2500 Gear Score Tank Downs ICC Lower Spire

[Mercurio]

So I dinged 80 on a new team on Friday and thought about the long grind that was ahead of me to get them geared up.

Lots of heroics to gather enough emblems of triumph to be able to...
do normal ICC 5-mans to collect some ilvl 219 gear to...
do heroics faster and build up enough gear and rep for head enchants to be able to...
do heroic ICC 5-mans for a few weeks to get some ilvl 232 gear to be able to...
get into groups every week for VoA10 and VoA25 and maybe start into ICC10

Made me tired just thinking about it. So instead, I just threw them into a couple of my solo ICC10 teams that I run each week to see what would happen.

I didn't buy or craft anything for the two mages, who did a pitiful 2100 DPS and had hit ratings of about 100. Of course, that was before they died, which happened very quickly when faced with any kind of AOE damage. If they survived more than 2 minutes it didn't matter b/c they were OOM. But who cares? They are just DPS - my other DPS toons made up for them and I was successful.

My two healers were a bit more critical, but I figured I'd throw two of them at everything by 3-healing instead of 2-healing on another team. They were able to survive AOE damage a bit better as the sources of AOE healing.

But my poor 2500 gear score tank! I did actually make her an ilvl 200 shield to get her to such a lofty gear score (LOL), and she entered ICC with a bit less than 21000 hit points. I was shocked that I was able to one-shot Marrowgar and Lady. I wiped about four times on Gunship before getting it down, then one-shotted Saurfang. It was quite humorous to see her health pinging from 10% to 100% over and over, but I got through it.

I really wouldn't have thought it possible, but with a 25% buff in ICC, even a so-so player with a tank wearing one purple, 3 blues, and the rest greens can succeed.

It is funny how the raiding progression ladder Blizzard created for WotLK has gotten compressed towards the end of the expansion (of course, help from eight "friends" to carry newbie toons through ICC doesn't hurt either).