down him on the first try. I'd read some surv hunter reports that they'd run up to the boss and drop an Explosive Trap on their heads to proc Lock and Load. While it's not one of the most dignified things to be seen doing, especially on Sapph, it does result in a chain of Explosive Shots, and hey, more crits mean more uptime on Replenishment, right? Absolutely!

I even have a WWS report! It's my first time actually seeing one of these things in action, so bear with me if I'm a bit excited. According to WWS, my Replenishment buff caused our healers to gain an average of 14k mana. It's not stellar as far as mana replenishment goes, but I guess it's not bad? Forgive me if I have no clue how this works for healers...

I came 4th on damage, and 6th on dps for that fight. Not too shabby for damage, but a little lackluster for dps... but I was expecting that.

On to Kel'Thuzad. We wiped the first time due to an unlucky number of mana explosions on one of our druid healers, and an unlucky ice block on the add tank right before the adds came up, but we did get him down to 10%.

Anyways, second attempt went better. Here's the report for those interested. On this fight, Replenishment restored about 15k of healers' mana. I also switched aspects 5 times on the fight, something which is also interesting. As with Sapph, I was periodically running up to KT and dropping a trap. It was actually pretty amusing to hear our DK tank - who is formerly a hunter - ask if he should be doing anything, because he thought it was something the boss did.

Came 3rd on damage and 4th on dps, slightly better than Sapphiron. (It's the not having to move out of blizzards... I swear)

I wasn't feeling on top at the end of the raid, but after our resto druid posted the WWS reports and told me that Replenishment was actually helpful to him on those fights, I kinda feel better now. It is nice to actually have some utility other than just bring the huge numbers in, and I think I will be respeccing for guild 10s to Survival from now on. :)

Special thanks to the guild's resident grumpy resto druid for posting that WWS report!