As planned, I respecced to the recommended talents for Beast Mastery, redid my keybindings for the new priorities, and spent all the Valor I had on the upgrades recommended by Ask Mr. Robot. AMR is great, well worth the ~$10 for a yearly subscription. Without it I would have probably upgraded the wrong stuff, and definitely defaulted to higher iLvl gear when something lower might be more beneficial. The ability to export and import gear lists using their add-on is invaluable.

New rotation and gear in hand I dutifully queued for some Cataclysm Timewalking. Which was probably unfortunate for the first couple of groups as I was making all kinds of muscle memory mistakes. But I pretty quickly settled into it - there was a definite improvement in the key mapping, making things more obvious and faster to reach. Timewalking doesn’t give a good idea of DPS output so I queued for all the LFR wings, hoping to also pick up the final Tomes.

The good news was there was a definite improvement in damage output - phew! From being mid list I was steady in the top 5, which has the added bonus of knowing the healers will pay you a little more attention. Speaking of, I think anyone who heals or tanks LFR is a saint. So many people on follow, or just standing in the fire, dropping things at the tanks feet, pulling bosses early, etc. Chaos!

In any case, it’s pleasing when you set to work on improving something and there is a clear result. Sure it was only LFR, but the improvements were pretty obvious. Added bonus: Barrage is much more fun than Glaive Toss. Serendipitously, all four remaining tomes dropped after only running 6 bosses, including 3 for 3 on the last section. So I’m the proud owner of the Legendary Ring, at a similar expansion stage to when I got the MoP cloak. Maybe for Legion I’ll be ahead of the curve instead of waaaay behind!