Wailing Caver... huh?

Continued with the dungeon runs last night - hit the Wailing Caverns, coming in as a replacement tank just before the final boss. Quick xp, a bit of gold, and of course, another blue item (cloak, this time) to vendor.

Having done RFC and WC, I really wanted to take Aeven into the Deadmines. So I queued up again for that specific instance as a tank/dps, and waited... and waited... and waited. It was sheer agony! I was beginning to despair! It took me almost five whole minutes to get into a group!

Yah. Tanks are spoiled rotten.

Aside from an inadvertent pull of Captain Greenskin that caused a wipe, it was a nice run. At level 17, I was at least 3-4 levels junior to the next lowest level person in the party, and I still managed to hold aggro pretty decently. At least, when the 24th level rogue wasn't making with the stabbity stabbity too quickly.

As a result, I'm starting to rethink my decision to go retribution. As time goes on, I'm not sure that I'll be able to keep my dps up at a level that's competitive with similarly leveled characters. Running RFC, a whopping 26 dps isn't all that different from 30 dps. Continue the trend, though, and at some point I'll be doing 10% or even 20% less damage per second than my dungeon delving compadres. At that point, I think I'll have to switch over to tanking (or maybe healing) if I really want to continue running dungeons. If that's the case, I might as well start looking at it now.

I swear that the fact that tanks get near instant queue times has absolutely nothing to do with this decision. Really! And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Tanaris to sell you...

In completely unrelated news, I realize I missed out on a major point in Aeven's leveling: getting her first glyphs at level 15. Not a big deal, I thought. I hit the AH and picked up a Glyph of Judgement and a Glyph of Blessing of Might, then dropped two unspent talent points into Improved Blessing of Might. Popped back to Westfall to do a quest or two and... wow. Just wow.

The critters here were hardly challenging prior to those changes, but now they were falling over like... well, like things that had just had a quivering, snarling white hot ball of Dwarven terror smack them over the head with a heavy piece of metal attached to the end of a long lever arm. Quickly is the word that I think I'm looking for here. Yowza. It's interesting to see just how much effect talents and glyphs have - at least at this level, it seems like they're more signifiant than the minor bonuses from gear. Good news for me - let's see how long that will remain the case, though.