The secret of my success

I finally completed my frozen shadoweave set this week, gemming up with cheap spell hit and damage gems and passing the +500 shadow damage mark. I feel so much more confident about running dps in instances now. It's not without its drawbacks though. With vampiric touch up, I often take agro off the tank. If I fade, I risk dumping agro on the healer, so it's better for the group if I take the hits. This means I tend to die a lot more than the others. As long as we accomplish the task I don't mind, but it's tough on repair bills and it slows down progress. As my gear improves it will only get worse, so I think now is the time to investigate threat metres. More on them at a later date.

In the meantime, I took my shiny new armour for a test drive in Shadow Labyrinth with some guild mates. We've been trying to crack it for ages for the Karazhan key fragment. Until this run, I hadn't even been past the second boss. It was as tough as I remembered it, and we struggled a few times on some of the bigger pulls. In the end, we resorted to a suicide strategy I spotted on wowwiki. I take off my gear and mind control one of the mobs -- preferably a healer or caster. The other mobs quickly burn it down and turn on me. I am squashed instantly, but if the rest of the group is far enough away the angry mobs will reset, leaving us with one less target to deal with. If I take off my gear first, I suffer no durability loss. We employed this strategy to great effect in the canteen, before Blackheart the Inciter. It's very tedious having to switch costumes, eat and rebuff every five minutes, but on the other hand, it's preferable to wiping. If you lack the crowd control to deal effectively with large pulls, it's a steady and reliable strategy. And it gives your team makes a laugh to see you in your undies.

We made some mistakes as we progressed through the instance, but always learnt from them and moved forward. Even the third boss only took two attempts. The result was that, slowly, steadily, we cleared the instance and walked away one step closer to Kara. Hooraah for suicide and a great bunch of guildies.