f13.net

Well, since there seems to be a lot of "how do I spec" or "how do I DEEPS HARDS?" questions floating around in other threads, I'd though it might be prudent to stick all of that somewhere.  Yes, I'm ripping off EJ.

So, if you have a class, game mechanic, or general WOW question that doesn't pertain to a particular topic, try to post it in here.  This will also help those of us that are paralyzed with posting indecision as to what thread to derail with our non-pertinent questions.  

Let your noob flag fly.

For PvP, what point in gearing is going with Survival > Marks.  I find that if I give up a little utility, that my ability to drop a target fast seems to increase while playing Marks.  It could just be that I'm not particularly familiar with the finer points of survival and may need to consider a better rotation. 


I'm considering resubbing, but have been disappointed with the play of my hunter in pvp.  Warriors, Paladins, and rogues really take the fun out of the pvp game.

1. Anything not in full pvp purples at this point is rogue candy.
2. Survival is a higher DPS spec than marks last time I checked (patch 3.2, I think).

If your goal is PvP, then Survival is the way to go.  You have much better Burst, and more instants to fire off on the move.  The Survival flavor talents, like Scatter Shot, Deflection, and Entrapment, are also much better suited to PvP.  I think Marksman is still better pure DPS standing still, but it isn't really the optimal PvP spec as its power relies heavily on Steady Shot that can't be used when moving.

As far as gear goes, as was mentioned, you need pretty good PvP specific gear to live very long no matter what spec.  Ofc, it's much less painful in battlegrounds.  But luckily, with the latest patch, PvP gear is pretty easily had.

I guess I wanted more specifics.  I'll check elitestjerks.  I want a pure dps comparison using the common marksman vs survival rotation.   When I'm in WG, I dont' need to be on the move as I'm often grouped with a healer and can do nothing but concentrate on using dps to drop targets.  In BG's, I'm often solo and I can see how survival spec would benefit play for utility, but can't imagine how I'd ever match my marks level of damage (especially since I'm near the to-hit cap).   My gear is all pvp purples (which is why I never commented nor asked about gear) and I still have a tough time with warriors, paladins, and rogues.  My guess is that this is all about class balance.  Even with a properly glyphed survival toon, I doubt that I'd ever beat a well-played warrior, paladin, or rogue 1v1.  I can kill paladins solo in the bg's, but it takes me a year to whittle through 2 full health bars and I have to kite them all over the map while draining their mana. 

Thanks for taking the time you two.  I should have read the thread heading and kept this to a more fundamental questioning level. 

What ilvl purples?  The 213 vs. 232 can make a big difference.  Not that gear solely makes up for it, some classes are just plain hard to kill (the ones you specifically bring up ;-) ).

Survival should theoretically be stronger against plate since it has a lot of non-physical damage between explosive shot and black arrow, no?

It' sa mix of honor + WG gear, so I'd assume 213 since I never do arena.   I think the game just has some serious class balance issues when pvp is considered and I need to just be ok with that.  The pvp is fun, but can sometimes be frustrating when I need to play perfectly to win while other classes just faceroll to victory. 

If you're willing to do the random instance thing, you can get furious gear with badges now.

I didn't know that.  Thanks.

Question :

1) The furious gear bought with emblems do not have rating requirement, right?

2) Can honor buy furious gear? Does it need Arena points? Does it need ratings?

1) correct, no rating reqs
2) honor + AP I think, with deadly for just honor alone. That version I think still has a (low) arena rating requirement.

EDIT: If S8 ever starts, then furious will probably go to just honor, relentless will be honor + AP, and the new set will I believe be called wrathful.

Nebu:

EJ is where I'm getting the DPS comparison.  Hunter simulationcraft thread.  Survival is better for stand up and punch holes in things by a small margin in T9+ gear.  So you should do more damage in an early season pvp set as marks, but I doubt it would be significant.  Anecdotally, my brother claims his hunter performs better single target as survival while instancing and he's in ~ iLevel 219 purples.  This might indeed be an issue with the way you do your rotations, but don't respec if you can't learn it, obviously.

You can go past the hit cap for pvp'ing.  A number of specs (AFAIK: ret paladin, sub rogue, frost mage) can talent extra chance to be missed, some of these will appear regularly, some are for more esoteric specs.  Anything between 5% and 10% +hit is still effective to some degree in pvp.

For those specific classes: do not viper sting ret paladins (the drain was nerfed); do use stoneform to fuck up rogues and warrior rotations (Hunger for Blood and Taste for Blood require a bleed, rogue poison damage is a large part of their DPS); and tranq shot off everything that isn't easily/cheaply reapplied (Blessings, Hand of Freedom).

Are crabs still the pvp pet of choice?

1. No, no rating requirement on the emblem bought gear.

Fakeedit: beaten

What's the best way to gear up a freshly minted level 80?  Run heroics to gear for normal ToC and ICC 5 mans? Then heroics for badges?

Random heroics.  Run as many as you possibly can, get the gear from them that is an upgrade, get the upgrades from badges once you have enough (30 or 50 for the T9 stuff).  If you can get a good group of people chain running and they are willing to have you, even better!

BOO. BOOO BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. 

1. Buy BoE blues or epics if you can afford them.  If you're a melee, try to get a decent weapon.
2. Get easy faction and buy some faction gear.  If you've leveled up via questing, most of this should be available. 
3. Do some WG and get some easy gear there.
4. Look at your talents.  Get out of your leveling spec. If you do some sort of 71/0/0, I will kill you through the internet.
5. AFTER THAT go hit up random heroics or the purple rain 5 man instances. 

This is really only for DPS.  If you're a healer or tank, ugg, good luck man.  Probably a bit easier if you're a healer. 

Just don't be THAT guy (more like "those guys" nowadays).

If you're a chain pulling tank or healer with minimal downtime you can manage ~21+ badges an hour depending on what instances you get, and how fast you get past the queue (my server tanks queue and are in instantly).  At that rate you could be 4/5 T9 + non-set Triumph peace in a half a day /played.  The hard part is getting to where you can do instances this way, which has been solved quite handily by normal instances which drop iLevel 200 and 219 epics..

Every class has a DPS spec they can use while gearing up for a tank or healer role.  The gear level of your average random heroic group makes all the non-ICC heroics three/four manable.  Tanking or healing while starting from green/blue quest shit is asking for grief though.  If you are worried about being a drain or hit a couple of people doing the same thing just bail.  The group will re-queue when you leave and DPS slots get filled almost instantly.

Ack no! If you're a healer you will need to get as good gear as you possibly can before entering the random heroics. They go at insane speed now and keeping up with the tanks is nigh on impossible without a fuckton of mp5, a huge mana pool and some seriously big numbers coming out of your healing buttons.

Speaking of which how do I make a macro that when I press it marks me with a raid icon (a rarely used one like the pink diamond or something) and says in party chat "Pink diamond is your healer, please don't run off ahead of me if you want to be healed"?

 :yahoo:

Don't listen to him.  Be that guy.  Honestly, if you can do 2k dps in the blues you came in on, you're fine in pretty much any heroic.  Anyone who berates you in your instance is just being a dick.  If you're a tank and you know how to pull, then gem all stam after defense cap, and keep queuing because you're the bottleneck.  People aren't going to boot you unless you super-suck.  If you're a healer, make sure you tell the tank to watch your mana because your gear is balls.  If you're a 2k dps monkey in blues, everybody's gotta start somewhere.  A couple people will probably throw a fit.  They'll get over it somehow, and you can laugh and their nerdrage in the privacy of your own home.

It's seriously never been this easy to gear out a dude.  I'm like leveling up everything I can think of just for the sweet purple euphoria.

I'm not sure I agree with gear requirements for healers either, though you DO need to get lucky with a geared tank. For example, my drood is in full 'welfare' gear (got all of my loot from badges + the new heroics, who needs raids anyway?  :why_so_serious:) and in some heroics I barely need a healer at all; for the rest, I just innervate the healer when it's up and keep pulling. You need decent gear to heal the new heroics, but you won't be able to enter those while you're still in greens. And heck, even heroic halls of reflection (hardest instance atm) is easy as long as at least the tank, healer and one dps have good gear and the rest of the group can follow directions; I had a flawless H-HOR run the other day with a 4k dps ret pally, me doing 3.2k-ish as tank, a guildie healer, and two pug DPSers around 1.6k-1.8k.

About the only person who needs good gear to ensure a smooth run is the tank (both to hold aggro and enable the dps to go all out, and to make the healer not have to heal much at all). It IS possible to get through heroics with a fresh 80 tank who's not defense capped and has 19k hp (after all that's what everyone did a year ago), but it can be a stressful experience.

So yeah, if you have crap gear, just queue as dps (or even healer) and enjoy the purpz. F the haters.  :awesome_for_real:

I definitely agree on "Get into a good spec" and "start working on your reputations".  The latter is especially true if this is your first 80 on the server.

As a healer, I've done Heroics with new tanks and ~2k DPS and finished them just fine.  It's not as exciting as chain-pulling with a group of raid-geared players and finishing an instance in 10-15 minutes, but I still enjoy it for the most part.  If DPS can follow directions, they're almost all the way there when it comes to running Heroics.

Heh, show me a freshly minted 80 that's doing 2k DPS, because you don't see them in my groups.  Hell, I had a person with the same gearscore as me pull sub 2k (trash I can understand, but bosses?) in an instance last night. I'd be happy with anything above 1300.  If you hit that, you'll be doing about 50% more damage than most of the chucklefucks infecting the queue.

All I'm saying is don't ignore obvious upgrade paths before jumping in.  You will do better.  That and making sure your specs/glyphs (you get 3 major now) are in order will put you above most of the "lol combat daggers" rabble you see.

Also, as a DPS, your likely only weapon upgrades will come from the regular 5 man ICC instances (random isn't likely going to put you in HTOC).  These will be your biggest DPS upgrade.  Not sure what the gear threshold for queueing for those instances is.

A good hunter or a good mage can easily do that without a load of purples (just ilvl 200 BoE blues).  Granted, they are the exception, but it is possible.  Melee classes are going to have trouble just because of the lack of good weapons outside of the new ICC heroics and raids.

As far as "don't be that guy" my raid geared mage pulls 4k-4500 DPS on the average heroic now, but I won't hold it against anyone for being new and not putting out numbers like mine.  Hit at least 1200-1400 and I know you are at least trying and won't hold anything against you (especially since stuff dies so fast to me ;-) ).  The times I really get frustrated is when I am doing 4k, the tank is doing 1k, and the other 2 DPS are in the 500-700 range.  I get annoyed because I am essentially carrying 2 people who aren't doing anything beyond white damage or some strange rotation that they think is awesome.  That doesn't even take into account WAY undergeared healers in H-PoS or H-FoS or a tank that can't maintain aggro through one of my spell rotations.

My rogue did 2k the day he hit 80 and that was pre-3.3.  Pure classes own you, etc.

My DK at 80 in greens/blues was doing 1.7k.  The only class I can think of that I've had trouble with is my Shadow Priest and he still was over 1k.  Within days, each of my "trouble" classes had improved to 2k+ with little effort.  Between emblems, drops, faction, etc. Upgrades are an hourly occurence anymore.  I now have 2 chars over 230 iLvl, 1 over 220, and a fourth over 200.  This isn't hard at all.  Visit Elitist Jerks if you are having trouble.  Each time I did, I would increase my dps by the hundreds just with small tweaks.

Last time I ask a rhetorical question.  Heh.   For reference my DK and shaman both started out at around 1.7K, but they were at least sporting a lolsteel weapon.  Of course, they're still in Naxx level gear while my warlock is in far, far better thanks to this system.  I know we're all rockstars, but the entry level folks I've seen have been barely more DPS than autoattack and a broken castrandom macro. 

I'll add my own noobish question to attempt a derail: what's a good rule of thumb of when to AE instead of single target? I usually go with 4 mobs.  And does backdraft affect the channel time of Rain of Fire?  I find that my AE DPS is pedestrian at best and even on a fight like Onyxia I'm doing about as much single target damage as AE (5.5-6.5K+. Varies a lot it seems). 

I always AOEd on 3+ mobs, different class though.

Could someone take a look at my gear and suggest an upgrade path for me. Currently I am sitting on 250 emblems because I am unsure how to spend them.

Ret Pally (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Tichondrius&n=Morvant)

Here is the problem:

My chest and shoulders are better than t9 pieces. My helm is subpar, so I can get the t9 helm, and I should probably get the legs too. I am unsure about the gloves, as I cant find any info on if the set pieces are better than the PVP gloves (+5% CS damage).

Should I try and get 4 pieces, ether going with the lesser shoulders and/or chest for the 4piece set bonus?

It seems like a ton of the gear has ArPen on it, which is not a great stat for Ret Pallies.

Yea, I'm just assuming those 900 dps people don't live here.

As far as AoE, I'm not real sure how warlock AoE works.  My hunter's dps increases on 3 or more mobs.  On Ony, I'm easily hitting the cap at around 10k if I drop a trap before I start volley spam.

Are you primarily PvPing?  Since your gloves are your only piece of PvP gear, I'm going to assume no.  So, for PvE, the Paladin tier 9 (the set you can buy outside ToC for the regular badges) set bonuses look like they're pretty good.  So you should for sure replace gloves, legs, and helm with tier 9 (ilvl 232).  And possibly your BP, even though it will only be a sidegrade, it will also give you the 4 piece which is 5% crit on judgments.  All that is if you don't plan on raiding enough to get frost badges. 

If you do plan on raiding enough to get frost badges, forget all that and spend your regular badges on the 245 gear you can get from the badge vendor in Dalaran.  Then spend your frost badges on the tier 10 stuff you can get from the vendor inside an ICC raid instance.

But yes, you really should only PvE with PvP gloves if it's the only option, as the item budget is wasted on resilience in PvE.

As far as ArPen for Ret, yes it's not a very highly desired stat.  From a cursory glance at the EJ Ret Thread (http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t68951-retribution_updated_3_3_a/), it looks like you prioritize hit until cap, strength, expertise to cap, and then crit.  So pass that ArPen plate/trinkets/rings/necks to DPS warriors, and get strength/crit. 

As a fresh 80 warrior tank, I looked at tankspot's "easy to get tank items" thread and did some targetted questing/championing in normal instances to get to the def cap and to about 20-25k health and armor before starting heroics.  I also got the tanking weapon (Teldrassil Protector) from the Argent Tournament.  That probably took the longest, but if you are able to do the half hour per day or so, it's 9 days from scratch.

After that, aside from the random heroics, normal TOC and normal ICC 5-mans give you some nice tanking upgrades.  Also, gem and enchant everything.  It's a little expensive, but hey, gold flows like water now.

The hardest part for a tank is trinkets. I still actually have one green trinket because I haven't seen either the drop from Loken or the TOC stamina trinket (actually I saw it once and lost the roll to some tree).

edit: oh yeah, I also bought the crafted helm and shield (titansteel).

Yeah I feel bad for tanks coming along now who missed their chance to farm up the 2 brewfest stamina trinkets.

The trinket out of H-AN is decent if you just need stamina.

Even for a tank with instant queues, you would have to be getting one of the four 5 badge heroics (there are 16), however all of those tend to be longer. You would also have to be executing them perfectly and at speed, which isn't guaranteed with randoms. 21 badges per hour is an upper limit to what you can get; 12-15 per hour is more realistic, and even that involves very grindy playing.

Factoring in getting the slower heroics like Strat and stuff I figure I average about 3 heroics/hour as a tank as long as the groups are decent. That's 5-7 triumphs per instance (after the first one) so yeah 21 in an hour is pretty rare.

For my tanking set I'm going to just roll on tanking gear in heroics while dpsing.  I'll just get some friends to roll with me.

Reading this reminds me of just how much I'd love playing WoW if I had a set group to run instances with.  I think that my love of DAoC stemmed from having an incredibly strong to play with nightly.  Now our damn jobs and lives interfere with gaming... priorities suck!

I feel bad for tanks coming along now that have to deal with all the impatient idiots that want someone who's obviously in the beginning stages of their gear to pull half the dungeon at a time.

I've never used dual spec before.  Last time I played was Jan'09 and I've recently come back but I didn't need it while leveling.  I just hit 70 and I've going to grab it so I can have a dps and tank spec.  I have a few questions.

How does it work switching specs?  From what I know already it's a timed cast that you can use out of combat and it automatically switches your spec and your glyphs correct?

How do you guys set up your UI?  Do you use bartender and manually switch your hotbar profile?  That's my only concern really since I hate setting up my hotbars.

Easy.  Go to your talent window, click the spec you want, and click the "activate these talents" button.  Takes 2-3s and you are done.  Resets any buffs you cast on yourself and others (not flasks or ones that others have cast) and resets to 0 any mana\energy\rage\rune power you happen to have.

Your bars are unique for each spec.  Once you change from one spec to the other, your bars switch automatically too (all 6).  I use zero add-ons for managing my UI.

Bartender should preserve your bars for each spec; it's really very flexible and one of the easiest mods to configure.

Dominoes works pretty good as well.  Only problem while leveling is that it wouldn't upgrade spell ranks when you were switched.  Nothing quite like blasting away with yesterday's spells.

I've used bartender for quite a while.  I'll have to give it a shot.  Does it save your configuration as well and detect a change spec automatically?

I've noticed that it automatically switches Bar 1 when I change stances.

The reason for the PVP gloves, is for the glove special bonus (+5% crusader strike damage) which back in Burning Crusade was BiS gear. The t9 chest and shoulders are both downgrades. The chest because I would be trading haste for ArPen and the shoulders are just a direct downgrade.

I plan on doing some casual raiding. Nothing hardcore, so I dont think I will be getting a massive amount of Frost emblems any time soon. As to passing on ArPen, I wish I could. Seems like Blizzard has put it on every fucking piece of plate gear.

It mirrors what the default bars do. If you are a Warrior/Druid/Shadowpriest it will give you different bars for each spec, and then within each spec you will have different bar layouts corresponding to your current Stance/Form/Shadowform etc. So a warrior would have 2x3 sets of bars to configure iirc.

Backdraft doesn't affect RoF, but Empowered Imp does. I AoE when there's 4+ mobs as well. Since our AoE is not particularly strong and our rotation doesn't need any time to 'rev up' single target is the way to go on 3 or less, at least in my experience.

I'm never going to raid, so I think I'm just going to be that guy who does DPS in his PVP suit and spend badges upgrading that. I was doing 2.5k in heroics in just my honor gear + HTOC5 axe and that's plenty, especially for someone who doesn't stand in the fire and has enough situational awareness to occasionally save the day by dropping LoH on the tank or healer. Maintaining two complete suits is just too much grinding and shelling out for gems/enchants.

I think it varies by class. I read recently that the threshold for mage AE is down to 2 mobs, at least for flamestrike. My rule of thumb on my moonkin is I AE if there are 3 or more mobs alive, and always finish the channel even if it drops to less than that during the duration, since hey, I already PAID the mana for that damage, I might as well get my money's worth, at least in the sort of normal chain pulling heroics we have these days where there's not much chance to drink etc.

My personal mage rule of thumb for AoE is "can the tank hold my aggro?" as even if there are a decent number of mobs to make it attractive (last part of DTK) most PUG tanks won't be able to keep the adds off of me, so I just single target everything down and do better work that way.  When I review the numbers of each fight, AoE is almost never worth it compared to my single target DPS unless there are 4+ mobs being affected by it.

Three or More, AE Galore!

Got my UI and dual spec set up last night.  Works great, less of a pain in the ass than I thought.  I had to get rid of bartender and I'm using Dominos now (I actually like Dominos over Bartender).

The biggest pain in the ass last night was training my 2h wep skills.

Fury seems slightly faster than prot with killing speed.  Maybe I need more gear?  Shrug.  I'm assuming I'm not missing anything (Armory Link (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mal%27Ganis&n=Draeganz) for my spec) with just whirlwind, bloodthirst and slamming with the proc.  My gear is crap still except the weapons so maybe that's it.  I seem rage starved and I forgot charge was battle stance only.  Booh.

Any handy macros out there?  Maybe sticking berserker rage onto WW or BT?  Stance dance macro with charge?

Wow. Thanks for this.  I haven't played Fury in so long that the times I switch to it, I just realized that I totally forgot about Bloodsurge, improved WW and improved berserker stance, all of which I have.  Good thing I only quest in Fury and don't try to actually DPS.

Also, Fury spec reminds me how much I  :heart: :heart: :heart: the Warbringer talent.

Warbringer is arguably the most powerful single talent point in the game.


Maybe ShadowForm beats it, maybe.

Maybe in PVP. In PVE it is mostly a convenience factor thing (albeit a very nice one.)

You also forgot Moonkin Form.  :awesome_for_real:

Why do you mock us? :cry:

Not sure why you'd want berserker rage tied to whirlwind or bloodthirst.  Also don't know why you'd want charge tied into a stance dance macro.  This is a conventional stance dance macro.  Is this what you mean?


This is for tanks to get out of fears they can see coming.  For example, when Onyxia shakes the ground in phase 3, or Nef, or Nightbane, etc.

Here (http://www.wowwiki.com/Useful_macros_for_warriors) is a shitload of warrior macros.

Here (http://www.arenajunkies.com/macros/warrior/) is a shitload more of the PvP variety.  (Beware: website is made out of 100% pure epeen.)

3 or more for locks, though it's sometimes easiest just to burst things down. Also, if you're in the 4+ range and have a shitton of mana/can tap without your healer getting in trouble, Seed of Corruption is actually really freaking good right now. Just tab seed tab seed tab seed and it winds up cranking out silly amounts of damage for crazy amounts of mana.

One or two, just pew pew!

I'd say 4 or more for boomkins, just not dps efficient as rolling your dots. Even then you have to keep your dots up. Moonfire/insect swarm everything then hurricane, if there's above 50% dot all again, if not dot and dd.

Starfall is risky due to range and aggro, watch out if you add it to a cycle.

Maybe in content where stuff doesn't die in the time that one hurricane takes, but its a waste of time to pre-DoT everything in your typical heroic.

There's no more need for stance dance macros for fear, berserker rage is usable in every stance.

You forgot a pew!

I'm only talking about leveling shit.  Nevermind.

Yeah, i was going to post this.  I remember the days when we were recruiting tanks and if they weren't good stance dancers they were right out.  In any event, a lot of stuff like that seems to been removed/made obsolete by Blizzards design choices.  While I do sort of appreciate that they want to make the game more accessible to all their players, and they want their game mechanics to be transparent enough that you don't NEED to go to elitist jerks to learn how to play passably, I do think that a lot of what I liked about early WoW was this sort of depth, and in Wrath I felt like a lot of it was gone, which is one of the reasons I didn't stick around very long post-80.

I didn't know they changed it.  Thing is that it isn't really realistic to expect someone to do it consistently.  It's one global just to get into the right stance, then one to get out of the fear, then another one to get back in defensive (from Berserker no less - the one where you take 20% more damage), that's three seconds for you to be destroyed by the holy shit monster du jour.  Then, on a 2.5 second fear cast (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=18431), you had a 1 second margin for error for avoiding the fear.  Not to mention 1.5 second (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=22686) fears (You had to use a timer and guess for this one).  Factor in latency and you can probably imagine the amount of coke you have to do in order to get this right.  It basically meant that the macro was mandatory.  And I'm pretty sure they don't want to design noobs into the world where nerds write macros.  This was pretty much the sole reason that led the majority of raiding guilds to alliance where fear ward was free money.

Stance changes don't actually trigger a global cooldown.

So when I'm farming Scholo for runecloth and junk, I sometimes get these dark runes that take 600-1000 life and give 900-1500 mana, 15 minute cooldown. I'm a ret paladin with a mana pool slightly less than 6k. That makes one of these runes worth 16-25% of my mana bar. Granted I don't run out of mana often, but that... doesn't sound useless for being a billion year old vanilla item. Think I'll farm some up and see if I find a use for them.

They AH decently, or used to, since the paladin mount quest calls for some I think.

I believe those runes are also the item used by the chinese farmers who spell out websites with piles of bodies.

I thought those guys used the z-axis exploit to drop themselves from 10,000,000 feet in the air for that.  There are youtube videos, it must be true!

I'm not very sold on Seal of Righteousness and Seal of Vengeance plus 5/5 Seals of the Pure for PVE ret pally DPS. At least not for heroics. If I were wailing on a raid boss for 5 minutes solid that would be one thing, but heroic bosses are quite often mostly dead before SoV builds up to 5 stacks. A lot of them have gimmicks that take me out of melee long enough to force me to start building stacks up all over again anyway.

I might just drop SotP, spec back into Seal of Command, and spend the other 4 points on whatever.

SotP builds are higher DPS and allow you to glyph for 10 expertise, which is fucking eyelasers.

How do you all think of this build for leveling to 80?
http://www.gotwarcraft.com/guides/leveling/class/paladin.php
Basically 0/20/51 Retribution build

I was getting my ass handed to me at level 24 but was all holy, but now have a better idea on how to play. 

Yes, ~80 Expertise Rating from a Glyph is insane.

Command is nice because of the cleave, but it doesn't have the supporting Glyphs/Talents like Righteousness and Corruption do to make it awesome.

From what i understand, Command is probably THE best dps talent a ret paladin can take for ANYTHING that involves hitting more then 1 mob.

Yeah, I mucked around a little and took two points out of some silly-ass talent that had no place in PVE, put one in Command, and put the left over one in Divine Sacrifice. I figure if things go to shit and I need to bubble, I can hit Divine Sacrifice too and spare the whole party 30% damage for free. Command > Righteousness for trash, by far, even with 5/5 SotP. I'm keeping SotP though, for it's benefit to SoV. Picked up the SoV glyph, which I didn't know about, so this thread did in fact help.

I'd like to ask you for your Hall of Reflections strategies. As a priest I'm healing everything up to and including ICC10 wthout problems, but most of the time I don't seem to get past the 10 waves or the escape in HoR. Most of the Time I run out of Mana by the 3rd of the five waves or somebody dies from the ridiculous amount of group damage.

How do you handle it?

My friend can heal through there without much mana issues.  Not sure if she just has more mana or better regen then you do.  The amount of damage could be more from your group not paying attentiong.  The Mage in there pumps out so much aoe damage it's kinda stupid.

Mage should always be the first one down, and you have to do it quickly or she pops her hallucination and it can get worse.  The major damage dealers in there are the mage and the mercenary.

Are you disc or holy?

As disc HoR is trivially easy heal (compared to other healers). You just keep PW:S up on everyone, permanently. After that it's an exercise in dealing with DPS who pull aggro. As holy it's a little harder, but still eminently doable.

Suggestions:

 - Talk to your tank prior to the start. See what they would like you to shackle (I usually go for the hunters, since they are a pain for non-DK tanks to pull). Keep this mob shackled as best you can, but don't make it your sole focus.
 - Fight the mobs in the doorway, not the alcove. There's really only three sources of group damage: Flamestrike, SW:P and the Rogue's shadowstep. The alcove makes flamestrike dodging a lot harder, and makes shackling a lot harder. It's easier on the initial aggro if your group is braindead, but past that it's inferior to the doorway in every way.
 - Dispel has a very high priority. Fear, SW:P and Impending Dispair on Falric are all dangerous and unhelpful debuffs that you can remove easily.
 - Falric is an evil AoE encounter. As disc you can pre-shield the AoE fear (fear ward won't help). As holy pre-casting renew (the spell is cast every 33% HP) on all five party members will help, as will getting a 3-stack of serendipity. The difficulty with healing the AoE fear is that everyone is really spread out at the end, often out of CoH range for the most part. Having renew ticking and casting a serendipity-hasted PoH on yourself will help. PrOM really helps of course.
 - For mana-management, evaluate what spells you are using, and don't feel compelled to save cooldowns. A lot of the time you shouldn't need spells like PoH (in either spec). ProM is obviously vital, but if you are using PoH to heal up say the tank and a DPS who has aggro, then you'll run your mana down fast. Flash Heal and Binding Heal are very important here, learning when to use binding heal is very handy as a priest. Furthermore within each set of 4 spirit waves you can afford to pop Inner Focus + Divine Hymn at least once. Same for Hymn of Hope. You can drink between waves (you get about 8s out of combat between the two) and you can use Shadowfiend on the 2nd/3rd and 7th/8th waves. If all else fails, you can always pot, but frankly I don't
 - Don't be afraid to use cooldowns like Guardian Spirit and Pain Supression on the tank to give yourself time to heal up the DPS. A tank at 80%HP with guardian spirit and renew can generally be safely ignored for 5-10s.
 - On the pursuit, save Divine Hymn for the last wall. Pop Hymn of hope and Shadowfiend between the penultimate and last walls.


I will admit, I have only done this once as holy; mainly because this instance is just that much easier as Disc.

Anyone know the name of the Addon that allows you to target something you have tracked by clicking on it on the minimap? I haven't used it since vanilla, so I'm not sure it still exists... Started leveling my huntard again and realized I really miss it.

Simple question: (I'm looking at you, Rasix)

What's the best leveling spec for a Warlock?  I was thinking affliction with a blue taunting pet, but it's just a guess purely based on mana management. 

"Best" is completely subjective.  I am leveling Demonology (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Runetotem&cn=Agakha) just because I like how quickly things die.  Some people like leveling Affliction, but I didn't really care for it, so personal style may make a difference there.

Affliction is the king of lock leveling until Demonology gets a felguard and even then, demonology is only 'better' because your pet can solo most quests while you /afk.  Affliction will still kill stuff much faster and more efficiently.

Affliction with any DPS pet.  Although early on it's nice to just use the blueberry because you're so fragile.  I tended to go with the felhunter just because the mobs that gave me the most trouble were casters and the felpuppy eats them up.  Succi is pretty decent too, but she's a bit fragile at times.  The CC isn't important because you're an invincible god and nothing's going to kill you.  If you're having some doubts, wait until you can get siphon life.  It really changes the game and makes your mana pool basically infinite.

Nothing beats the health and mana return you get from affliction.  You never drink no matter how many mobs you pull.  Corruption everything, drain life, mana tap, and you can get a shard while at the same time getting a very nice mana return.  Really easy leveling rotation where you don't even have to ever cast a filler spell.  I tried demonology, but it was just so easy to stay full health/mana nearly 100% of the time as affliction.  

Only thing you may have problems with are some Outland elites because they're fear immune and you head into Outland with relatively poor HP.  Still, it's not like you just can't skip them as you'll blow through Outland in no time at all.  

I imagine all specs to pretty well.  Demo always kinda felt goofy to me though.  Destro is nice and easy for end game dps, but I imagine it levels just like a elemental shaman except without the mana efficiency.

It's actually not bad for mana.

Thanks for the input.  I decided to give WoW another shot now that I have a little more free time in the evenings.  I was going to start leveling my priest again, but decided that the only way I'll ever see the dungeons is in a pug and I'd much rather play a dps and not deal with idiots complaining about how I heal.  DPS is also more fun for solo PvP.  I enjoy playing my hunter in the BG's.

No, it's not. I don't notice it when I'm shard farming or doing a daily.  But anything is poor mana efficiency next to a affliction lock or an elemental shaman.


Back to alliance or you going to briefly say "hi" again?  :grin:

I would have to say depends on the server type. My thinking has generally been PvE = Demonology and PvP = Affliction, but that actually sort of went out the window with my current main as I hit 70 with her with just about pure Demon on a PvP server. (threw some points into Affliction and Destruction to enhance the dots but that was about it). I also mainly stick with the Void as he holds good aggro in PvE and Sacrifice can be a life saver in PvP. Demon also helps a lot as your pet takes a bit of the damage you would normally take. Anything that keeps you alive even just a little bit longer is good.

Elemental actually goes through a period in the early 70s where the mana use starts to kind of suck, or at least mine did. I think it was the redesign this expansion that relies so heavily on lava burst, which you don't get until level 75, that made 70-75 problematic. After I got lava burst it was back to normal.

I will agree with leveling to 70 at least as Affliction.  There's a fair amount of spell damage gear out there for leveling now that really benefits shadow damage.  Once I got Imp Howl of Terror, I never pulled less than four.  Anything else is just a waste of time.  It really kicks off once you get to Outlands and some increased mob density.  Zangarmarsh was awesome.  Fearbombs beget autopulls which just make things faster.  I did switch from Affliction -> Demonology -> Destruction once I got to Northrend.  The mobs just hit too hard in Northrend to be able to sustain my fear bomb strategy and the thought of modifying it made me sad.  With quest gear, most mobs die before they get to you as destruction or may get a single hit in.  Mana is something of an issue, but tapping is ususally sufficient.  Plus, you can PvP with it.  Three button combo is ftw.  Immolate, Chaos Bolt and Conflag and most people are dead before they realize you are targeting them. 

Speaking of PvP, do not forget about those mid level PvP rewards.  The AB boots in particular are awesome, free runspeed enchant.

The beginning of the EJ Twinking thread (http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t18857-twinking_tricks_leveling_alts/) has some good recommendations for casters and gearing.

I only have one 80 which I leveled through the release of WOTLK, so I had done most of the quests.  Now with the dungeon finder I'm leveling faster than my quests.  Is there a list of quests you NEED to complete?  Basically the phase quests etc.  I know there is one in Icecrown somewhere...

Then again I'm only level 72 and still sitting in Borean Tundra.

Leveling faster than quests is just fine.  Hit 80 and finish the quests you didn't do while working on achievements.  It's a great way to make boatloads of cash. 

Well yes I know that.

-You may want to do the Argent Crusade and Ebon Blade questlines in Icecrown until you open up their flight paths and faction vendors.  Ebon Blade has a lot of easy dailies. 
-Doing the Sons of Hodir quests may be important for you if you want that flight path or do not have a character with the shoulder enchants yet.  The Hodir dailies are also very easy and take almost no time.
-Oracles or Frenzypaw dailies will not open up unless you finish that quest line in Sholozar basin.

Other than that, I'm not sure any are what I'd consider mandatory.  My shaman and warlock have entire zones untouched except for obtaining their flight path.

Sorry.  Stating the obvious is what I seem to do best. 

Hmm ok thats what I thought of already minus the Sholozar Basin.  I've actually never been in that zone.  Never had to go there and I skipped it last time on my 80DK.  I luckily don't have to do Hodir dailies for the enchant since I'm exalted already with one toon.

Sholozar is one of my favorite zones (it's a combo of Stranglethorn, Un'goro and Nagrand) and fastest for exp, but unless you want the Mysterious Egg from the Oracles, it's very skippable. 

When I last leveled a toon I went through zones and did every quest in this order:

Borean Tundra -> Howling Fjord -> Grizzly Hills -> Dragonblight -> Zul Drak _> Storm Peaks

I had a shit ton of quests left in Icecrown and Storm Peaks that i did a few of.  I'm going to hit up the Basin just because I didn't last time.

As a horde I always tend to go Howling Fjord -> Borean Tundra -> Dragonblight  -> Grizzly Hills -> Zul Drak (and 80 within halfway through it or so) and get every single quest that is available in there.  I may run a dungeon or two, I may not.  My first character ran all of the available low-level dungeons once and got to 80 3/4 through in Grizzly Hills ;-)

My route is Howling Fjord (complete) > Borean Tundra (til 74) > Dragonblight > Zul'Drak (til 77) > Storm Peaks, with a healthy amount of instancing thrown in. If that doesn't ding me 80, I hit the WG dailies and start the Argent Tournament; I used to add in the Ebon Blade and Argent Tournament chains, but now that the shoulder enchants are BoA I won't bother.

I go:
Howling Fjord > Borean Tundra > Dragonblight > Grizzly (till 76) > Sholazar > Storm Peaks (till 78) > Icecrown (just to unlock the Argent and Ebon phased areas) > back to Storm Peaks until 80.

I love Sholazar, and don't like Zul'Drak so much.

Seocnding Rasix on the love for Sholozar Basin. The quest density is high and the xp is good. Plus it's a much nicer zone aesthetically. Lastly, if you are a herbalist, Sholozar is the most herb-dense zone in Northrend (I think) and is great for levelling your profession.

A small thing that pisses me off about Icecrown and Zul'drak are the Vyrkul Bones and Drakkari Offerings which drop off almost every mob. While the quest items are fine, having to delete stacks of those anytime you do anything in the zone at 80 is a little tiresome. A tiny niggle I know, but a niggle nonetheless.

Not sure about the Offerings, but I know the Vrykul Bones are vendorable.

Offerings can be vendored as well.

I've skipped nothing on any of my 8, lvl 80's.  The money is too good.  I always do Dragonblight before Grizzly because Grizzly is so much better with a fast flying mount.  I tended to always have enough cash saved up from my main and other alts by that point to get it.  Dragonblight has little in the way of riding a fast ground mount so I knock that out right away. 

Scholozar isn't bad either since all the quests are very close together.  Short slow flying hops back and forth are not too bad.  Zul'Drak has so much MOB density a fast flyer is really necessary.  Storm Peaks and Ice Crown require it really.

Howling Fjord > Borean Tundra > Dragonblight > Sholazar > Zul'Drak > Grizzly  > (usually hit 80 about here) Storm Peaks > Icecrown

Oh really? Now I feel a little dumb. Thanks!

So, a while ago I shelved my Rogue because I thought grinding was too much of a pain considering how much damage he takes.  Decided to give him a spin now that I can do some dungeons, and damn, I have no idea how to play this guy.  Used to be combat, but respecced assassination after I found some decent blue daggers, but I cannot get him to do any damage.

Armory here, level 74 character for those wondering (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Cenarion+Circle&n=Malas)  He's pulling around 650-700 DPS right now.  His DPS wasn't awesome as a combat rogue, but it was generally a few hundred higher than this was, anyway, so I must be doing something wrong.  A few specific questions:

-Hunger for Blood won't activate unless the enemy is bleeding, which means rupture.  Do I have to keep him bleeding, or do I just ambush>rupture>H4B at the beginning of every fight before going into a more DPS-y rotation?  Because trying to keep rupture and slice/dice both up all the time is driving me crazy.  For that matter, what should my rotation look like?  All I found on EJ after a cursory search was something like "get slice/dice up quick then spam envenom" but the mob's usually dead before I can ambush>rupture>H4B>mutilate x 4>slice/dice>mutilate x 4>envenom, so I assume that's not what I should be using.

-I don't seem to have any AoE, like, at all.  I guess later I get Fan of Knives, but right now, how am I supposed to compete on the meters when every other class can hit four guys every time I hit one?

You don't.  Even when you do get FoK it's not going to be anything that competes with really with AoE classes.  Rogues are single target primary dps.

Ummmmm... rogues tend to blow everyone away on the super AE dps charts (Ony whelps, Anub'arak hard mode adds) actually. Even after the fan of knives nerf I've seen rogues do 9k+ on 25 Ony PUG runs.

Re: the leveling mutilate rogue, your dps will be kind of sucky on trash and be awesome on bosses pre-80. More or less as designed I think.

That's really only in a couple of situations.  When doing most of the everyday heroics and stuff I manage to pull out more dps if I just single target the mobs down then spam FoK really.  I've heard of all these huge numbers that we are supposed to be able to do, but I've never seen it.  However I've only been 80 since the 3.3 patch. 

FoK can do some really silly damage in raids. Not so sure about heroics.

It sounds very similar to the Feral 'rotation'.  On easy trash it's usually not worth using Rip (Rupture) and sometimes not even worth bothering with Savage Roar (Slice n Dice) because stuff tends to die so fast you never really get any return out of using the combo points that way.  I usually try to at least get off a 1 or 2 point SR though.  DPS is just going to naturally be lower in those kinds of fights regardless.  Feral doesn't even get a Hunger for Blood equivalent so I imagine it's even worse for a Mutilate Rogue.  It's boss fights that Feral/Mutilate tends to shine because you can really ramp up the damage over time.

Stealth -> Mutilate x 1 -> Slice & Dice -> Mutilate (until 4+ CP) -> Envenom

Take Ambush off of your bars, you open with Mutilate.

You must never let S&D drop.  This is not hard.  Once you have S&D up you will not need to use it again that fight.

You can use Cold Blood after the Slice and Dice to ensure faster combo point accumulation for the first Envenom.

Use other people's bleeds (Warrior, Druid, Hunter, Combat Rogue) to proc Hunger For Blood.  Otherwise you can generally ignore it for heroics because it's exceedingly hard to work into a cycle.

Poisons are Deadly/Instant.

The 'ideal' combat rogue rotation no longer includes rupture apparently, so depending on lineup mut rogues might have to provide their own bleed.

I guess Rogues don't have an equivalent to Rake?  Is Garrote that bad of an opening for a Mutilation Rogue?

Ya seems rupture has gone away.  I pretty much use SS to 2-3 -> SnD -> SS to 4+ ->Eviscerate.  On boss fights I'll throw in Envenom's since I'm on the 20/51/0 build.  My top 3 damage is always Melee, Sinister Strike, Instant Poison.

When did this happen for combat, and why?

3.3, because of the poison changes.

I've heard we're not supposed to be rupturing as Assassination anymore either, but I still use it in my rotation and I'm winning parses vs other rogues who aren't. YMMV.

Handy rogue FAQ.  Updated for 3.3.  (http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t54257-3_3_rogue_faq_if_youre_new_ish_here_read_before_posting_updated_1_5_10_a/)

Nothing in that thread explains WHY they aren't using Rupture anymore, just that they aren't.

The only reason I think they were using rupture in the first place was because of the set bonus from T9, since everyone is moving up its gone out of the rotation.  Plus the extra damage from poisons makes it lack in dps.  I never even used it before, I don't need a bleed for anything and Eviscerate just does more damage.

This of course does highlight one potential pitfall in using EJ as your sole source for theorycrafting: they always assume the very highest end stuff, so for example they're leaving the T9 set bonus behind just as the vast majority of players are actually picking it up.

Their better guides deal with set bonuses from every tier, but sometimes things aren't that codified.

The extra damage from poisons comes from what, exactly? Extra uses of Envenom?

They changed the poison mechanic in the last patch I believe.  I believe basically is that if you have 5 stacks of deadly poison it will allow for more procs of instant poison.

I'm not sure exactly what changed.  I have played on and off since launch and only just made level 80 on my character about a month ago.  Hell I was looking for poison mats to make poisons when i came back  :ye_gods:.

See, I know that's changed, but what does that have to do with not using Rupture?  :uhrr:

The l33t rogue I asked said it's because you can skip it and get more melee haste elsewhere, and therefore more DPS (better usage of combo points he mentioned).  I do not play an end-game rogue, so I do not know exactly how true that is.

Your combo points turn into more damage by using Envenom instead of Rupture if you're Mutilate (assuming someone is giving you the bleed elsewhere.) You may have to use a 1 point rupture to provide your own bleed.

For combat, it appears that it is just because gear is good enough now that rupture is not keeping up, mostly because eviscerate scales so well with armor penetration. Losing a rupture set bonus when you move to t10 is just the nail in the coffin, its nothing to do with poison damage for combat rogues.

This means if you're still mostly in 219ish stuff as combat you probably want to keep using rupture, especially if you have the T8 4 piece. The T9 2 piece is not necessarily going to be good enough to keep it in your rotation.

EDIT: fixed stupid mistake

Ingmar manages to actually answer the question about combat with a response that makes sense.  Do you even play a rogue? :awesome_for_real:

Thanks Ingmar, that makes sense.

My rogue is level 26!  :awesome_for_real:

Ingmar, it's much easier to just say "because the spreadsheet said so".  But that does seem to be where they get some of the decisions they make in standard builds.  Modeling shows X ahead of Y, so use X. 

Blessing in disguise. You don't have to tell me twice to make my rotation simpler. Although, none of this really applies to a shmoe like myself that will be staying in the 5mans until Cat.

Except it's easily possible for a spreadsheet to be wrong in its assumptions.  Or for the variables in the spreadsheet to give a different answer than what the player has.  Especially since EJ seems to always sim stuff assuming BiS gear.

They're modeling everything with BiS or near BiS.  They don't even model rupture anymore because it's not worth it apparently with the new level of gear.  It won't overtake envenom or evisc unless they change it significantly.  It still can be situationally useful.  People can always run tests themselves, but for now the top end raiding rogues have given up on rupture.  If this spreadsheet is wrong, then a lot of rogues have simply gone along and drank the Kool Aid.

Unfortunately the EJ crowd doesn't apply to my future gear level.  I can start with what they have, but what I eventually settle on will work for my level of gear.   Like crit cap.. I don't think I'll ever have to worry about the math relating to that.

Which is why their FAQ pisses me off.  They have gotten consistently more useless for providing rationale and roughing out breaking points where priorities change.  It's not even easy to find the shit in the ongoing posts anymore because all the threads are fucking huge 100+ page monsters.

I think I knew this at some point, but how do you allow the camera to pull further back? I'm tired of proto-drake wings in my face.

It's mouse wheel for me.

Type in the following.

/console CameraDistanceMaxFactor 5

lets you zoom out a decent bit farther then normal.  There is probably a place in one of the config files you could throw this to get it to stay in effect permanently, but I have never bothered to find out where.

That's the one I was looking for. I actually found the file for it too (since I was already looking) - WTF/Account/ACCOUNTNAME/config-cache.wtf

I have tried changing the setting in that cache file, but it never seems to stick. I always end up having to use the /console command to change it from inside the game while the game is running.

I just made a macro for it and click it whenever I want it to work in game.

Fairly similar to what i do.  I have a notepad type addon i use to keep track of various things, i have that command in an easy to reach spot on one of the first tabs, and just cut and paste it in at the start of each session.

I don't think that setting works any more, and hasn't for some time. The max distance is already set by default now.

Just tested to confirm and it makes no difference at all to me. Of course one of my 30+ addons may be already setting that each session but I don't have any addon installed specifically to do it.

There's also a "Max Camera Distance" slider under the Interface menu in the Camera section.

cameraDistanceMaxFactor is one of two variables that control how far your camera can go back.  The other is "cameraDistanceMax".

The default maximum setting for later (which is the setting Kail is talking about) is 15.  It can go up to 50 either with a slash command, config.wtf editing, or using the TweakWoW (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13562-TweakWoW.html) mod, which is just a GUI for all sorts of config.wtf edits.

it must be something you have in your addons that does it automatically.  I know for a fact that for me, i have the camera slider in the normal ui options set to max, and i still can not zoom out very far, but when i use /console CameraDistanceMaxFactor 5 i can zoom much farther out (for example normally i can only see to the immediate edges of Sarth's little island if i zoom out, but use the console command and i can zoom out far enough to see the entire island and most of the area around it with ease).

Ah ok, I'll play with it more later. It could be CTmod thinking about it, but I do have a lot of mods, any of which could be responsible  :awesome_for_real:

Not only did it clearly work for me, it also stuck in the config file (so far).

Carbonite does it.

Anyone know if Transmute: Titanium shares a cooldown with the epic gem transmutes?

Transmute: Titanium doesn't have a cooldown.

Ok thanks. I had heard that in game, but Wowhead's comments were all over the place regarding its cooldown or lack thereof.

Originally it shared a cooldown with the Gem Transmutes. 

Then they removed it from that and removed the cooldown on it all together.

Sort of the same thing they did for Arcanite a while back.

Noob question: Is jewelcrafting worth the effort?

For the personal benefit you get by using JC gems? Yes. To make money? Varies by server.

Debateable.  Probably the biggest pain in the ass profession to raise next to tailoring (LW still bad?).  Wasn't hard to max, but there are some areas where it's very difficult to find the gems you need or they're very expensive for the level they are.  Given a big enough budget though, I suppose it's not too bad.  You just have to be willing to stomach the rough parts.

I imagine cut Dragon Eyes not being prismatic anymore has somewhat taken the luster off the profession as a whole.  Prospecting is nice, since it's laughably easy to farm up a bazillion saronite while you wait for the dungeon queue.  Prospecting my own ore and sending the results to my ach to transmute has made me a lot of cash.

It is nice having your own JC.  But there are a lot of them and getting a gem cut is cheap.

If you are an absolute min/max'er, yes for it and Blacksmithing.  But, the thought of grinding 1-450 for 42 str/agi/int or 48 spell power?  That's a lot of gold or a shit ton of mining grinding.

This discounts the thought of it as an actual trade skill.

Once you get to the end, there can be money to be made.  Although most people who need gems cut randomly asking are cheap bastards and won't tip you at all (just like enchanting).

A followup post on my Hall of Reflections post.

Difficulty varies heavily with group setup. I'm a ICC25 ready holy priest. Wow-heroes says that It should be easy (green) for me to enter ICC25 and yet I have to blow every cooldown I have plus flask plus mana pots to survive the waves or the escape event.

The amount of group damage is quite frankly ridiculous for a 5-Man and if damage output is too low or the DDs don't focus on mages and priests you will be out of mana by the third or fourth wave or somebody dies.

Healing as disc is way easier, healing as druid is easy mode.

My personal experience so far.

Kill priority: Mages first then priests then rifle men (the first waves only have mage or priest by the 4th you get both) Blow Divine hymn Shadowfiend and Hymn of hope in the 3rd or fourth wave so that it's ready again by the time wave 8 or nine come around. If the group takes heavy damage put guardian spirit on the tank. Circle of Healing is your friend. If you need the maximum amount of mana in the least amount of time pop Shadowfiend + Hymn of Hope at the same time (Shadowfiend profits from the 20% Mana increase, Hymn of Hope provides. But only in case of emergency because you usually need both to fill up.

If a DPS dies before the first boss the fight will get really difficult.

If you survive the waves you've won. Bosses are significantly easier.

You usually have a few seconds of out of combat time to drink before a new wave starts, use it.

You nearly don't have enough time to rez somebody after a boss.

The groups you are going in with are handling the adds terribly. I'm a nowhere near ICC25 ready priest, and I've had no real problems healing Heroic HoR.

Shackle a ranged target every pull. If you're running low on mana, LEAVE IT SHACKLED. The next wave will not start until the last mob dies, so you can chill out a bit and let spirit work. I've only had issues in HoR when every DPS attacks random shit they find interesting, the tank is running around like a mad man, and we barely scrape by a wave and have to deal with the next one.

As long as people assist train properly and actually use CC, it's not all that bad.

First successful tanking of heroic on my warrior.  I refused to use the alcove which caused a lot of bitching. 

What was REALLY irritating though was the mage refusing to sheep anything and the DK insisting on killing the mages first even though I repeatedly said they were low on the priority list since they were easily CCable by the hunter, DK, or say, a mage.

Well, the ignore list grows daily.

I would say LW is the worst of the ones I have done to level to max in WotLK by a pretty good margin.  I don't have a scribe, engineer, or alchemist close to the cap though.

They are undead, can't sheep.

Oh, ha.  Well, he was still irritating, honest.   :awesome_for_real:

That would probably have to do with sheep not working on undead mobs.  Freeze traps, repentance, and shackle are the only long-duration CC that works.  DKs can and should help pull mobs to you with strangulate/death grip as long as the healer understands they need to heal the DK sometimes.  When I heal on my shaman or tank on my warrior, I tell DKs or other people with ticking aoes to feel free to drop it even before I pick everything up.  It's better the DK eat a few hits than the healer.

Alchemy is still as easy as it ever was, there is only a small window near the very top where you can only gain skill points from flasks or transmutes or something. I don't even remember now. Probably the easiest profession to max overall by a far margin though.


Engineering was very expensive to cap, though I imagine it is much cheaper now that many of the materials have gone down in price and up in availability. You'll never be without Gnomish Army Knives ever again!

On my DK [unholy] I can basically solo a mage with almost zero healing required. That's CC... sorta.  :why_so_serious:

Also, H-HOR is one of those places where army of the dead actually helps the tank (as fun as it is to play spin-the-dragon in some heroics). Tell 'em to use it on wave 9 and/or 4.

Seriously I  made like 30 of those suckers.

Using flares made it pretty cheap to cap engineering. I pleveled it from 0 a few months ago, to I think 425, or whatever you need to use engineering-specific things like the belt and gloves, and it only cost me 1k gold or so.

I wasn't able to shackle anything even once. There simply is to much area damage around when you do it random. Also paladin and death knight tanks usually break CC while they are tanking.

Huh? Isn't everything in HoR undead? So no sheep. Hunter's ice trap might work

You have to shackle the runners coming from far in. It's the only way to get them locked down out of generic pug AE range.

Still, 50/50 chance of some idiot sicking a pet on it, but it can really help for a low mana cost to keep you from getting too overwhelmed.

Yeah, shackling is very easy with the entryway approach, the mobs will stand and pewpew well out of generic faceroll range. It's still doable if the group insists on the little side rooms, just harder - on my priest I pop a shield on myself+the tank between waves and pop out of the alcove when they start running, shackle the farthest one, and fade. Even if the tank is slow, the worst thing that can happen to me is a single ranged hit, in my experience... which the shield will absorb, same with the first attack on the tank (while you're shackling).

Getting from Heavy Knothide to Borean Leather was a big pain.  I recall a similar problem with the end of the Old World skill ranks, but my DK was leveling her skills for Outland at the time and took care of that quickly enough.  Trying to get above 420 is an absolute pain.  It requires either a ton of Heavy Borean Leather, even more uncommon 'leathers' like Nerubian Chitin, or two Artic Fur, two Frozen Orbs, and two other uncommon leathers.  If you're rich no problem.

When you hit 430 that one recipe that's just heavy borean turns yellow, too.

Thanks.  I'm three points away.  You've crushed my hopes.

Is there some reason you want to be above 400 leatherworking?  You don't get any more personal benefit out of it past that.

make number go up is good

That's really all there is to it for me.

wow.com did a series of posts where they showed that the benefit from the crafting professions and gathering professions is approximately the same (worth the equivalent of about 60-70 attack power).  The crafting ones are just more flexible and let you choose the manifestation. 

Making the new 245-264 patterns?  Our guild LW has all of the BoE patterns and most of the BoP ones.  He also gives us fail King's and the druid buff when none of them are with us.  But yeah, if you don't raid, run serious heroics, or make the cutting edge patterns, there really isn't much point to grinding your tradeskills above the 400ish mark where most give the easy personal benefits.

Yeah I forgot, I do want to make the failkings drums too.

The only reason my shammy is working it past the 400 mark.  Luckily I have a dual-spec and I've gotten enough gear and arctic furs to easily enchant my pants and bracers for 2 sets of gear, which has helped with the skill-ups.  Won't last forever I am afraid.  I'm stockpiling heavy Borean Leather (you need like 800 to get to 450 from 405 or something, plus all the exotic chitins and dragonscales).  That's why I have 2 skinning farmers, just to get materials for the LW as they level to 80.

Your talk about CCing the adds in H-HoR got me thinking.

I am a veteran player who started in US open beta. I have been playing until one year into BC and at one point was heavily into raiding. I resubbed agaain 4 or 5 months after Wrath was released mainly to play with a few close friends that moved to a different part of the country.

In the year since I have never even once seen anybody do CC in 5-Mans or Raids. I'm not kidding I just realized it yesterday when we were talking about HoR. I never noticed because I stopped playing my mage and as a healing priest usually don't do CC duty.

At some point during BC or wrath people simply seemd to stop doing CC altogether. Usually DPS just bombs the shit out of trash and/or bosses. Do you guys have similar experiences?

IT started with wrath, and the MUCH easier heroics (comparatively).  In BC, most of the top end heroics could get down right nasty if you did not have great cc (usually because many of the mobs had VERY nasty abilities that wiped parties if too many of them went off at the same time).  Comparatively, WoLK heroics are a cakewalk.  As long as the tank holds aggro on everything, the mobs are pretty much no danger to anyone.

Yeah, we've discussed that a few times in other threads as it's part of what makes the Icecrown 5-mans such a bitch.   Those instances require CC or at the very least interrupts on the trash for those not below 25-man gear.  However, people have gotten so used to facerolling places that they don't bother and wipe on simple shit like the "surprise" spawns in PoS.   A few interrupts on the female Vyrkul caster and watch for the hellfire and interrupt that.  Blammo, easy trash.  However I can count more wipes at that one spot than I can in all of my other heroic encounters.

The same is true of tanks who don't use CDs or healers who don't blow them because "it's only a heroic."  Yeah, but if your ass isn't going behind the rock to clear the debuff, you'd better be blowing that CD because I sure as hell can't heal through it.

I hope they bring back some of it with Cata.  Not to the riduculous "must have class x for instance y" levels of BC, but enough that it's not just another "gather 'em up, aoe them down" session.  Even when Heroic gear was "good" I heard my tank buddies complaining that's all they did. 

They need to bring back the days of trash that could Mindcontroll someone who would then wreck the hell out of half your party before you even realised he was hostile.  Most mobs these days are usually just stuff like: oh, he is casting a heal, i could interupt it, but it wont matter in the long run because even if it goes off the mob he just healed is going to die in 6 seconds instead of 3.

I wouldn't necessarily say that 'CC is a must' is a bad idea, but there's still a lot of CC-inequality even after most classes were given a 'proper' CC. Do I take the enh shaman who has a single humanoid-only cc usable every 45 sec or do I get the boomkin who has spammable hibernate + roots + cyclone / warlock with spammable banish + seduce/enslave + fear / ...? DK and warrior 'cc' would be offtanking I guess along with reliable interrupts.

Making mobs un-aoeable is a possibility, but I don't know how it could be done properly... stacking self-damage buff / enrage if the mob is hit with anything that's not a dot / incidental splash damage (from things like wandering plague) maybe?

No, no, no. As a DPS I want to get my rotation on, move with the fight and not worry about lag or other "surprises".

Because while I am obviously a better than average player, I don't want to exclude worse than average players from the content I'm enjoying.

Halls of Stone has a few mobs that do that as does the 3 packs of trash in ToC.  The abilities are there, it's just that most people mow the mobs down so fast it doesn't matter.  The only time it's really an issue is if the tank is the one who gets MC'd and proceeds to rip through the healer.

At least they brought back the "one player will get MC'd" raid encounter in Lady Deathwhisper.  It's ridiculous how many people have to be told "don't kill the mind controlled person dammit!" after half the raid unleashes on that person.

I got mind controlled yesterday in the Halls of Stone.  I had just started a hurricane, so all that really came of it was finishing the cast.  The bear was our only melee so the priest just healed through it.  I'm not sure anyone actually knew I had been controlled.

The Priestess mobs in 5 man ToC also have a mind-control.

And they always use it to burn Divine Hymn damnit.

Yea, mobs that MC have always been known to blow your biggest, longest cooldowns.

I will never forget the best part of strath:

Your druid getting MC'd and hearthing to moonglade.

Stupid baroness always burned my shield wall.  :angryfist:

Started up my DK again with a 3700 GS.  Anyone want to give some advice how to use the badges I'm accumulating?

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mal%27Ganis&cn=Rhavinous

Not sure which is the best way to go.

Tier 9 gloves and shoulders aren't expensive (30 emblems a piece) and yours are pretty bad.  I'd start there. Also a new shiny ring is only 35 emblems.  If you plan on playing this character for any period of time, save your frost emblems for a cloak.  There are also some nice frost emblem trinkets you could get instead of a cloak.

Triumph: Gloves/Shoulders/Ring are nice.  Maybe a Sigil if you don't like the Emblem of Frost one.

Frost: The Belt has been the biggest bang-for-the-buck on both my 80s but the Cloak might also be a good idea.  If the Sigil is good for your spec though, I'd grab it first.

If you don't raid now but want to, chain heroics as many as you can to get the entire T9 set and get whatever pieces you can to fill out what doesn't drop from the 219-232 heroics.  I just got done gearing my shammy up for ICC-10 doing this, and her gear isn't *the* best but it is a long way from heroics and quest rewards.

I'd like to raid, but I'm going to have to PUG it.  So T9 Gloves and shoulders then?  I thought as much.

Edit:
Why the T9 ones instead of these: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=47696

Nevermind, check rawr stuff.

edit2:
I'm also running an Unholy aoe spec.. no reaping.  Hows blood these days? Better for my gear level?

Edit3:
Moar upgrades for me.  2pc T9 now.  I'm thinking my next upgrade via Triumph badges will be my chest piece.

Well, if you go blood, there's a definite change in stat priorities.

I just did this exact thing with my DK about a month ago.  I'd get T9 legs + chest next as the 4-set is really good for UH spec.  Then either ring or the 245 helm.  Frost Badge cloak for sure if you get to that point.

For DPSing 5 mans I found UH kicks the shit out of Blood.  Seems to remain about equal in raids so it's more about which raid buff or debuff you bring.  I find there are already a lot of Blood DKs out there (I guess UH has been buffed back to competance recently?) and the UH debuff really helps them out.

Since this is the "simple questions" thread, I'll ask a very simple question.  You guys talk about tier gear all the time.  Do you mean arena gear, honor gear, or what?   I've been playing this game off and on for years and I still have no idea what this T9 stuff refers to.

No laughing!

PvE 5-piece sets are the tier loot.

T7 (200) - Naxx 10 and Heroism Badges
T7.5 (213) - Naxx 25 and Valour Badges
T8 (219) - Ulduar 10
T8.5 (226) - Ulduar 25 and Conquest Badges
T9 (232) - Triumph Badges
T9.25 (245) - Triumph Badges + ToC25 /ToGC10 Trophy
T9.5 (258) - ToGC25 chest loot
T10 - Frost Emblems
T10.25 - T10 item + Drop from ICC25/ICC10hc
T10.5 - T10.25 item + Drop from ICC25hc

List with all of them (and the PvP sets...) (http://www.wowhead.com/?itemsets&filter=qu=4;minle=200;minpi=5;maxpi=5#0-2+1)

Thanks for that.  I guess it's obvious that I haven't experienced any of the endgame content beyond dailies and WG/BG's. 

Tn is going to refer to PvE sets from raids.  Arena gear (and therefore down the line, honor gear) is usually referred to by its prefix: Deadly, Furious, Wrathful, etc.

With there being multiple levels of gear per "Tier" and the increased awareness of item levels the Tier designations have become a bit less meaningful but they're still useful shorthand.

Speaking of the arena sets.  Can I assume that pretty much all the PvP gear gets bumped up in ilevel once the put in Season 8 or is that staggered somehow?

Meaning I will be looking at 245 PvP gear for honour+arena points and low rating requirements?  Does this apply to the offset pieces you buy with pure honour as well?  Those suckers are 245 now so they go to what 264?

You can get furious gear for Triumph Badges since 3.3, that's ilvl 232 gear. Relentless gear is ilvl 251, but I don't think it will go to Frost Emblems immediately. ilvl 251 offset items (boots, belts, bracers, rings etc) should go to honour though next week. I'm not 100% certain though, blizzard has been fairly inconsistent with how and when they distribute PvP gear in the past.

Next stupid question then:  If I'm a pvp player with full honor/WG gear, what level of 5 and 10 man PvE content will I be able to competently attempt with that gear as a DPS (hunter on alliance, warlock on horde)?

Tier 9 wil be mentioned a lot because it's what is most easily available.  You can purchase the whole suit of it outside at the Argent Tournament, whereas (correct me if I'm wrong) previous sets only had certain pieces available on the emblem vendors.  It's really nice to have this available for a non raider.

You can do the same with Frost emblemss and the entry level tier 10, but they're pretty expensive and would take a while to get for any non-raider.


Any 5 man outside of Heroic Halls of Reflection you're probably fine in.  As far as 10 man raids, you may be somewhat behind the curve because at the very least you may have issues with the hit cap.  All of the stam and resilience you're getting on that pvp gear is taking away from more desirable pve stats.  But, this won't affect you much in the 5 mans outside of that single instance.

You should give the random heroic finder a try. You can't be worse than most of the DPS I end up being grouped with.

Don't bet on it.  One of my problems is that I'm used to playing only solo.  I have little to no understanding of how my class works when grouped.  My fear is a) getting grouped with people wasting my time or b) wasting the time of people that know what they're doing.  I guess I should just dive in and see how it goes.  One of the reasons that I started leveling a warlock was that it appeared to be a class with some of the least responsibility when it came to grouping.  My hunter has to debuff and cc a bit and that can require knowledge of encounters that I just don't have. 

There is no need for debuffing or CCing in 5 mans.  Just pew pew and loot.  Give it a shot, You can do a dungeon inside 30 minutes.

As a chain-heroic'er for the badges, I can tell you I really don't care what you do as long as we get the heroic done in 20-25m.  If your DPS is sub 900 or in the 400-500 range, people will give you shit, but a hunter with auto-shot can do more than that.  I was tossed in a heroic twice last night with a tank with under 24k health.  Most people would have been a dick and bailed right away, but I didn't care and just healed like mad to keep him alive as best as I could and we still got the instances done relatively quickly.  DPS doesn't waste people's time anywhere near as much as a bad or stupid tank or healer can.

As far as warlocks go, they may seem like no group responsibility, but people like to see big DPS numbers from them.  I ran with one yesterday pulling (get this) 450 DPS per fight.  I don't know what the hell he was doing, but the tank was ridiculing him the entire time over it and his response was "my guild doesn't have a problem with my numbers."  But said warlock didn't get kicked, just got dragged along with the rest of the group.

That said, get in the random dungeon finder and pull 1500-2000 DPS and no one will care outside of places like H-HoR (the Pit of Saron and Forge of Souls may care slightly too, but Halls of Reflection is just plain nasty).  People are much more likely to be vocal about gear and and performance of a tank or a healer than you unless you do stupid things like stand in stuff you aren't supposed to or pull mobs that the tank hasn't gotten to yet, which you don't do ;-)

Thanks for the encouragement.  Is there a way to avoid HoR or do I just leave the group if that one should happen to come up?

Unless your gearscore rating is above around 4200-4300 (wow-heroes of around 2350 or so) you can't even randomly queue for it so you won't get tossed into it.  And once again, if you have a super group with you, it's easy to clear even with 4 people and 1 who is new.

About the only tiered armour slot you should consider replacing is the BP (because it's a little on the mediocre side) - either for T10, the non-set analogue to T10 or the Titanium Razorplate. Other than that, you really don't want to break the T9 DPS 4-piece bonus until you're raiding Icecrown or similar. Yes, it's genuinely that good.

The sekret for locks in a 5man is seed, tab, seed, tab, seed, tab....

Then you get to see if your tank is any good at holding agro.

I'm probably going to start with my hunter.  I figure I'll just assist the tank at first and go through a standard survival rotation (though I've been playing marksman spec a lot lately).

Pretty much what you should do!  Really, give yourself more credit.  We love to tell horror stories of fail PUGs, but very rarely does it involve DPS unless they are just flat out BAD or seriously mouthing off to the rest of us.  Get in, learn a few fights and watch the rest of the group stomp the mobs to the ground before you have time to think ;-)

You'll be fine in full PvP gear.  If you're really worried you can queue yourself for non-heroics to learn the dungeons a bit, then switch to heroics.  Now I had the advantage of leaning on guildies to assuage my fears, but I used partial PvP sets to boost my quest-level gear, and that made a big difference.

The other nice thing is that there isn't a lot of competition for gear.  If you see something which is an improvement, you'll likely get it.  (May or may not apply to high-end dungeons, but the system won't be queuing you for those until your gear is better.)

Never, ever queue for normals as an 80.  You only get horrible players, vs heroics where the other guys in your group are as likely to be in full ICC as they are to be in blues and capable of carrying you.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1143749/Melee_Hunter.jpg)

Nebu, you have to fuck up bad to have the people here complain.

Also, that will get you through a heroic.

Also, need more axe skill, still getting glancing blows on an 80.

The only surefire way to make sure you never get queued for HoR is to make sure you never successfully complete Pit of Saron.  The second and third of the new 5 mans require you to have done the previous one in order to unlock the next one, so if you never run the Pit, you have a 100% chance of never getting queued for HoR.

Another option is to run HoR once, and then extend your lock out on it every day.  The dungeon finder will attempt to always assign you a group for a dungeon you are NOT locked to before assigning you one you ARE locked to, so that would at least soemwhat reduce your chances of getting into a HoR group.

Having exactly the opposite experience in my battlegroup. Done some normal randoms with 80 pally in "learning how to prot" trials and with my 78 frost mage, and had awesome groups with nice people.

Done roughly 17 bazillion random heroics as enhance shaman, resto shaman and holy pally and had waaaaaay more awful groups full of raging cockends.

Maybe it's a Euro thing.

Votekicked my first PuG player today; some lock doing 600 DPS in Nexus. As Disc I can do 1300 DPS in most easy heroics just by spamming mind sear alone, and I'm still healing. When I told him to buck his DPS up he said he was on the phone. Undergeared people I'm fine with, some of them are terrible, but a fair few try hard. Lazy people I have no tolerance for.

Conundrum:

I love to tank, so I've been doing specifically that in heroics since hitting level 80 on my warrior, and my gear is getting pretty decent. I'm pushing 30k health unbuffed.  I have only three kills left for my Glory of the Hero achievement.  They are Sartharion, Malygos and Kel'Thuzad.  Of course, the raids.  (I'd also like to experience the level 80 Ony at some point).

Now there are PUG raids taking place all the time for these, so I should be able to get into one.  Problem: my dps gear is in the gutter. I have a few epics, but some quest greens and other stuff.  It's also ungemmed and unenchanted.  I only really use it occasionally for questing.

Finally, the question: do I read, study, watch videos and otherwise cram for tanking the raids (on my first go) or do I work up my dps gear?  On the one hand, I can probably technically tank those raids after a few more upgrades, but a) slots for tanks are limited in raids and b) I don't want to be failtank due to inexperience combined with marginal gear and the unpredictability of a PUG.  On the other hand, grinding up some dps gear isn't my idea of a good time, let alone dropping the gold to make it good, but on the gripping hand it would let me relax a bit and maybe even dps some heroics.

Is it ridiculous to even try tanking them as a first experience? If not, what's a good benchmark for health/stam/avoidance?

If you're nearing 30k unbuffed you're overgeared for tanking those fights frankly. The first time I did all of those I am sure I wasn't near that total.

Noob paladin here, still leveling up.  I leveled her to 70 under the old paladin rules, then abandoned her almost immediately.  So I have a few questions.

One spec is ret.  Ret's fun and powerful, no doubt.  Seems face-smashingly easy to do top dps in random pugs (for the two dungeons I've been in).

I've been trying out a protection spec lately, in leveling and AV.  I am still trying to get the hang of things.  What are and when do I use my "oh shit" buttons?  I am competent enough to bubble myself, but I always fumble when it comes to helping out somebody else.  Say in AV, just to keep it easy.  What do I hit when somebody's going down?

In terms of your gear, you're fine.  Nothing in Naxx his particularly hard.  Malygos and Sarth are pains in the ass, but I imagine doing it normally with today's gear shouldn't be any worse than Naxx.

Everyone's got to start tanking raids sometime.  I started off in ICC-10.  Admittedly, off-tanking the first wing mostly involves standing still and getting punched in the face, but it wasn't so bad.

If you like the person: Lay on Hands.

If they're getting beat on by melee: Hand of Protection

If they're getting chain-snared and are willing to run away: Hand of Freedom

If you're both getting beat on: Divine Shield + Hand of Sacrifice

Divine Sacrifice is nice in parties, but I'm not sure it'd get much use in a big raid like AV.  If you're spec'd into Divine Guardian though, it's almost always the spell I cast after bubbling.

So this is sorta embarrassing  but for whatever reason healing Pit of Sauron's boss fights is giving me a fucking fit.  I can facerolll everything else (including Forge).  I don't suppose there are any useful hints or is it just a straight up matter of tweaking out some of my gear a bit more (and yeah, I know the boots have got to go - I'm still working on rep for boots and enchants)

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Cenarion+Circle&cn=Ygg

Pit of Saron is easy to heal IF your group know the fights and a total nightmare if they don't. They're very, very much about situational awareness and high mobility - both the healer and the rest of the group have to keep moving but keep the distances between them right. Too close or too spread out and you're fucked.

For Garfrost the main thing the group have to do is hide behind the rocks occasionally to let the debuff drop. Once people are getting that debuff stacked over 10 then there's little you can do. Frost resist totem will help a bit but not a vast amount. You're gonna have to do a lot of group chasing, which means re-dropping totem sets a lot too, because people have to dodge rocks thrown at them. The group have to take all the adds that pull with Garfrost out too - they should be 1st priority.

Ick/Krick are pretty easy - everyone has to move around a LOT. Keep out of the green shit, run away from poison nova, run away if you're pursued. The tricky bit is the barrage of purple domes. Everyone's gotta keep moving but they've also got to avoid the purple domes that everyone else leaves as they run around. It's a dance basically and either people get it or they die. As with Garfrost at the end of the day if a DPS or two die then so be it. Concentrate on yourself and the tank first!

Tyrannus is easy imo, nothing special for a healer at all except to, again, keep moving to avoid the ice blast things.

Your gear is certainly good enough for it, no doubt, it's just a question of everyone in the group being familiar with the fights really. I actually think the hardest part of PoS as a healer is the groups of mobs on the slope up towards the ice tunnel after Ick/Krick. If they aren't getting interrupted enough then the damage output is horrendous, and very few people seem to know how to interrupt in pugs :(

Healing PoS is all about the rest of your party not screwing up.

Forgemaster Garfrost: Frost Resistance Totem (or Aura) mostly trivializes the fight.  If it's down, it's mostly on the DPS to not get hit by boulders and get the debuff off of them if they don't get resists.  It's basically impossible to heal through a full group with 7-10+ stacks on them for long, even in the best gear.

Ick & Krick:  All on people not getting hit by the Nova, or Mines, or during the pursuit phase.  If people are getting beaned by the Nova, I'd drop a Cleansing Totem just in case.

Scourgelord Tyrannus:  Again, Frost Resistance Totem is your friend when dealing with DPS getting beaned by Rimefang.  As a healer it's mostly triage work if the tank kites Tyrannus over ice patches during the enrage, the DPS don't stay clumped together when they get Rimefang's mark on them, and no one forgets what Overlord's Brand (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=69172) does.

And I second the trash before the cave as the worst part of that instance, as a tank or a healer.

Most things have been covered; all I'd add is that for Tyranus, don't stand near the cave, or you can randomly eat 32k shadowbolts. That's not too pleasant. Another thing for Ick is to use instant ghost wolf when he pursues, it'll let you get away quicker.

About trash: the hardest part of the instance is indeed the two groups of caster-heavy mobs on the hill. Cleansing totem + grounding totem whenever it's up + wind shear is pretty good for those two packs to prevent damage / position mobs; you can also hex the humanoid caster as a ghetto interrupt or even a cc [if the tank los pulls]. A quick wind shear on a mob when it starts hellfiring the group saves a LOT of damage. Of course if the tank's undergeared, you probably won't be able to spare the GCDs on tricks like this.

Your gear is missing a LOT of gems and enchants.

Enchants: Head, Shoulder, Back, Chest, Wrist, Legs, Boots, Weapon and Shield missing
Gems: Back and Waist (Also missing eternal belt buckle)

Head enchant you can get from Wyrmrest as you are exalted, shoulder is more of an issue since you haven't even interacted with anyone from Sons of Hodir by the looks of things; but it's not the biggest enchant.

From enchants alone (-shoulders) you would net 173 spellpower, 23 haste, 35 int, 55 stamina, +8% runspeed and 5mp5

Gems would add more haste and SP. Healing is always a balance between keeping your mana up, and then once you can sustain a level of casting, boosting your throughput. As a resto shaman you want to stack haste like crazy (I'm at around 900 haste unbuffed on Nerfed), but not at the cost of being incapable of sustaining your casting.

For gear improvements I'd suggest you get Talisman of Resurgence next to replace your Winged Talisman, then get the EoV Back. I'd also reccomend dropping your glyph of water mastery for glyph of earthshield; ES is a must-have glyph. If you need more mana regen stack Int gems rather than MP5 gems, you'll get better returns that way.

Otherwise I'd echo what the others have said; PoS is by and large an exercise in your DPS not standing in stuff.

Yah, the enchants are mostly a matter of me not wanting to waste mats on shit I'm trying to replace quickly and then forgetting to tell an enchanter buddy of mine what I'm looking for when I do get a new piece of gear.

 I was dicking off and working on the other easier factions first (and getting gear that was actually worth putting the enchant on) before tackling Sons of Hodir - especially since I'm going through it right now with my tank.

I had never even heard of the eternal belt buckle, so that's a definite must buy on the shopping list.

Originally, mana was an issue, but since most days I'm sitting about about 3/4's at worst, losing a bit of mana regen for a slightly larger error of margin on the tank sounds like a fantastic plan.    I'm tapped out on badges again (just bought the Egg last night),  but another few days should net the next talisman easy enough.

Thanks everyone for the advice!

You can reasonably do Sons of Hodir from neutral to exalted in one afternoon now. I think it took me 2-3 days playing casually.  

One quest chain, and you're Friendly I think, and then once you do all the one-time quest you're Honored, then the relics are 650 a turn in and buyable on the AH.  You can usually cover the cost of relics by the gold gotten from the quest chain, so it ends up a wash, at worst.

edit: Also, blue gems in T9?  I usually drop the gold for epic gems for epic gear, let alone T9.

It's called being broke and not having the cash to drop on the epics right now. They'll get swapped out for the purple upgrades as cash allows (which is to say when I go back to a few zones and do quest chains)

It's interesting to me to see other people suffering from tanking anxiety (tank-xiety  :awesome_for_real:).  Wondering if they're ready for certain instances, are they geared enough, do they know fights.  It's the responsible side of being new to tanking and wanting to do a good job (as opposed to the bad tank experience).  It's quite clear that there's more to tanking than having the gear - you need to know the fights and you're a lightning rod for any wipes.

I'm just wondering what's going to happen if Blizzard executes on their intention to make it easier to tank.  There have been blue posts talking about having an Arms warrior slap on a shield and be able to tank 5 mans.  I can't see this working unless they're talking about Cataclysm 5-mans being facerollable on normal difficulty.

Not really a game question; more a potification.

Good tanking is a mindset, aptitude for the game, and confidence. Gear comes from having those things. Too many tanks have confidence, and just think the rest is useless, so they fail horribly when dealing with others. It's the same as good dps or good healing for that matter. The only difference is that tanks have to handle putting their asses on line in front of a bunch of people in a very obvious fashion. No meters, no digging deeper, none of that. If you have a shitty tank you'll know it within 20 seconds. I can't say that about anything else unless I'm looking at a bunch of screaming mods.

I want one button that will cast A, unless it's on cooldown, in which case it will cast B instead. Apparently WoW thinks this is cheating and won't let me do it with a macro. Is there an addon that gets around this, or do I have to just use an external macro program to simulate mashing several hotkeys at once?

Which specific attacks, you may be able to cheese it with a cast sequence.


Otherwise, no, you won't be able to do it with any legit means.

No, it gets hung up on the 10 second Divine Storm cooldown. So are they going to ban me for using any generic typists macro program? Ooh from what I read, apparently yes. Fucking assholes.

A few patches ago, you could've used a /castrandom macro, but they intentionally broke those.


I have a macro I use that puts Crusader Strike and Shield of the Righteous onto the same button for the 1% chance I might need to use a 1h/shield while in Ret mode.

All I really want is to use AutoHotKey or some program like that to make it so that pushing say f1 equates to me pushing 123 in a row really fast. Facerolling them, if you will.

All true, to which I'd add situational awareness.  Not only do you not have to stand in the goo, you have to also be watching to make sure a loose add isn't eating the healer, and possibly positioning the boss and/or reacting to its special attacks.  You can't be a good tank and have tunnel vision. 

You'll still be limited by the GCD even with a outside macro program.

Of course. Here's the difference:

I put say Divine Storm, Judgement, and Crusader Strike all in a /castsequence on one key. The first three presses it works fine. On the fourth, it comes back to Divine Storm which still has several seconds of cooldown left and just sits there. It won't skip to Judgement, it'll just keep going "durr cooldown" until Divine Storm is ready again.

Meanwhile if I put those three spells on the 1, 2, and 3 keys, and use an external program to make pressing X equal to pressing 123 at the same time, hitting X will cast the first thing that isn't on cooldown, global or otherwise, while giving me error messages for the other two. Literally the same as taking your thumb and mashing all 3 keys at once.

Yea, nothing legitimate will allow that in game. Blizzard is very keen on stamping out macros and mods that make 'decisions' for players.

Yeah, doesn't matter anyway. Turns out the rotation of those three repeats well with the character limit to fit them all into a /castsequence. I just want to free up some fucking buttons.

You only have like 5 to begin with! Sheesh  :why_so_serious:

Now I only have three! Mahahaha! Pwn, Stun, Bubblehearth!

Might be able to do it with the logitech (or equiv) G15 (11/whatever) keyboards.  Their macro keys allow you to specify a delay before proceeding to the next step.

That's been ruled unacceptable by Blizz too. There were lots of threads about the G15 a few years ago and they basically said that they had no problem with the keyboard as long as you didn't use the macro functions to do anything that couldn't be done with a single keypress on a normal keyboard.

Get a 5+ button mouse, bind two of those buttons to alt and ctrl using an external program.  Make a bunch of macros with:

Anyone here run an Unholy DK tank?  Or is that just not a viable pick?  I assume I'll be told to Frost tank.  lol.

My DK (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Crushridge&cn=Zaphiir&gn=Jademoon) has an unholy tank offspec that I use in heroics. Compared to my bear (and even my warrior), it's pretty bad... most aggro comes from DOTs and single-target double disease abilities; glyphed + specced DND is actually pretty nice, but it eats runes and can't be kept down constantly. I'm going to change to frost probably (even though my feral druid is in bear form 99% of the time as it is, tank > dps for random heroic queues). Blood is also a decent tank, but that's mostly a raid thing.

Anyway, if you really want to stick with unholy, your tank rotation is similar to your DPS rotation, except blood strike usually only gets used once per fight to get desolation up. IT-PS-pestilence on multiple targets with a DND ready, SS the focus target, pray. If you have experience with unholy DPS and/or a blood tap / bone shield macro, it works fine for tanking too.

edit: screw AMZ, seriously. If it cost RP instead of a rune, MAYBE it'd be worth using... I still have it because it's an obligatory tank cooldown. Same with corpse explosion, even glyphed it's not as good threat as a single deathcoil except for massive aoe situations where everyone dies at the same time anyway..

As I've said elsewhere, Blood really is the superior tank spec at the moment.

I can't recommend glyph of disease enough for DK tanks.  Particularly if you're trying unholy tanking.  One rune to refresh diseases on all targets? Yes, plz.  It also frees up enough runes to drop D&D as soon as the CD is up, provided you've got all 3 points in Morbidity.

'Course, I haven't tanked as Unholy since they nerfed bone shield into the ground.

I <3 blood tanking.  Still can't stand the frost tree.  I don't think I've specced into it for more than 8 hours since I made my DK.

I've been unholy tanking some instances lately.  My gear is up to 2 pieces of the triumph set + fancy helmet + Marrowstrike + some stray decent stuff.  It's hard to compare to my warrior because the warrior's gear is much better right now, but it's manageable.  

Bone shield suuuuuucks, though, especially if you're used to paladin holy shield or warrior shield block. I have a TellMeWhen icon showing when it is not up so time to push buttan, and it is NEVER up and always on cooldown.  One minute is a looong time.

Hard to tell about threat with the different gear levels I'm experiencing.  Best I can say now is it's "different".  Single-target threat has not been an issue at all, though.  And anti-magic shell is fun to play with.  And everybody loves ebon plague.  For heroics at least, it seems to work ok.

Glyphed howling blast is ranged, AE snap agro. It's up there with sliced bread in AE agro happy body pulling heroic PUGs.

Blood is better for boss tanking.

That's how I feel about Unholy tbh. I leveled as Blood, then specced Frost to tank in the 3.0 era. When they did the first big round of nerfs (moving HB to 51p) I went Blood and never looked back. I've never really played as a dps (dual specced for tank/pvp) because I played at the start of LK when getting into a group as a DK dps was unpossible.

Caveat: do NOT use glyph of disease if you are specced for the improved icy talons thing, it will break your ability to refresh it I believe.

Reason #5024 that vehicles are a bullshit idea nobody will miss when they're left out of Cataclysm: Wanna move all your keybinds to the two top bars and leave the one bottom original bar for shit you're content to click? Fuck you! Bind the first five buttons of the bottom bar or be left trying to steer vehicles with the mouse and click at the same time!

I don't think I'm parsing that right. What do the first 5 buttons have to do with vehicle controls?

Those first five buttons pass their bindings along to the vehicle buttons. Unbind them and none of the vehicle buttons will have bindings. So you will bind those bottom buttons and bind them to something convenient, or fuck you when it comes to whatever random faggot daily gimmick they make you do.

Why would you completely unbind your first five actionbar buttons?

Better question: You're still using the default blizzard bars?

Since my 2 key was my heroic strike key for ~2 years, I rebound that exact location to mouse wheel down so I can heroicstrikeheroicstrikeheroicstrikeheroicstrike.  It was disorienting the first time I realized I have to use mousewheel down to press the '2' ability on a vehicle, but I got used to it.  I think next time I log in I'll put heroic strike & cleave on one of my hidden bars so I can reclaim the 2 key for vehicles (2 became Shield Slam, I put it on my cooldown bar so I could watch it closely)

It has nothing to with vehicles.  Bar 1 in the default UI is the possession bar.  The vehicle UI just puts a different skin on that bar, so you can't bind it and Bar 1 independently.  Same thing happens when a Priest uses Mind Control except without the skin.

I know I can change what bar gets possessed in Bartender4, so I imagine there's a way change that without wrecking too much havoc on your UI.

Why wouldn't I? I'd rather just run all my keybinds along the top one. Just because. I wasn't aware the default bar was special and that "push 3 to drop gnomish ticklebombs" won't work without it.


Why wouldn't I? I know using an addon to shove all your buttons up into the middle of the screen or whatever makes you super pro and all, but since any real USEFUL function (best damage spell not on cooldown with one key, etc) is deliberately broken, who really cares?

Default UI users representin'!

Really it's a minor miracle I have any addons at all, but I was tired of asking other people to split the DPSers because I didn't have recount, and I decided I like Bigwigs while I'm learning how to tank a new encounter (I did all of Naxx and most of Ulduar without it though  :drillf:). I should probably also install Omen, but whatevs.

The *only* add-on I consider critical these days is Deadly Boss Mods if you want to raid.  Everything else is just personal preference.  I prefer to run with as few as possible honestly.  I have Recount so I can see who is sucking and whether we should even try bosses like Festergut.  I use Omen for those rare times when I am yanking aggro like crazy and have to be careful.  Gatherer is also used out of laziness.  Nothing else!

(http://www.slyagent.com/WoWScrnShot_012610_211309.jpg)

Gets a little crowded during 25-m action, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be in 40-m raids.

That screenshot makes me cringe.  Get Grid for crissakes.

I'm playing on a crappy laptop while I'm in Phoenix for a few days.  I tried playing with the default UI for a night, but the next night I had to install the barest core of the mods I use.  I simply find it too hard to play with the default positioning of the unit frames.  Gotten good enough at setting up my UI that PitBull4 only took a few minutes (mostly just finding the damn options to turn off all the stupid frames I don't need).  I think almost everything else I could live with but I'm just so used to my unit frame and my target's sitting near my feet. Bagnon, Dominos and a few others made it on also.  Sticking to leveling, although I'm surprised at how well this laptop is doing with the graphics cranked down.   Dalaran is bearable and I actually what I miss the most is my monitor, not diminished graphics and cpu capacity.

Crazy people who actually raid heal with the default UI represent?

Seriously, what's wrong with you people! I went from screen dominating green bar hell to mouseover casting and tiny window of who is in or out of range love.

Seconded!  If you think you are healing at your best without something like Healbot, you are just wrong.  I can see who is in range, hurt, or just plain has agro and shouldn't.  I have heals coming on people that are about to get whacked more times than not.  I do that all WHILE tank healing too.  This allows me to not overheal spam and go OOM constantly while keeping our activities successful.

If you still insist default UI is ok for raid healing, at least get an add-on for pvp healing.  There just is no other way to do it.

Stock UI is hideous if not just barely functional.

I need my UI for moving my health bars.  Condensing buffs/debuffs.  Putting bars for temp buffs above my health bars, and debuffs above my targets healthbar and their durations.  Big plus on this one for my DK.  Recount, Omen are needed as well.  I do need to remember to download a raid mod though but I havn't raided in a while so I don't need it.

That's the main thing for me (and the ugliness).  The default UI has gotten a lot of useful features, but the placement of things like vitals off in the corner is still dumb.  Oddly enough, the vehicle UI is pretty good about that.

I've always been the type that runs a lot of mods, but now they're mostly small, or for personal data mining, or just provide a display I like better.  I didn't even have Omen installed until I started tanking, and that would have been verboten back in the day.

You CAN heal 10 mans with the default UI.

It will simply drive you to the brink of insanity compared to healbot/vuhdo/grid+clique.

The difference is really in how much information you can have (knowing a target has weakened soul with two priests, etc), and how many people you can pay attention to at once. Vudho will happily heal a WG raid. The default UI would probably make you walk into a tree.

Click-casting as a healer is the way to go.

That really doesn't have anything to do with using the default frames versus *favorite raid frames*+Clique/@mouseover macros or an all-in-one like Healbot/Vuhdo though.

Unless someone is tanking or healing a raid, frankly a lot of this just looks like UI masturbation for its own sake. Yeah I can't glance up between pulls and see that my Blessing of Might has 12 minutes left, I need that shit on an animated bar chart in the middle of my screen.

I've healed through Rotface on 10-m content and up to Saurfang for 25-m content (most of the WotLK content really).  With the default UI.  And no, no one complained about anything.

I tank with omen up and DBM. But I don't mess around with all the UI stuff.

Yeah, I've been healing 10 mans just fine since TBC. If I may toot my own horn (toot toot) I am still better at healing than some of the healers in my guild who do use all that add on bullshit. I would definitely get something for 25s though, I think that would make my head explode otherwise. But since I would rather shoot myself than do 25s as a healer, it's a moot point.  :grin:

I remembered another addon I use! Quartz.

I'd argue on middle-of-the-screen, but I understand what you're saying.

The reason I use a bar display (SimpleBuffBars in this case) is that while a few buffs use the same or similar icons a lot of debuffs do so I find the text list more useful then a grid of icons.  Also, before this patch I could filter out buffs that I didn't care about (but you can do that now with the Condensed thing).

Honestly, all of this stuff comes down to what works for you.  For example, the health bars being around the middle of my screen stemmed from picking up Guild Wars and seeing how much more sense it made to have my vitals near where my eyes already were.

With Sjofn bringing up Quartz, having your latency in your cast bar or a GCD timer or a swing timer are all damn useful for most classes.

DBM is pretty cool for the abilities I can't remember in 5-mans, and also I appreciate someone saying "ABILITY X.. RUN AWAY". It doesn't get any nicer than that.  The way the bars animate across the screen to get your attention when something's about to happen is nice too.

Otherwise I use Mik Scrolling combat text, a recent addition, because I wanted to try a new one. I tank with Omen up. Titanbar is the only other one I use. Maybe healing is different but I never had a problem hitting a key to heal, especially since I use Q E R G and F, and there are usually no more than 5 abilities I absolutely have to have in twitch range for any given class.  Keeping track of 5 people is infinitely easier than 10 or 25 I'd guess though.

You CAN drive a car with your teeth, that doesn't mean it's the easiest way to do things.

UI addons allow me to free up a ton of screen real-estate. Eliminating redundancy is also another nice thing; I run Grid which eliminates the need for party unit frames for example. Other addons like recount are incredibly useful for assessing both my own performance and the performance of others.

I have no idea how anyone heals raids without Clique+grid.  It's massively faster than clicking on unit frames and pressing my heal button.  It also frees up a bunch of keybinds, which for a shaman are more precious than life itself.

They don't frequently release upgrades for my car that necessitate me having to wait until the steering wheel is upgraded to be able to drive again.

That said, I also use recount too (you reminded me), so maybe I'm more of a addon junkie than I thought I was.  Gearscore and Rankwatch too. Those things are insidious!

Is there a way to make a macro use an ability on your focus, if you have one, and if not, on your target?

Addons really don't break much anymore.  I'm sure they'll shatter with Cat, but then you'll be leveling, so who cares.

Last addon problem I had was when a  build of Dominos uploaded to Curse was packaged wrong or some shit.  Took all of a minute to fix after following a link on the addon page.

ding ding ding ding ding

I fucking hate the "whelp, let's see which addons broke THIS patch" game, and I don't want to be one of those people who are completely helpless without their 368925384562345 addons. The UI isn't nearly as bad as people claim it is. It really isn't.

/cast [@focus,exists] [] Ability;

That's the generic form of it, but it will break (i.e. not try and cast on your target) if you have an illegible focus.  Assuming this isn't a resurrection spell (or other spell you can cast on dead targets) you'll want to use one of these three forms:

/cast [@focus,nodead,help] [] Ability; For helpful spells
/cast [@focus,nodead,harm] [] Ability; For harmful spells.
/cast [@focus,nodead] [] Ability; For spells that work on both friendly and enemy targets like Dispel Magic.

With these, if the spell can't be cast on your focus because you don't have one (nodead, help, and harm all imply exists), it's dead, or of the wrong type; it'll cast on your target... or you if you don't have a target, have auto self-cast on, and it's a friendly spell :awesome_for_real:.

Edit: Clarified why exists disappears in the other macros.

So for Spellsteal, I would use the following:

/cast [@focus,nodead,harm] [] Spellsteal;

Is that correct? Particularly I'm trying to use this for Jaraxxus, so I can still get the buff while dpsing the adds; my mage only recently hit 80 and I never needed something like this before.

Yup.

If you have a focus, it's not dead, and it's an enemy the macro will try to cast Spellsteal on your focus.  If one of those three things isn't true, the macro will work like a normal Spellsteal button.

Edit: Way too many "it"s.

Its about minimizing the chance of error.  It isn't that it matters 99% of the time, but if it saves you one wipe because you realize something isn't quite right before the pull, then the UI mods are worth it.  

The same principle applies to tons of UI mods, its not that they are all needed all the time, but when they save you that wipe, or that mistake, it helps.
Furthermore, post Blackwing Lair, pretty much every raid instance Blizzard has made in WoW has fights in which situational awareness is very important.  So, the more information you have easily accessible on your screen, the less you need to devote to memorizing, keeping track of things, etc, and the more you can focus on things like not standing in the fire (which any raider can attest to, is a major problem in every raid group it seems).

That assumes you are raiding at a high enough level to care about such a thing.  But, personally, I'd say its probably worth it, as it reduces instances of error that leads to wipes.

If you don't care about that little bit of extra efficiency, then you don't, but that was always the reasoning behind required mods when I was in a raiding guild.  I tend to agree.

There's a certain level of addons where I just start to wonder why you bother playing the actual game. It was very very uncomplicated to begin with. As I've said before, if you are a healer, I totally get the use of anything and everything to make your life a better place. If you are a dps with 20 addons, you're a fucking scrub.

Yah, that map mod is totally skirting the line between playing and having the game play for you.

 :awesome_for_real:

Can all of the mod-a-phobics quit being gigantic retards for just a moment? It's a BAD UI.  And trust me, I've seen bad UIs.  I work for IBM.  :oh_i_see:

Legal disclaimer here: my thoughts, view, pant size do not reflect the opinions of IBM.  DON'T HURT ME.

No one's debating a bad UI. I just wonder about the people that need a mod to scratch your ass for you. I use about 8 myself. I can still realize WHEN I'M STANDING IN SHIT.

The one you can argue for that largely everyone uses: DBM.   I'd argue that it's needed somewhat as it's kind of dumb to expect people to stare their chat screen looking for a boss emote to determine an ability and not everything has an animation/cast time/easily spotted visual cue.  It makes up for the limitations of their game engine encounter design.  Still, yes, people that can't be bothered to move out the poison or get out the way of the giant laser get their hand held a bit.  Yet, they still die.

The rest is mostly all aesthetics and data parsing/presentation.  OHH NOES.

edit: To expand.

And Blizzard now designs fights based around the fact they know everyone has DBM. They say they don't, but let's get real. I'm not a mod-a-phobe, but I also understand the effect of a mod making developers feel de-pantsed by better programming. We learned that lesson way back with decursive and BWL, and I don't like it when the boss fights happen off the field, so to speak.

In ridiculous terms, they know that we know that they know about our knowing that they know.

Good luck having to look three inches higher to see that you have 47 minutes of Well Fed left, noob. And let me tell you, everyone appreciates the three different mods I run to analyze the performance of others. Why just the other day this pug rogue in spell leather told me "stfu fagort" in response to some helpful tips. I think it stands for So Thankful For... something.

It's always fun when I can't tell that you agree or disagree with anything, and just ramble on like Dennis Miller. You should do Monday Night Football.

Decursive was more of a response to fuck-stupid boss encounter design.  It was good they nerfed the shit out it and then rightfully tossed "curse the entire party for ultimate wipeage" in the trash.


Option A: I look in the upper left hand corner of my screen to check my health. 
Option B: I look where I was already looking and check my health.

Which one should I pick?

Reverting to WindupNutsack form in this thread isn't doing you any favors.  You're just looking like a moron.

So Thankful for Urhelp. Duh.

Also, the people in my guild who are stupidest about standing in stupid shit they shouldn't stand in and all that other bullshit are the ones with a billion add ons. When you have enough add ons basically thinking for you, it ... makes you think a lot less in my experience. We have people who have REPAIR add ons, because clicking the repair icon is apparently such a hardship. They're usually the geniuses who magically have shit break in the middle of dungeons. And so on.

They're also the ones you don't see for a week after a patch. Which is a mixed blessing. :P



PS: I don't actually give a fuck about who uses what addons, I just get tired of the retarded MY GOD HOW CAN YOU PLAY LIKE THAT. It isn't anywhere NEAR as horrible as the add on humpers claim. (Love, a gigantic retard mod-a-phobic, apparently.)

I don't disagree at all. It was absolutely ridiculous. It was the biggest case of the playerbase hitting the developers in the face with their own stupidity. It was a total, We Win, You Lose, button.

They didn't like it then, and they don't like it now. They will design things knowing you are using every advantage you have, and then lying to your face about it.

At least they seem better at warning you that shit is about to get real on boss fights! Many fine raid warnings happen without any mod help these days, not that I think many people would notice this, as pretty much everyone has DBM or Bigwigs. But still!

You're right, and Blizzard is like the Borg in that regard. They will assimilate anything that remotely seems interesting into their own system. They will do it poorly, but just enough to make you question whether it's worth the effort to keep updating external mods.

Think about it this way with the mod battle: Let's suppose I'm a programmer with nothing better to do, and I create a "GTFO MOD". This mod will automatically move your toon for you while you hit your dps rotations when you get hit by any ground effects. I just cut Blizzard's boss design in half.

What's awesome is even if that mod existed, I know some people in my guild would use it, but still die to fire, because they'll get confused why they moved and run into something else to kill them.

I love my guild, I really do.  :heart:

Ok that made me chuckle.  :awesome_for_real:

If only because I raid lead 24 other people like that.

And yet their base UI still doesn't have moveable unit frames or customizable button bars.  Is it too hard to give Tuller a call and see if he'd like a job at Blizzard?

I'm pretty sure their attitude at this point for that type of thing is "community does it better, why bother?". Otherwise it probably could have been done in 5 years. 


Got an example that isn't against the TOS?  :grin:

If you want a mod that really, really goes beyond the pale: ShockAndAwe.

The accountant side of me says, "And it's also free."

The nerdrage gamer side of me gets pissy.

If something is trivial enough that a few lines of LUA could do it, I don't know how my spending any time on it constitutes thinking.  I do have a mod that automatically hits "Guild Repair" and sells my grey items.  I have another that refills my Candles.  I'm still the one that remembers to run to the Priest Armor vendor in ICC to repair though, or whip out my Gruntling to buy more reagents.

In combat, BigWigs timers do allow me to pull off "Stupid Discipline Priest Tricks" like having everyone shielded going into Bone Storm on Marrowgar-10.  Nothing in combat helps me decide when to blow cooldowns or transition between raid shielding and full HPS on a tank.  And honestly, if BigWigs is bitching at me about standing in fire, I either meant to do it or I've already screwed up.

I use Squawk and Awe!

God damn hidden Eclipse Cooldown!  :angryfist:

Why you gotta hate, dog? It ain't like I turned this thread into a lore debate!

You are a lot more likely to derherp forget to repair when you never have to think to yourself, "o rite I need to repair" while you're selling shit. Yeah, that's not deep thought, but you still have little thoughts drifting around about stuff you should be paying attention to.

Also, I've already said I use Bigwigs, mostly because I got tired of Ingmar whining that I am doing it the hard way waaaah. I don't need it, not the way people think I do. I like it, it makes my life easier when I am learning a new encounter, but it does, in fact, make me lazier and it sure as hell doesn't make the dumber-about-fire people suck less. Or God help me, it does, but I would REALLY hate to think about my life as a raid leader that way.

I view most add ons like voice chat, really. It's handy dandy and can make life easier in a lot of ways, but when people get all OH MY GOD I CANNOT DO ANYTHING WITHOUT IT, I think they need to take a deep breath and realise that no, actually, you CAN do stuff without it. Sometimes quite easily! (Pre-emptive strike: Yes we use voice chat for raids, although for most raids we do, I would feel pretty safe going without. But some guildies insist they need it for five mans, which makes me go :uhrr:, hence the comparison for me.)

Addons really don't break that often. I did an addon update the other day and I had some that I hadn't updated in two patch cycles and I hadn't even noticed. That said, I have cut the addons I use down a lot:

Bartender
Pitbull
Grid
Recount
DBM
Rankwatch

That's about it really, I'm not some addon junkie, but the first fve of those transform a clunky and unattractive UI into something far more workable.

I've never understood the opalescent frames.

If something works for somebody else, I think it's hard to criticize the results.  So you have to be careful about taking ui judgments too far.  I know there are a lot of guilds that require you to submit screenshots of your ui in their application process, but I'll wager the good ones just want to ask you why you do or don't use a specific mod (along with providing proof you've bound all your keys). 

But it's also hard to argue that certain mods don't do things better than the default ui.  Grid is a better raid frame.  DBM is a better warning system than fancy particle effects.  Omen is more informative than the threat bar.  There is no default replacement for Recount.  Bartender is easier to configure keybinds, able to be scaled, and moveable.  Pitbull allows for more customizeable, scaling, moveable unit frames.  There are bunch of class mods that help each class in specific ways that the default UI cannot.  Consult your EJ class forum.

With all that said, if you can manage to stay out of the fire with the default ui, then more power to you.

People who think WoW has a clunky default UI need to refresh their memories and play ANY OTHER MMO ON THE MARKET for a little.

Didn't say it was clunky.  Just that there are things that mods do better.

They're all bad.  I don't remember a good MMO UI.  At least with WoW, there's the community to make up for the shortcomings. Just about every base MMO UI looks like it was shipped without any sort of usability evaluation or the programmers shot back every request with "that's hard, I got more important stuff to finish".

Although..  UO had movable unit frames (and a very serviceable UI for the time).  :awesome_for_real:

Everything about EQ2's UI is moveable and resizable. EQ2 also allows any combination of windows to be open at once, unlike WoW where you can't have (for example) the AH and a profession window open simultaneously.

Funny, I have my prof windows and  Auction windows open at the same time quite often.   Quest log is one you can't do it with, though.

Really? Is there some addon you're using to do so? I can't remember if you can with Auctioneer; stopped using it because repeated use of Quick Auctions bogged the database down really fast to the point where I'd get a one minute lockup the first time I touched the AH on login.

Think it's a matter of having enough screen resolution for the AH window to not push stuff off the right side of the screen.  I can have the AH and like two windows up on my widescreen.  I have a mod habit though, and yes Auctioneer is one of them.  So it may be one of them doing it and I'm unaware.

It might just be Auctioneer because I have AuctionLite, and while the Auction window only takes up ~60% of my horizontal screen @ 1680x1050 I can't have any other window open.

So I had a poopsock day yesterday and powered up my JC by hand (I'm broke) and prospected all my own ores.  I'm sitting at 402 right now and I'm finally at the point where I can do my daily JC quest.  Few questiosn:

I need tokens it looks like, and there is only one daily available for the tokens correct?

I also see you can buy tokens with Titanium powder.  What is the best location to farm this?

Are there any other daily things I should be doing?  I don't recall much else.  I already have my +36 strength design for my DK, I just need dragon's eyes. 

Also Icy Prisms.  I guess it's profitable to do that once a day right?

You can't farm titanium powder, you get it as a byproduct of prospecting titanium ore; I farm my titanium in Wintergrasp, but I'm not sure that's the best place for it. You can also obtain tokens with the Damaged Necklace quest starter thing.

I probably would, especially if you're getting a lot of Frozen Orbs from running Heroics.

Well yes, I knew it comes from Titanium Ore, I was looking for a good place to farm it.


Unfortunately I think I just sold a bunch on the AH without knowing.  Ah well.

Can someone explain to me why I keep seeing people pop out of the ground next to titanium nodes in Shalozar?  Is there a z-axis exploit that Blizzard hasn't fixed? 

Sorry, wasn't sure since you just said titanium powder.

Frozen Orbs still sell well on some servers? They AH for their vendor price on Andorhal.

Farmers using hacks. Look on your combat log for who "performs mining" on the node and report them.  It's usually pretty quiet for a while once you feed Blizzard enough names.

Anyone here PVP as a mage? Mine just hit 80 a bit ago and I'd like to give Arenas a try this coming season with him. Spec suggestions, glyphs, etc. would all be helpful.

Pretty much everyone who plays wow fails econ.  So you probably want to check how much Titanium is going for on your server before you prospect it.  Don't think it's worth as much when it's broken down as it is to everyone who is paying a premium for the ore itself for misc stuff.  I'd sell the ore and buy damaged necklaces to get you started on your important gem cuts.  You used to be able to make a shitton of money prospecting saronite.  But for whatever reason the price of epic gems didn't stay as high as the ore it came from.  Probably because you can buy them with honor.

Yes there is only one Jewelcrafting daily.  Get it from the dude in Dalaran. 

Don't buy the blue recipes, they drop like candy from heroics.  Maybe buy Bold/Delicate/spell power(?) scarlet ruby. 

Don't waste JC tokens on Dragon's Eyes - they're tradeable until you cut them.  Buy them off the AH from noobs who wasted their tokens on Dragon's Eyes.

Epic gems are ridiculously cheap from vendors. They cost 20 badges for pure colors, 10 for multi-colors (They're on the heroic vendor, so most people seem to forget them) and only 10k honor.  Alchemists can also transmute them from the useless gems you prospect off of the very plentiful cobalt and saronite ores.  You can get an epic gem an hour even if you're a terrible player and undergeared.  Thus, they're super cheap.

I had forgot to look on the AH.  I bought a Dragon Eye with a token last night.  Sweet.

I've been doing the daily fine and I've gotten a shit load of designs from heroics already.  Buying the necklaces after selling ore is a good plan.  I'll have to look at the market.  I havn't started farming ore yet.

--

New question.  I've switched from UH to Blood DPS for my DK.  I have 4pc T9.  But my rings/trinkets are poor a long with a few other slots that are mediocre.  Now I just need a few more badges and a lot of dragon eye gems.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mal%27Ganis&cn=Rhavinous

Order of improvement:
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=47734
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=47729

Then I'll have to keep saving for the cloak from frost badges.  Once I get the better hit rating trinket above I can wear this (which I already have):

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=50272

Then I have to hope for a better necklace drop and maybe the War Banner from TOC.  There are boots that are an upgrade somewhere also, but not that much.  There is also a ring in HoR with +Str that is an upgrade.

Then I think I'll be as geared as I'd ever be before I try getting into PUG raids.  I need a 4500 GS to even attempt that on Mal'Ganis.

Anything I'm missing here other than a few odds and ends?  I'm pretty poor right now so I can't buy BOE's and craftables.

There is a 232 2H axe from the end boss in Heroic PoS.  When I was hunting for that I would run PoS before my randoms.  Sometimes you luck into 2 or 3 shots at the zone in a day.

You can trade Stonekeeper shards for honour and get gems that way as well.  Horde on Skullcrusher pretty much owns Wintergrasp so I had close to 1000 before I noticed anything good to do with them.

Are they any decent available offhands you can get for a sword or mace spec rogue outside of HHOR?  I'm afraid that if I want to stay combat, I'm going to need to go CQC and hope for that main hand fist weapon (random dungeon drop ftl) to drop so I can pair it with one of the easily gotten daggers.  Right now I'm unfortunately slow/slow on weapons because I didn't see that the ilvl 219 sword I got was slow before trashing my ilvl 200 offhander.   Would going axe/dagger be more dps than a slow axe/sword when hack'n'slash is taken into consideration?

I just don't really want to go mut, but may have to considering the weapon situation I'll likely find myself in.  Keeping up that dumb HfB bluff would make me stabby (more so).

Other player's bleeds allow you to activate the buff, rupture isn't even in the optimal rotation, just Mutilate and Envenom after your initial S&D.

Doesn't that assume you're always going to have a feral dps or dps war in the raid?  Something my guild lacks on a regular basis.  The Feral is often tanking and the war has problems getting online more than 3 days.

I would like to again point out that this is in theory only; I've yet to see a rogue who isn't Rupturing do more dps than one who is.

Rogue:
Rupture  (Drops from rotation in better gear)
Garrote (Drops from rotation in better gear)

Druid:

Rip (Cat)
Rake (Cat)
Pounce (Cat)
Lacerate (Bear)

Warrior:

Rend (Arms)
Deep Wounds (Prot/Arms/Fury)

Hunter:

Piercing Shots (Marksman)
Rake - Cat pet
Savage Rend - Raptor pet

Sheepherder already noted it but to reiterate, if you have a bear tank they should be using Lacerate, which is a bleed.

Properly specced protection warriors usually have deep wounds too which puts up a bleed every time they crit.

Thanks for the input.  I rarely raid, and mostly it's just the one off bosses in pugs.

My friend is a pretty decent feral, however. 

Ah, see I didn't know bears has a bleed, I thought it was only cats.  My druid is all of level 14 and a bank alt.  (She's hot in those woolies!)  The more you know.

Prot wars would also be a problem for us.  We have one warrior (and I'm the only DK). we're fucking Paladin/ mage/ Druid heavy.  For the longest time we had one raiding lock, rogue, war, priest and DK, the rest was Pallies, Mages and druids with a mis of 3 slots shared between shaman or hunters from time to time.  We're fucking weird on class balance.

Hunters still use cats? Hunters have ever used raptors?  I see wolves all the time, never the others.  Not sure what spec most are nowadays, but isn't it Survival?

Survival and marks are both raid viable and pretty close on damage/utility these days.

Survival is the better entry raid spec, but Marks scales better, particularly with Armor Penetration.

Does anyone here play a resto druid? My girlfriend has one, and seems to be doing poorly on healing parses in ToC and ICC. Here's an armory link (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Andorhal&cn=Morrow); any glyphs or talents that need changing? Any mandatory healing addons for a resto druid?

The resto druids in my guild swear by healbot, and they kick my arse at 'winning the meters'.

Resto druid is arguably the most complex healer to play in terms of keeping track of stuff, and the most faceroll in other regards. Having addons that facilitate rolling HoTs and using the right heal in the right situation will improve your throughput massively. Resto druids should do well in endgame raids as almost all fights involve some form of continuous low-level raid damage that is made to be healed by HoTs.

Gearwise she has a few issues. She's a blacksmith but she isn't making use of the wrist and glove sockets. Quite a few blue-quality gems which could be upped to epic, and no gems in the legs (but I see these are a new acquisition). Helm, Back, Gloves and Legs are missing enchants, and ideally she should be using Tuskarr's Vitality (+15 stam, +8% runspeed) on her boots. She's also gemming for spirit, which isn't an awful choice for resto druids (better than mp5 or stam certainly), but she could afford to break some of the weaker socket boni and go for better throughput stats. That said, her gearing is fine for ToC and ICC.

For glyphs, glyph of Innervate will not increase her throughput at all, and she can boost throughput instantly by switching to Glyph of Wild Growth.

Talent wise she should pick up Natural Swiftness and max out Gift of the Earthmother. She can afford to loose points from Improved Tranquility and Natural Perfection.

In all probability though the main thing she might need to change is the spells she chooses to use.

My resto druid (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Runetotem&cn=Ithora).  That build and glyphs setup is from Naxx raiding days, but it still works pretty damn well in my opinion.  Haven't bothered to check out rapid rejuvenation though, supposedly it's a better glyph.  I still do almost 4k HPS on fights like Festergut where heals are pretty crazy on the raid and tanks (most healers spend their entire time just healing on that fight, no downtime) and I don't run out of mana *too* much on it.

I don't use healbot or anything fancy, some people say I would be better with it but right now there are no complaints about my style anyways.  Another resto druid and I are pretty close for healing abilities and he's got better gear than I do.

I wouldn't switch to rapid rejuv unless you're tank healing - it is actually a bit worse for raid healing by blanketing everyone in rejuv.

Thanks for the comments K9. She's gonna redo her spec and glyphs, and we know about the gems/chants. It's not her main, and she's too lazy/poor to get epic gems for the druid. And her blacksmithing is...slightly less than max.

Simple question: How long would a full run of Molten Core take to do with 5-6 level 80s (GS ranging from one at ~3200, 2 at ~4500 and 3 at ~5200), only one of which has ever done MC before? No terribad players but only 2 semi-experienced raiders, and all using voice comms.

One of my guildies is being really pushy about wanting to do MC. He just wants achievs, he's a bit of a cockend and is very reluctant to ever do guild groups where he doesn't stand to get something he specifically wants and nobody else really wants to do MC. However, if it's going to take us an hour then fine, we'll do it, the rest of us are nice like that. If it's going to take 3 hours then we're going to tell him to cock off and when he bitches use it as an excuse to kick him out of the guild  :grin:

You can probably clear it in an hour or so, your main issue is going to be actually finding your way around the damn place since it's somewhat non-linear and the different sections are entirely homogenous in look.

OK fine, if it's only going to take an hour or so we'll do it. He should know the way around.

It gives us ammunition to use when he next refuses to join in other guild groups to help other people out.

Just be careful with the mini corehound packs after Lucifron.  We thought we'd speed things up a bit by pulling them all at once.  20 minutes later we were still stuck there on the same pull.

You can probably get it done in an hour, hour and a half.  But as stated, be sure to at least have a glance at the fights beforehand because some of them still have pretty nasty mechanics that, while they don't wipe you anymore, you may get stuck trying to kill the boss\mob.  Not to mention knowing your way around, because all 7 bosses are pretty much in a non-linear fashion.  It's not as much of a cockblock as AQ-40 STILL is, but it can ruin your evening if you go in with seriously fail people.

Ragnaros is still one of the coolest boss-mobs in the game, even at 80 though, and rather makes the whole thing worth doing.

I've run through MC with just the wife on her druid and me on my DK just to watch Rags again.  The kids love watching Majordomo  getting pwn'd.

This is another thing, you CAN 2 man it.  Need someone able to play healer though.

Do you still have to put out fires, or have they taken that out as well?

WoWWiki says (http://www.wowwiki.com/Molten_Core#Prerequisites_and_Quests): "With the introduction of Patch 3.0.8, killing the boss that is associated with a rune will now automatically douse the rune."

OK, sounds like it may actually be fun then, we'll try and schedule it soon :)

I started playing about a month ago and today tried the LFG tool for the first time for the Deadmines.  I was a 22 combat rogue and wanted to finish the Van Cleef/Defias quest so I figured this was a good time to experiment.

The first group was a ne druid, a gnome mage, a human warlock, and something else I think a priest.  When we were about to start I'd said this was my first time and the only responses were 'this is like my 500th time lol'.  Then the druid ran off in bear form and started pulling stuff.  Their method of pulling was to run around and gather 4-5 mobs and wait for the group to catch up and start beating on the pulls.  I didn't think it right of me to criticize this but when I played a monk in EQ I would ask 'ready?' then say how many I was going to bring back (best guess) and bring the mobs all the way back to the group or camp...which wasn't happening here so I was trotting a good distance to catch up and start helping the druid.

It was after the 3rd of 4th of these that the healer/priest went offline.   At this point I was puzzled about what was going on both with the group dynamics and the action.  I had no idea if I was doing the right thing but assumed that assisting the tank and sinister striking/keeping slice and dice up was the logical thing to do.  There wasn't any communication or chat in the party channel and with so many mobs being pulled and the druid jumping constantly all over the damn place I was struggling.  I was lost and confused but it was mostly fun until we suddenly started wiping and people leaving/getting group-kicked.   We got to the bottom of the goblin furnace when the druid ran off and pulled what seemed like a dozen clockwork robots or something.  The rest of us were still working on a remaining goblin and they swarmed over us and ate the mage, the druid, then me.

A few minutes after my third run back to the instance the other remaining members quit.  I got a few things to sell and got a neat blue sword so I guess I ended up better than worse.  So I guess my question is what, as a rogue, should I have been doing differently?  I don't know how much help I was but I sure was spamming my combat window with hits and parries.  I don't remember much of what the warlock was doing but the mage was constantly spamming some aoe fire thing.  We were all 21-23 in level.

 

Well, for a start, you should have asked the group for some help.

I did at the start and got the '500th time' comments.  Then we were off.  A few minutes later I had asked something like 'am I doing the right stuff?' and didn't get a response.   The party chat was dead.  So I didn't get any feedback on if I was mistargeting or what.  I guess I can make it more clear that newb == me in the future though.

If you're a rogue, you're there to DPS. At mid-levels (40-68ish) you may be expected to CC mobs with sap. When you DPS you should also try to interrupt spell casts. That's pretty much your role in life.

The problem is you are a little late to the game and the majority of people playing through the early game now are alts rather than new players. These are people who will often have level 80 mains and will be used to the zerg style of endgame dungeons and will also assume that everyone else knows what's going on. For your part it's probably best to just go with the flow, but I wouldn't hold your breath for measured pulls and such. Keep trying with the party chat, sometimes you'll get lucky; never be blind to the fact that WoW still has one of the worst (not the worst, there's still Darkfall) communities of any game, particularly at lower levels.

The best way for you to learn the game would be to try and get into a casual guild where a lot of the players are focused on raising alts. This isn't the easiest thing in the world, but will make life a lot better for you if you can find such a group to support you.

Nothing.  You were there to kill mobs, that's what you did.  What the problem was if the tank was yanking dozens of mobs and the DPS was unable to get them down before the healer ran out of mana, the tank should have slowed down.  I don't chain pull tons of stuff regardless with people I don't know, because I don't know if they know how to play or are able to keep up.  I don't like chain pulling a new fresh set of 6-7 mobs while half the original 4-5 are still alive and maybe half health either.  But that's on the tank, not you as a rogue.

The quick and dirty explanation for the completely lost:

1. Tanks AoE now, welcome to 2007. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9-gg3zKMS0)
2. Pulling is done fast to get in and get out fast.
3. It's Deadmines, nothing in there should be able to wipe a group.  Your tank or healer was failing.
4. You're a rogue, you do damage, that's it.
5. Parry and Block only happen when you're in front of an enemy, get behind if you're not going to pull additional mobs in doing so.
6. Weapon skills affect block/dodge/parry/miss rates significantly, did you recently switch weapons?

I ended up in front more often than behind the mobs.  There wasn't any reason for me to not be behind them since there was no risk of extra pulls so I'll remember that next time.  I hadn't switched weapons for several levels so I was using what I was familiar with during soloing.

As a Rogue, until you get Blade Flurry, you're pretty much going to sit on a mob and beat the crap out of it.  Preferably a caster so you can interrupt anything nasty it tries.  (And when you do get it nothing really changes :awesome_for_real:.)  If you're beating the crap out of something and not getting beaned by whatever encounter mechanics are out there, you're doing your job.

As for the pulling etiquette, on my 80 Paladin, it's pretty much a "Hey all.", seeing if everyone looks buffed and topped off and I'll start pulling.  It's going to be on the tank to set the pace, but the healer needs to put the brakes on it if it's getting too dicey or the group needs mana breaks.

The way you're describing it though, the tank (Druid) just didn't feel like waiting for a new healer which is all on his head.

I found some purchasable items on the Dalaran armor vendor that I'd never seen before yesterday!  Looks like another week and I should be to 4600-ish on the gearscore and well over 30k on HP.  However, finding a weapon/shield upgrade past ilvl 200 for a warrior tank seems to be slightly more difficult, and the WoW Armory hasn't given me the "find upgrades" option in weeks.  Any good (non-raid) places to look for these?

HOR reg seems to be an OK place to find a shield.  At least the only readily available upgrade that I see.

FOS reg is a very easy place to get a tanking weapon upgrade.  Looks like a giant lolly though. HPOS also drops a nice tank weapon, but I don't see it drop very often.  You should probably do fine tanking there.

Are you picking up the T9 tier items?  Really, for a tank you should be gearing up pretty quick.  On my healer, I tended to gobble up emblems like candy.

For Shields it's pretty much Splintered Door of the Citadel (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=49835) out of Normal HoR or nothing.

Weapons you have a few options: Peacekeeper Blade (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=47500) from Heroic ToC is okay, but you're really looking at either Rimefang's Claw (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=50268) (Heroic PoS) or Falric's Wrist-Chopper (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=50290) (Heroic HoR).

T9 = ilvl245?  Yep (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sen%27jin&cn=Fimlar), minus the helm so far.  From a cost-benefit perspective, the helm seems to give the fewest stats for the 75 badgers it wants.  The Dalaran merchant will let me upgrade legs/hands/feet to 226 for cheap (Conquest items).  Then it's just cloak and trinkets.

Also, it looks like the "find an upgrade" link started working again - go figure.  FoS reg was a relative cakewalk, so I'll poke there for the lolly.


 :uhrr:  Looks like it's time to check out HoR...  Given experiences in PoS, I'd been avoiding this one so far.

Tier 9 = ilvl232 set items. 30 emblems for gloves/shoulders, 50 for head/chest/pants.  Sold right outside of the entrance to TOC near the Argent Tournament.  Easy way to upgrade your glove quick and possibly your pants or helm also.

As a warrior, buy all the T9 except the helmet and use the 75 badge offset helmet instead. The T9 4pc is really pretty good so I wouldn't skip it in favor of wearing both offset 245s. The 245 helmet is better vs. the set helmet than the 245 shoulders are vs. the set shoulders, so go with the helmet even though it is a few more badges.

EDIT: If you happen to wander in to an Ony raid and end up with the warrior tanking hat from there, both the 232 and 245 versions of that are also better than our T9. Our T9 helmet is not very good; block value is a low priority.

EDIT #2: Splintered Door is your only non-raid option for a shield. There are good tanking weapons in heroic Pit of Saron and heroic Halls of Reflection; the sword from Pit of Saron is a little better statistically unless you're an orc, if you're an orc go with the axe from HoR.

Found the ones you're talking about - had confused those with the other set pieces that took Frost badges.  Picked up the gloves, should have the legs in a couple days.

Thanks to all for the advice!

My resto shaman (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sargeras&cn=Szophia) is approaching 80, and I'm wondering about spec for heroics/raids. Seems like the PvE resto spec is mostly cookie cutter, the only options being that you get to pick 2 of Elemental Weapons, Healing Focus, and Healing Way (I will spec out of Healing Grace). Once I'm geared I think Elemental Weapons will get cut because it's a pretty trivial effect, but in the meantime I figure 45 SP is 45 SP and I pretty much never cast HW anyway so I'd leave out healing way. I'll be running with lots of randoms most likely, so I intend to keep Healing Focus in case of bad tanks. Anything I'm not thinking of? Does it even really matter?

Also, I just respecced my secondary from PvE enhance to battleground resto, but I couldn't find any guides for that (all the PvP guides are for arena) so I pretty much just guessed at a spec. Seems to work pretty well so far, but am I leaving out anything important? Also, what do I do with my last two points after maxing Thundering Strikes? Guardian Totems? Nature's Blessing?

For PvE 0/16/55 is really the best way to go imo. My shaman (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Kilrogg&cn=Nerfed&group=2).

Assuming 10 points in Enhance for Ancestral knowledge and Thundering Strikes as a baseline, as you go down the resto tree you'll hit 38 points like so. (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#hZ0xxZx0ezIxoxk) Here you are better off taking Healing Way because frankly sources of pushback are uncommon at level 80 in PvE; and since the changes to pushback it is much much less of an issue. Healing Wave isn't a spell you will use lots, but unlike GHeal for priests it is a spell you will use sometimes. If nothing else having an extra 25% on Healing Wave for when you pop it with nature's swiftness is helpful, and there will be times when you want the extra throughput and can use tidal waves for the cast speed increase. If you get to T10 gear levels then healing wave becomes quite fun. With over 1K haste and the T10 2-set healing waves come down to nearly a 1s cast after riptide, which is some evil HPS, and you can support that level of healing for periods with T9+ level gear.

After filling out the Resto tree you should have 6 points left. Your options are improved shields, elemental weapons and healing focus. Personally I prefer the former two since I don't find pushback to be a noticable problem, but you can move points around between any of thosee three talents and healing way (they are all three point talents and you'll have 9 points to spend on them) and most outcomes will be comparably effective.

No ideas for PvP though sorry, Disc priest is for pvp for me.

My shaman. (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Shu%27halo&cn=Rasix&gn=Murk)  Built specifically for 5 mans.   Mostly I just sit back, pop an earth shield on the tank and riptide the retard DPS that manage to stand it something  (or the ever present tap-tap-tapiity warlock).  Gear is kind crappy (haven't played him for a month, since my tank friend disappeared), but he's never had a problem.  Only wipe was when I fell off a bridge.  :awesome_for_real:

edit: Just to add, I hated healing on the shaman early on, but it's just so easy and surprisingly flexible. Perfect 5man healer.

My Shammy (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Runetotem&cn=Morinagra).  Healed all the way through Saurfang in ICC-10 without issue.  I prefer the no push-back vs. the extra healing on my Earthliving weapon, but that's just me.  Heals heroics like it's no one's business and does just fine in all raids.  I spam chain heal a bit to get the speed buff, then use the quick cast time for big heals on the tank (done both tanking and raid healing without issue).

Yes, it's a little touch and go before you start getting serious gear, but afterwards your mana regen and chain-healbombing is ridiculous.

Joining the wagon on shaman healing.  I have one too for heroics and it is really nice.  We have several for raiding that top the healing charts easy peasy.  They really are all about the gear.  I turned that corner probably 2-3 months ago.  Now, no issues.  I have even healed bad groups at hHoR.

Ran Oculus for the first time yesterday.  I totally understand why people ditch/hate it, but it was novel at least.

Two questions:

1] First ring with all of the trash - all the little whelps are casters and are a PITA to round up for the slaughter.  Warrior tanking suggestions?  Multiple spread-out casters seem to be a weak spot for Warriors.

2] Drake madness on the final boss : I've read that 1 red/3 bronze/1 green seems to be common - is this the recommended "no headaches" config in randoms?

Pretty much, you can get away with just 2 bronze, but you really need that time stop.

The whelps are pretty weak.  Tag what you can, but your DPS should be able to handle a few on them and burn them down fairly quickly.  Focus on the dragonkin then clean up the whelps.

To reiterate, the whelps are non-elites and DPS should be able to handle them after they've pulled aggro from them.  Concentrate on the elites in the pack and get them down first.  It does require some thought from your DPS and healer to get through it, but not too much.  It's just a general annoyance more than anything.

Thanks!  My original strat was to focus on the 3-4 elites, but the healer was complaining about getting hit.  I was figuring he'd prefer the whelps on him to the elites, but I thought I'd ask, as I am addicted to the heals.

Upgraded the legs to 232 tonight, set bonus ftw.  The stat boosts on 200+ level stuff are freaking nuts.

While true, the DPS needs to be focusing on the whelps since they have like 12k health and die quickly.  Technically it's their fault ;-)

You can do almost any setup of drakes now and win. 5 amber works well, 4 ruby and 1 emerald is good too.

Re: Whelps.

HANDLE IT!

Seriously, if your healer is bitching tell them to man up, they're fucking non-elite whelps.

As a healer, if I get 5 whelps on me that are being ignored by the tank then I can keep myself alive. That's it.

If said tank has run halfway round the start area and pulled 3 packs of elites in the meantime then they're gonna die, tough shit. Come get these whelps off me or prep for release.

whelps have like 20k health, a dps can burn this down in seconds and there are generally three of us around :)

Holy Paly - no issue really.  If you are worried, Beacon yourself and heal the tank.
Druid - HoT up and Barkskin
Shaman - get in the middle of everything and aoe heal with some Riptide
Priests - get in the middle of everything and Holy Nova w/ a shield up

There is nothing in that trash that will cleave or one shot you so stand on the tank and allow him/her to pull everything off you.

*Edit:  Yes, I heal with all 4 of those classes in heroic randoms.

What effects in particular do I need to turn down so my computer doesn't choke in 25 mans, but I can still see what I'm standing in?

You can turn EVERYTHING down, just make sure the "Projected Textures" box remains checked.

just a note - particle whatever (density?) really helps on Sindragosa bombs.

Wait, seriously? The time I got Ruby/Emerald Void we were all on Vent, the group leader meticulously gave all of us super-specific instructions, and we still wiped probably 15 times. I'm pretty sure this was before drakes scaled with gear - are the fights really that much easier now, or were we doing it wrong?

They are just that much easier

Yeah you gotta have a paper bag over your head to fuck up the Malygos fight now. Did Ruby Void today on my pally, without even realising we were doing it. I was wondering why keeping them healed was a bit harder than normal.

Easy way to get Emerald Void is to just dismount at the chest area and heal from there.

Yes, they are a weak spot. From my warrior tank perspective: I use the TC glyph for the extra 2 yards range, and it helps a lot with groups like those. Try rounding them up and position yourself so that the initial Shockwave hits as many as possible. Use Cleave (might want to look at the glyph for hitting a third target) and move a bit around between them, shield slamming and devastating as they are available. Not much more we can do sadly. On heroic difficulty, the mobs in Oculus drop very fast. Practice moving and smacking, you will need that for groups of similar composition later on - most notably the 2 caster groups after Ick in PoS, and the spectrals in the HoR main room.

For you hunters: I've been playing my hunter a lot more lately and find that, using marksman spec, that I burn through mana at a pretty alarming rate.  My toon is geared almost entirely in WG and honor gear for pvp, so I don't have any tricks to keep my mana pool up.  I think my GS is about 3400 and I have like 22k hp and 10k power wearing resiliance gear.  

Any suggestions?  If I do a daily in this gear I can burn through my mana bar in about 2-3 mobs using serpent sting, chimera shot, arcane shot, kill shot

Let me modify the question:  Will switching to survival or BM spec allow me to maintain a more consistent level of dps by decreasing the time needed to drink?  I have no interest in doing anything but heroic 5-mans.  I want to be the most efficient dps that I can.  While marks seems great for spike dps in pvp, it may suffer from downtime in cases where you're always on the move. 

Already have the two glyphs you mentioned.  Got some practice in playing "tag" with casters in FoS and PoS last night - as long as they watch the targets I mark, we're good, but there were a couple of "oh hell" moments when they didn't (WTB Glyph of Commanding Shout plz).  Thanks again for the advice.  :-)

Well one problem is trying to PvE in Resilience gear.  A lot of a hunter's int gets chopped out of the budged for PvP stuff. 

Honestly the best spec for DPS is Marksman.  I'm pretty sure it's the more mana efficient than Survival, as you're pretty much spamming Steady vs. interrupting your rotation every time Lock and Load procs.  I don't know if you're using Viper as much as you can in between pulls, but it helps a ton.  In that gear, you're just going to be out of mana unless you switch to Beast Mastery.  And then your DPS will be dogshit.  But dogshit is still good enough for heroics.  Another Marksman tip is make sure you use Rapid Fire for gaining mana back - assuming you have that talent - which you should.  If you've used it and you still need mana, you can pop your readiness and use it again.  I guess if you have a Marksman PvP build, you might not have that talent.

If that's the case, I highly recommend you have separate PvE and PvP builds if you plan on doing both.  If you want, use my hunter (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Mug'thol&cn=Harmine) for talent reference.  Both my Marks and Survival are pretty much cookie cutter PvE.  You may need to decide on a couple points in Focused Aim if you're short on hit, which I am not anymore.

Yeah, I had separate PVE and PVP builds with my paladin. Both retribution, and I wore my PVP gear for both. I think last time I checked I was doing like 3k DPS, which ain't shit but was still way better than the average DPS puggy.

Yea, my Pally doesn't have nearly the mana issues my Huntard does.  All going away with Cataclysm, thankfully.

Hm, my hunter isn't 80 yet, so grain of salt and all that, but I find that with prudent use of aspect of the viper I don't have to drink really.

Kinda disagree with Mushashi - I find SV is better for mana due to it having replenishment.  It also is generally better DPS at lower gear levels, especially if you have a sub-ilvl232 weapon.  MM comes into better DPS once you start getting all 232 and higher gear.

But I do agree with not pveing in pvp gear - work on your T9 gear.  2 piece T9 is fantastic, and getting extra int will help.  10K mana is pretty low - I run at 14K unbuffed (albeit in ICC 10 man gear).

If the mob(s) has a mana bar, don't be afraid to put viper sting on em - that'll get your mana back fast without hurting your dps.

Use aspect of the viper between fights - I have viper/dragonhawk macroed and swap between them between pulls.

If you're not scared of theorycrafting a bit, check out either the hunter DPS spreadsheet from EJ (http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t30710-wotlk_dps_spreadsheet/) or its online equivalent (http://femaledwarf.com) for a good place to play with gear and specs and see what will theoretically work best.

I am still a bit confused about Raid Healing.

As a priest I usually am holy specced for group heal in Raids. In fights with a lot of group damage I still struggle to keep everyone alive.

Examples: The newly buffed ship fight in ICC, Festerguts poison cloud, the trash before festergut and rotface, the AoE of the new archavon's chamber boss etc.

I have read most guides including the elitist jerks one, am currently at 5300 Gearscore (nearly green for ICC 25) and I still feel like I am struggeling and not pulling my weight as I should. In a three healer configuration I am usually last in heal/s and total heal even when paired with similarly geared healers.

My setup is healbot mostly and x-perl for raid and group frames.

The recommended rota for group damage according the the EJ forum is PoH, CoH, 1 or two Flash Heals and then PoH and CoH again. Then rest until the next burst phase.

I have several issues with that.

1. PoH only targets a group takes long to cast (even with haste and serendipidy up) and doesn't add much more health than a flash heal, it's usually only wortwhile to start with if I have three stacks of serendipidy up (which is recommenden by EJ).

2. CoH is a bit of a gamble because of the target selection and the limited range also the amount healed is not more than flash heal.

Rest of the rota is pretty straightforward.

Even if I time the start of the rota perfectly some times what I initially heal is not enough to stop someone from dying, especially cloth weares since the next damage wave starts before the rota is finished. Shielding as holy is seldom an option because of GCD and the cooldown on PW:S. Flash healing everybody takes to much time and burns my mana too fast.

At last night's festergut attempt I had a really hard time keeping everybody alive through the first waves.

So simply put, how do you approach healing fights with a serious amount of continuous group damage? What could I do differently to up my game?

As a raiding priest with "not the best" gear (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Runetotem&cn=Selby), I'll offer what I can.  I've healed through Rotface with ease.  Simply put, renew and shields are your friend.  The entire raid should have weakened souls at all times.  PoH I like, but that 2.5s cast time kills it from being an effective heal if people are going down quick (it's good to pre-cast for things like Decimate or Pungent Blight, things you KNOW will cause massive damage after a certain period of time).  I spam Flash Heal quite a bit, because with decent haste you can get the cast time down to ~1.2s or so, which is a very quick heal.  Some use Binding Heal, but I rarely use it and haven't had any encounters where I feel I *need* it.  While I am disc, none of the abilities I mentioned are exclusive to it like Penance (which I use when up for big heals).

The strategy will not work as holy (my secondary spec is disc so I know the differences at least a little bit)

PW:S in Holy Spec has a cooldown of 4 seconds (as opposed to the disc version being on the GCD which is 1s with enough haste) and uses 23% of base mana (or about 900 mana in my case)

You simply cannot shield fast enough and even if you could you'd eat through your mana pool fast.

Problem is the initial damage plus everything which comes next. Decimate for example some party members are below 10% health after Decimate (especially cloth wearers) even a tiny amount of damage before PoH hits will kill them.

PoH being single group should not be a huge issue if the groups are arranged properly. It's only a pain if the groups are split in some manner where they're never near other group members (2 ranged, a healer, and 2 melee for example)

I do feel far less useful as holy on average than disc just because I do pretty much rely on heavily hasted PoH and ProM bounces with surge of light procs creating most of my serendipity charges. It's great on a few AE heavy fights over disc (because CoH's smart heal functionality helps a ton), but for the most part instant cooldown shields are my friend.

You didn't mention Renew, which when fully Talented and Glyphed is pretty awesome and functions very much like a Shield: initial heal + future protection.  Also, to quote Bhodi from the Ruby Sanctum thread:

Timing is key for effective use of PoH, if you're trying to use it.  It's a strategy spell in a spell-spammer's game. Your raid tools tell you when that Decimate is about to happen, and that's what you're supposed to use to time PoH hitting almost immediately after the Deci.  If a DPS dies while you're doing this, they simply need more health.. inform them that dead DPS = 0 and maybe some blues or at the least purples with stam might be a better choice than just slotting straight +spellpower.

Let me just pop in here and expand a bit on my quote from the other thread. I'm a holy priest and should be able to offer you a few pointers. It's hard to give specifics without you posting your armory and/or a worldoflogs parse, but I can give general advice. Sadly, selby is giving decent advice for disc priests but is giving bad advice for holy - sorry Selby, they heal completely differently :(

EJ is also giving fairly bad advice since they have not updated their OP and you are expected to read through thousands of posts to get the info you need. What I am about to say is in there, on page 32 of the priest thread. Probably. If you're curious as to other opinions, go onto worldoflogs or wowprogess, pick a random high end guild, look them up on wowwebstats or worldoflogs, find a priest, look at their healing breakdown and HPS. They're all going to be the same percentages - around 40% renew, 25% PoM 25% CoH and the rest "other".


The standard priest thing these days is to spec for the two improved renew talents, keep PoM+CoH on cooldown, then simply renew spam every GCD. On longer fights, you also use SoL when it procs to decrease your mana usage. Don't use PoH except on a long windup massive damage spell you can see coming. Don't use Gheal. Don't use flash heal. In panic single-target throughput mode, use binding heal if you absolutely have to (you shouldn't, almost ever). Don't use PW:S, ever, unless you're using it for the body and soul speed boost. That GCD is better spent on a renew.

I've spec'd very aggressively (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Icecrown&cn=Sooth&gn=La+Cosa+Nostra) towards this end (no divine fury or empowered/improved healing) but you don't need to go that far. All you REALLY need is the 2 renew talents and the renew glyph.

This spec is much more effective for a number of reasons that I can get into unreasonable levels of detail if you're curious, but it boils down to the fights in IC being large amounts of steady AoE damage to the raid which is handled better by HoTs than by large burst healing. With the two talents+renew glyph, a renew gives about 3/4 as a flash heal when you count the initial heal plus the first tick a second later. The initial hit also lands faster than a flash heal making it much more valuable for reactionary saves. All these reasons make it very very viable in the current raiding environment.

To handle decimate, you can keep two groups alive by yourself.  What you do is 8-10 seconds before the decimate, renew all 5 people in one group, throw a PoM out, and then start casting PoH so that it finishes casting just as the decimate lands. Then, immediately CoH the same group and continue spamming renews on anyone critical. Optionally, you can GS the tank, and even more optionally, you can just renew spam both groups and not cast PoH at all, and instead just cast CoH-> PoM again as soon as decimate hits.

For general large amounts of damage, nothing beats PoM > CoH > Renew on a priority system. If you haven't tried renew spec, I URGE you very strongly to try it out and see if you like it (you will). Depending on your mana regen situation, you'll want to weave in SoL'd flash heal instead of renew when it's up (with 2/2 it's ALWAYS up, with 1/2 you should be able to just cast it while it's up instead of renew.) Follow the A.B.Cs - Always Be Casting. keep renews up on the tank and the DPS that tends to pull aggro.

I know.  I just know that as disc I never have any mana issues or healing issues.  Not sure what the deal is ;-)

Thanks for the comments Bhodi; I'm disc about 90% of the time, but I'll switch up a few things in my holy spec and give this a go.


Why take one point in Serendipity over Desperate Prayer? I don't use DP much, but the times I do I'm glad of it. Equally, why max out healing focus. I see that one point is possibly needed to get deeper in the tree, but if you are solely using Renew, ProM and CoH for the bulk of your healing pushback is a non-issue.

Here's the armory link for those interested

My Level 80 Priest:
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Lordaeron&cn=Nigeth

I am also interested in any socketing/enchanting tips you can give.

Appreciated the healing tips so far BTW. Thanks

I use Rawr (http://www.codeplex.com/Rawr) for analysis to see what gives better performance based on gems.  That said, I tend to go straight +Int or +Haste for yellows (there's a limit point for each), +SP for red, and some combo of either +SP or +Spirit for blues.  I am not sure the +crit gems are optimal for a priest, but someone who has done more math or has more experience can probably tell you.  I basically try to gem so that my spells cast as fast as possible, give me the biggest mana pool, and have decent mana regen (helps from running out in those long fights).  My mage is the exact same way, except more focus on haste and none on mana regen, Int, or crit.

Simcraft (http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/) is created and maintained by shadow priests, so I'm going to guess it works great for lesser priests too. I just know rawr is totally worthless for me :(

The rule of thumb I used for holy priests was to keep crit and haste roughly equal. Maybe that's changed now though.

Good questions! The reason for the first is simple; When things go bad, I don't have a GCD to waste only on myself. My panic button is a healthstone and stoneform, so I'll either fade or mash that and then spam binding heal, or mash it and hit myself with a renew. Plus, there are other healers in the raid doing the same thing. I'll get a bubble from our disc priest and a rejuv instantly.

As for healing focus, there's really no where else to put the points, since they have to be in the first 3 tiers; my only option is desperate prayer, but I'd really rather not be interrupted during my binding heal or rare PoH cast.

In general, rawr is crappy at seeing the big picture and should only be used as a general guideline and for item-by-item geming advice.

For holy priests, gemming is pretty simple. Gem for +INT until you have "enough" and then gem for +sp/haste or +sp/crit as fits your taste. Keep socket bonuses of +7SP or more, generally ignore socket bonuses of +spirit unless they are really big and/or you don't have enough regen yet.

"Enough" should be what gets you through the longest battles chain-casting, including using your shadowfiend. This can vary from person to person and from guild to guild as some have more replenishment than others and some people use more SoL than others. Plus gear heavily affects this of course - the more gear you get, the more int you have and the less you'll need to gem for it. When I was in 226 gear in naxx I was about half gemmed for INT, now I have one holdover gem from a belt which I haven't gotten rid of yet. I am of course very aggressive and often end heavy healing bosses like blood queen with an empty mana pool. I consider my mana hymn to be a last resort but occasionally I'll end up needing to use it.

Haste Versus Crit is personal preference, though keep in mind that haste is a +throughput/-regen stat where crit is +throughput/+regen (through more SoL). I am solidly on the 'haste' side of the 'haste/crit' debate, since 2/2 SoL is more regen than you'll never need and you're FAR more likely to save someone with a faster reaction (since you're always GCD locked) than with +100 extra health on your heal. Also, haste helps with being able to spam more renews on more people before a big blow. That said, crit is still valuable and I don't turn down gear just because it has crit on it. Some people also gem straight haste, ignoring red socket bonuses. I'm not really at that point, either.

For shadowpriests, point for point haste is better than crit ever since they added dot scaling.

Ok, so some judicious regemming got me above 32k HP unbuffed.  This seemed like a good number, so I decided to finally run HoR reg yesterday (and as a tank, first shot).  I had read through everything online first, so there were few surprises, and it was a near faceroll overall.  And 3/5 people came in saying "I JUST NEED X," heh.

The only issue I ran into - LoS tricks on the first phase.  The rest of the party hid in the corner of the alcove behind boss #1, but the waves of trash ignored me standing in front of everyone and aimed right for the clothies.  Nearly had a wipe on the first two waves until I figured out what was going on.  Are there any silly tricks that you can do to get the waves on you first?  Was it the casters casting "late" (including the HoTs on incoming) that skewed the aggro table?  Other suggestions?

HoTs will do it if they tick before you've done anything, for sure.

The corner strategy is really inferior to tanking in the entrance; people prefer it because it can make it easier for the tank to gather adds, but given the impatience of most players the ranged adds will still be at range by the time they break LoS, so you'll still have to run and gather them.

Hot's and spells like Prayer of Mending will generate aggro very early in the fight, if you haven't had time to build threat on all the mobs then you can have mobs going after your healer and such. How you deal with that really depends on what type of tank you are.

In general though, playing from the entrance is your best strategy.

Warlocks also completely fuck aggro over, especially if they pre LT(rank1) for the buff, and their armor heals them for a trivial amount.

Buff aggro.  A mob with 0 threat will immediately target the first player to cast something, even if that spell generates no threat.

It appears you're right - I ran this again last night, and I was paying attention to the other party members a bit more this time.  People were still healing, looting, and not at all out of LoS as the new waves came in.  Felt less bad about letting them take a smack before I gained aggro.

The group was also in the alcove before I could suggest trying the entrance.  I still need a cloak and a shield from this place, so should have plenty of chances in the near future to give this a try.

Why do people bother looting mid wave while doing that corner pull crap? WHY? It'll be there when it's over, I promise. Just sit down, focus fire the priests and mages, and stop being terrible at picking your own targets, DPS. ><

Oh, and the second part of that picking your own targets thing: if you pick something high priority and then suddenly get 40-60% threat on your first 2 casts: switch targets, the tank doesn't agree with you.

Assisting the tank is for stupids, didn't you know?  Whenever I tank and I've got 3-4 mobs, I assign priority and don't feel bad when 2 go running off because 2 DPS decided to majorly burn down ones that they decided were important rather than me.  "You pull it, you tank it" is my philosophy.  Granted I will still try and get them back, but when things are on cooldown and people decide they can't wait 15 seconds, tough toenails.

Another tank fail point in HoR is when they all too often ignore the mercs. These'll assrape the healer(s) if they aren't picked up pronto. As often as not, I seem to end up tanking these myself, and it's no fun (pretty much have to pop wolves on them). The casters I can handle on my own, but if a merc is running wild, well...gotta do something.

Oh, and assisting the tank doesn't really work all that well. My personal experience is they--regardless of class--seem to shift targets a lot and I invariably end up with aggro at some point, unless they're really on top of their AoE threat game. My attitude anymore is I outgear this stuff hugely, have done most of these instances a bazillion times, so you'd better step up your threat game because I am going to turn it loose. Despite magma totem/FN, I"m still basically a single target class and would prefer an /assist approach, but I just don't see tanks sticking to one target all that much anymore.

They switch a lot due to each DPS picking a different target. So they're forced to try and single target threat on 3 things. It's why I've moved away from the assist and kill method unless I know the tank's style. I'll probably wind up dpsing some add he wanted to smack once and switch from.

I just reiterate what the kill order is at the start.  Sometimes I get contradicted by the tank, but hey, it's their show.  I usually say "priest, mage, right?" and sometimes the tank will want the mage down first.  Not a matter to me.  At least though if people aren't sticking to the kill order (got to love the idiot that just picks the grouped up melee and starts spamming their AE abilities) I can effectively lock down a priest or mage on my rogue and negate most of their damage with cooldowns.   After the primaries are down, I go to assisting. 

Mage last. Seriously. It is the least threatening of all the mobs since they nerfed the flame strike (and also the best CC target).

I always go priest, rogue, warrior, then chase down the ranged guys, hunter before mage.

Ahh, didn't know that.  Been away in the land of single player gaming for a bit.  :awesome_for_real:

Nah you're not alone, most people still seem to go OH GOD A MAGE and want to kill it early. The worst thing about that I think, is that if you don't stunlock the stupid thing it spawns its add when you get it fairly wounded and then you've got yet another mob running around in the early going. Sure, it is a weak one, but still.

...here's an odd concept, but what if DPS assisted each other instead of the tank?

When I'm tanking, if I really need something to go down first, I'll say/mark it.  Otherwise, target whatever I charge and fire at will when it goes down is my motto.

(makes notes on kill order for the next run)

DPS meters are a competition. If the mage and I assist each other, he'll get the use of my debuffs to inflate his dps. Fuck that.

My kill order assumes you're doing things in the hallway with at least a little CC, btw. If you don't have any CC at all you might want to consider taking the ranged guys down earlier (before the warrior - I still think the priest and rogue are bigger threats).

I generally silence (HT) the healer, pop spell reflect, and stomp the melee on the way in.  I try to grab the hunter after that if I can find them amidst the chaos.

And what is this new word you use, "CC"?   :awesome_for_real:

If I'm on my priest and I get some tard group that insists on using the alcove I'll wander around looting during the fight because I'm comfortable with my ability to heal the group up; it also makes it easier for me to shackle stuff if I'm not in the alcove.

Its fairly rare to have a group with no paladin, no priest AND no hunter. Any of those can provide adequate CC for one mob regardless of spec (turn evil, shackle undead, freeze trap). A ret pally is even better of course since you get repentance too but you can't count on that.

I had a look at the glyphs my priest has again today and realised that there's really fuck all point having the Flash Heal glyph as Disc. Penance and PW:S are a given, and the PW:S glyph accounts for a good 5-10% of my healing done, if not more, depending on the fight. There's really no situation where I ever use flash heal much. As holy I'm using a renew-centric build with Renew-CoH-GS as my majors.

Any suggestions for replacing the flash heal glyph? Renew seems like the possible best contender, although I'm not totally sold on using renew as Disc. Holy Nova perhaps, might try dispel magic. None of them are particularly obvious choices though.

I used Greater Dispel Magic + Absolution because near-instant mass dispel for little mana is fucking awesome.

I'm trying to think where there are dispel-heavy encounters though. There's some on trash in ICC, but who cares about trash. Deathwhisper I guess and on a 50K tank that is a 1.5K heal.

Do you get your points in Absolution by dropping Imp:FH? I was thinking of doing that but moving the points to imp:renew. I guess Imp:Renew + Glyph could be not so bad for tankhealing.

Ooh you're asking for raiding.  My disc spec was for 5-mans (where dispelling slows/ etc is a convenience thing where that 5-10s slow walk is a LONG time these days of instant-dead trash) and PVP.

Yeah, I'd probably go with Renew then.  You're never really going to be standing around enough folks for Holy Nova -> spam until bubbles to make sense mana-wise are you?

Precious is the only fight in ICC where Holy Nova actually feels useful. Everywhere else people are either too spread out, or just keeping bubbles up makes more sense.

I can see the value of Dispel for 5-mans though, I might get a stack of glyphs and just try mixing them in and out to see what feels good. I expect to be generally underwhelmed though...

Renew shouldn't be used as disc, really. It's not very effective.
Your glyphs should be:
Penance
PW:S
Prayer of Healing

I use PoH a lot, especially in 5-mans or Vault, but I can't think of an encounter with regular enough damage in ICC.

I know it's better HPS than PW: Shield spam when enough targets (I think it's like 3 for my gear) have taken damage, even without the glyph, but where are you using it?

Festergut really is all I can think of, for a short period of time.  And I use Renew when I get stuck on tank healing duty as a disc priest (which I am not thrilled about usually).

Other than toravon, and festergut following exhale blight (which we only get once per fight), I can't think where I'd use PoH in T10 content as Disc (based on my current progression which is 9/12). I'm more inclined towards renew because I can take [url-http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#bVcbuhhVRIoffRtcEzc]this spec[/url] which has Imp:Renew.

I'm also having serious doubts about the utility of grace. There are so few situations where I'm single-target healing as Disc, and I barely use Flash heal. The main problem is if I take them out, I have nowhere useful to put those two points anyway.

Sindragosa and the Blood Princes have some raid heavy healing at times, but on the princes everyone is so spread out and Sindragosa has so little time to waste, you really can't stand around casting a heal that takes almost 3 seconds (unless you are trying to kill time on Arcane Instability).

Out of curiosity, what heal do you normally heal with as disc?  I use Flash Heal and Binding heal, but most of my time is spent on shields and renews as I usually end up tank healing.

Even if you never heal the same person back-to-back, Grace should still work out to a 3% boost to Penance which is probably better than anywhere else you could stick those points.

And when you are healing one target (which I get stuck with a lot to be honest) it's amazing.

PoH is useful on blood queen and sindragosa; With borrowed time and the appropriate amount of haste, it should only be around a 1.7s cast. There really isn't any other better glyph. If you find yourself using flash heal a lot, use that glyph instead.

Rookie request: Could someone link a good tanking build for warriors? It would be much appriciated, it has been a while (like two expansions or so...) and I feel I need to get an up-to-date starting point. Thanks!

Cookie cutter tank build (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Runetotem&cn=Cartia).  Works great, no issues whatsoever.

Much appriciated!

Glyph of Shockwave is a little unorthodox, mind you, I only use that in a protection pvp build.

I went with a slight modification to that for my build (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Draenor&cn=Alkander&gn=The+Hand+of+Evermourne). I'm currently at 10/12 ICC 10 with him.

Focused Rage is one of the most valuable talents to me and I wouldn't want to miss it. What I'm still trying to figure out is how I could work in improved spell reflect.

Agreed, but I like having the reduced cooldown time for it since we tend to pull mobs quickly in heroics these days.  I enjoyed it all the way from 60-80 ;-)

I actually prefer Devastate + Sunder glyphs for multiple mobs.

Devastate/Sunder is mighty nice, but the Shockwave glyph does help with the heroics, especially in randoms.

I prefer Cleaving for that myself.   I specced out of Focused Rage for Improved Spell Reflect on the theory that hey, my rage bar is always full anyway.  Turns out that's not the case, doh.   I'm probably going to switch back, I'm tired of starting fights unable to do anything.   :oh_i_see:

I've never played a Death Knight, how is it for a pet class?  I kinda like the idea of an up close fighter with a pet, but is it worth it?  Or should I just wait till they introduce the Beastmaster class like Rexxar (yeah I know don't hold your breath waiting for that).  Unholy looks decent but is it out shinned by the other specs?

You're not really a pet class.

Eh, the ghoul...

You don't really manage the ghoul much in PvE as a deep unholy DK. He's another form of remote dps, like the gargoyle. It's just he's always around. He does do substantial damage, but essentially you'll have him because you're an unholy dps DK, as opposed to the other two alternatives (i.e. you want more AoE dps, as opposed to a more single target type, like blood). Now in PvP, well, then he has all sorts of utility.

Go with unholy or frost for DPS. Blood does pretty good dps now, but it is turning into the exclusive tanking tree in Cataclysm so there's no real reason to learn blood dps cycles now etc.

I agree with Ingmar; go Unholy if you like using a 2h, Frost if you like DW.

Arise!

Anyone know a good site for finding spell-ids? Specifically, I'm looking for the ID number for the DoT applied by Immolate, to get MSBT to yell at me when it wears off.

If you use wowhead I believe the spell ID is the last part of the URL.  So something like http://www.wowhead.com/spell=x  ,where x is the spell ID.

Assuming this is still correct, max rank immolate is 47811.

Right, but Immolate is a binary spell; the id 47811 is only the id for the nuke, not for the dot it applies. Of course, it's possible I'm wrong and I just suck at configuring MSBT.

http://www.wowhead.com/search?q=Immolate#spells

I think the DoT component is in the "Uncategorised Spells" tab for this search. Which one it actually is I can't figure out.

Yea that's about as far as I got; it matters less now that 4.0.1 is here. The lock is on the back burner now that I have shit to do with my main again.

When and if Blizzard changes leveling from 78-80 do they intend to just drop the amount required per level?  Do they also adjust your current exp, or can you expect to log in and get free dings?

IIRC when they did it in BC they dropped the amount of xp required per level.   The amount of xp you had was adjusted so you were still about the same % through your current level, +/- a percent or so.  There were free dings only in the rare cases that someone was only a few hundred xp from leveling and that +% put them over.

What Merusk said.  You went from needing 900k to level to like 250k.  And if you had 750k xp built up, it adjusted to the same % rate (aka the bubbles stayed mostly the same).  No one I know got a free level out of it.

Simple question.

Decided to level up my prot warrior before Cata hits. Pissing around in Netherstorm and found something which bemused me. Earlier in the week, I was taking on 4-5 zaxxis ethereals and coming out the other side with at least half a health bar. Last night, I dinged 68 to 69 and found myself taking on the same mobs. But against two of them, I found I was hardly doing any damage and struggled to survive.

So I want to know what the hell's going on - although I suspect the answer is that I was too shitfaced to make sure that my weapon (which admittedly is in dire need of an upgrade) was either equipped or not red. But I definitely noticed that Shield Slam and Revenge hardly seemed to cause any damange.

Only thing i could suggest is going back, makeing sure your gear is repaired and you are sober, and testing it to see if the same thing occurs again.  I cant remember hearing anything about major changes being pushed through recently that would kill warrior dps that bad.

Good suggestion


Never going to happen

EDIT: cheers for reply. Didn't think there had been any changes and that it was most likely me being a gimp.

Only thing I can think of is there might be a big stat req's jump at 69-69.  If so that ding might have dropped your hit rating, crit rating and block value enough to hurt your DPS.

More likely is broken equip and drunken tomfoolery.

Some months ago I played for the first time and leveled a rogue to 80 mostly through quests and a sprinkling of dungeons.  After some time away I resubbed and started a ret paladin and really enjoy it.  I've started to duel more and try out some BGs but I'm really terrible.  So I'm trying to fix that.  For BGs should I helping guard things or going on offense?  I'm level 26 and don't have any fancy gear just soloable quest items which right now means an axe and shield from some Darkshire quests.

I dueled a 26 warrior yesterday and got stomped.  Thinking about it I'm wondering what your keyboard/mouse setups are?  I'm using wasd for movement and have some attacks/heals bound to 1-5 and I'm using the mouse for moving the camera.  It seemed pretty clunky during PVP fights especially with all the jumping around.  When I play a FPS I map everything to the number keypad and am wondering if I should do that for familiarity.  What setups are you PVPers using?   

Here's the thing:  Gear >>>>> Everything.

Once you are geared, then other things matter if you meet equally decked out players, but that is the number one thing that will determine your success in any BG.  And until you're in enough gear you don't go splat instantly, you can't really refine your strategy.  Remapping your keys is probably a personal preference.  It could help your reactions, but I found my default PvE mapping sufficient.

Also if this was on live, a bunch of the numbers on sub-level-60 stuff is completely out of whack. The scaling is fixed on beta but I don't think will be live until either the shattering patch, or the actual expansion.

Your keyboard setup is fine; the only thing I'd change is weaning off the backpedal (s) key - assuming you're using it, if not, disregard the next sentence - and using strafe w/ mouselook instead. Backpedaling is much slower than strafing, and both allow you to keep your enemy in your LOS; it IS useful for pve tanking, however. Mouselook with holding down right mouse button, turn camera with holding down left mouse button. Target with tab / clicking on the opponent nameplate (use a mod like Aloft). I personally target group members with F1->F5, but there are other approaches as well.

Other than that, most pvpers have the 1-5 keys bound with ctrl/alt/shift modifiers along with other buttons near wasd [qezxc, some of those with ctrl/alt/shift mods as well]; some use esdf instead of wasd, but that's not a big difference.. If you have a multi-button mouse, its side buttons are good to bind abilities to as well. Numpad is not really a good idea IMO unless you use one of those fancy gamer keyboards.

This X 10.  I was geared pretty well and starting to come into my own on all my characters prior to the patch that opened up all the items to anyone with honor points.  Now I've fallen behind the gear curve again and am back to getting insta-stomped a lot.  I'm getting back to adequate again, but it just shows that even though the person and skill didn't change, without the gear, it doesn't matter.

Again, don't underestimate the 4.0 class changes' impact on level 80 PVP. The new design isn't built to make a lot of sense with overgeared level 80s, and it shows in pvp especially.

What I've noticed from this is that casters rule now.  Their damage is so crazy, 1100 resilience doesn't do a whole lot.  Throw in a ton of different CC powers and it is just damned hard to compete.  Most fights come down to dps caster against healers anymore.  The melee run around trying to cause a lot of confusion and cc when they can, but otherwise get ignored until the end.  Whoever kills the other side's healers first, wins.

I'm a bit bitter about that because for some reason when I get into PUG BG's, Alliance has between 0-1 healer per event.  Yeah, we lose a lot!

It's not a bad idea if you're willing to fuck with the keybinds a bit, have space on your desk to shift your keyboard sideways a little, and really dislike WASD.

Your modifier keys are just to the left of your arrow keys.
Six mappable buttons are just above your arrow keys.
Fifteen mappable buttons are just to the right, seventeen if you're willing to fuck with numlock and numpad enter.
A shitton of mappable keys are just to the left, if you still need more.
All of the keys are clearly delineated by empty space between the groupings, which makes playing by feel easier for people like me: too retarded to type.

If you're playing Ret you need a two-hander though.

I use the Numpad for things like cooldowns and interrupts that don't occur often enough to need them on the main 1 through = keys, but need to be mapped somewhere for quick use.  It was awkward at first but now I just mentally go right for the keys without any issues.

If you're a shaman, then the numpad is your little island of bliss in a sea of totems. The ones I need individually for certain situations are mapped to the number pad.

The tanks have target making mapped to the numpad. Not that anyone pays attention to it (yet), but it's a habit I've been getting into. Then when morons bitch, I just tell them to follow the icons to avoid embarrassment and a repair bill.

Still, I'm feeling a need for a G13, but so far I'm resisting the call of the gameboard out of sheer bull-headed cheapness.

Yeah, I use the numpad for target marking as well, along with long-duration buffs (that you might need to reapply in a BG or something, but not really something you push in combat). I -used- to have most abilities bound to the numpad (except for 1-6 number keys and qezx), but the reaction time lost in pvp due to me having to move either of my hands to the numpad and hit my battleshout hotkey [f'rex] was pretty bad. I just switched to shift/alt/ctrl modifications of the 1-5 keys, and that's been enough... so far.

I put my bread and butter spammy abilities on ZXCV; more situational things on shift+ZXCV, 1234, and alt+1234; and cooldowns on FGRT and shift+FGRT. I also assign things to shift+QE and alt+QE, though not to unmodified QE because I like to keyboard turn in town while I mange my inventory with the mouse or eat chips with my mouse hand. I should get over this though.

I don't have a rogue or paladin, but on my pvp kitty for example this means that ZXC are my combo point builders and Ambush-alike, shift+ZXC are stealth, dash, and my finisher, 23 are pounce and my interrupt (3 is always my interrupt on every character or I get confused), F is my damage+energy cooldown, and R is my trinket. Works pretty well for me.

Heals and buffs I do with Clique, not with keybinds, even in PvP. My unitframe is right in the middle of the screen so clicking it is easy. Deselecting your target to heal yourself is probably a bad idea.

I got myself one of these (http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/gaming/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=102) a while back and love it. I've swapped the numpad over to the left, so I can use WASD, have easy access to 12 macro keys *and* the numpad, all without taking my hand off the mouse or WASD. The only things I don't like are the fact that the capslock is right in the wrong place and I keep hitting it by mistake, and the action on the keys has a really unpleasant sound.

One of the big problems I have with keybinds is that I now have 10 level 80s. That's a lot of keybinds and abilities to remember. I try and put similar abilities in similar places (group heals shift-4, targetted aoe shift-3, main spam attack 2, etc) but I'm not always that organised as I'm levelling a character. And changing keybinds once you're used to them is a recipe for 2 weeks of playing like a tard.

Hmm, that is kind of interesting. It would help with the desk room limitations of having a whole keyboard, mouse, and a gameboard all competing for space.

My only concern is I really like natural keyboards with the oversized space, alt, ctrl, whathaveyou keys. Especially that mutant alt key. Still, I do like that setup with the pad on the left. I don't like taking my hand off the mouse and it would facilitate that playstyle.

Welp, I tanked my first instance last night.  It was the Cathedral part of the Scarlet Monastery.  It was green to me so I figured it was a good time to try.  I gave my 'Hi, I'm new be nice' intro and off we went.  I got gentle encouragement to 'go faster and pull more when you feel comfortable' and I did so.  I had 8 or so mobs hitting me in the pew area and the healer kept me safe.

The end result is nobody died and I got thanked for being the best tank anyone had had that night.  :ye_gods:

I got some good private tells from one of the other members about how i should really be prot specced and not ret for tanking which made me facepalm but he was nice about it.  I got a nice scarlet shield out of it too.

Comments and suggestions here helped this poor newb so thanks everyone.

Has the theorycrafting discussion moved elsewhere?  EJ is a pale shadow of what it once was in terms of information and discussion. 

Anyway, does anyone have some mage tips?  I've been and have enjoyed Arcane, but things are significantly weaker than the power overwhelming they used to be.  Frost used to be good for solo, but at 70k hp and as much damage as the mobs do Frost just does not put out the damage to not force me to eat or bandage every fight.  Ice Barrier is only good for one hit anymore. Even with Arcane crits I have to remember to summon food and eat with some regularity.    Fire seems to be all about the AoE (somewhat uncontrolled aoe I think ie cleaves?) and that sounds like a recipe for problems in an instance needing CC.

EJ still has decent information, they just seem to be total fucking tightwads about having as few threads as humanly possible, which fucks up any sort of coherence because you have to dig to find shit, and original posts don't always get updated with relevant information.

Yeah, I can see why they want to keep the number of threads under control, but it makes my eyes cross trying to find anything there.

It crossed from filtering noise into fetish a long time ago.

Eh, to take the Priest board for instance, what more do you need besides: Disc, Holy, Shadow, and General Simple Questions?  If this round of normal raid mechanics are anything to write home about, Rosin might make a raid mechanics thread soon enough.

Shadow's in a bit of a lurch without a maintainer but that's the only thread I keep up with that's lacking one at the moment.

Has anyone leveled a Shaman since 4.0?  As in from level 1.

I haven't played a Shaman in about 3-4 years, I haven't played WOW since February and I know there are a lot of changes.

Is there any significant difference leveling elemental vs. enhanced?  Assuming Resto is for groups.

Regarding number of threads, it really depends if the OP is being updated quickly or not. Having to slog through dozens of pages to find info when the OP isn't being maintained is a huge pain.

Enhance is now the lowbie leveling spec. I play enhance on my main and thought I'd look at how they level now as opposed to the pain that was vanilla leveling. Bottom line was play enhance until you at least get to TBC and some decent tle gear appears.

It's still not as much fun as a L80+ enhance shammy but its ok.

Like so. (http://elitistjerks.com/f81/t106912-fury_dps_4_0_cataclysm/)

I've been playing an heirloomed dwarf shaman from 1 as soon as it was available.  Enhance all the way.  It's..... wacky.   My health never went down until about level 50.   

I was averaging 30 mins a level until Outlands (I did both 55 zones, so I went there at 63, but they just changed it to cut your Old World xp at 60, bleh & glad I snuck through before that).  In Outlands I had to switch it up and do some pvp to level since I am thoroughly sick of Outlands.  Hit 70 at 3 days /played despite said pvp diversions and dabbling in archaeology.  Currently 73 and doing ~2500 dps with everything fired off, all [2] and[3] quests have just been steamrolled by the dwarf & wolf hammer express.   I think my last UK was like 1600 dps or something?  It's silly (though a 74 mage did beat me).

Sadly, I never played a shaman before so I can't say how it's changed, but currently, it is a lot of lightning-crackling fun.

I leveled a shammy in vanilla and finished her in WotLK.  Your experiences mimic mine with the last expansion changes.  [2] and [3] quests were a joke and the hammer & wolf express is definitely how it goes.  Went like that all the way to 80.  It was loads of fun, but for some reason I really disliked enhance as a raid option so I just healed.

Just go to the official class forums and read the stickies. They'll have all the information you would possibly want for any spec.

I don't need spec info, I just wanted to read some personal experience with the two styles.  I ended up going enhanced over the weekend, and played a bunch last night.  Hit level 16 and mobs die very very fast.

They did a lot to the class.  So much better than wielding a 2H weapon and having just one shock spell as it was from Vanilla.

Shit, go tell the numbnuts on the O-fficial forums that. It's a rare day that doesn't go by without some jackwagon spouting off about how much better things were for enhance in vanilla and it could be so again if only 2h would come back and if the devil DW were purged from the trees. It's all bullshit, of course, but you can't argue with these people.

The only legitimate complaint about enhance is its lousy physical damage scaling and the fact it requires way too many keys for basic gameplay. I literally have to run dozens of keybound macros to keep up (hence all my angst over the G13--conveniance vs. cheapness). Too many mechanics (totems) are way to clunky (totems) and require way too many keys (totems). After running a number of heroics this last weekend, my hand was ready to fall off and I wish they'd take totems off the goddammed GCD already (or better yet, get rid of them entirely).

To raise this thread from the dead: so my affliction lock is doing about 9.6k without cooldowns right now on a boss style rotation, about 11-12k ideal situation DPS (doomguard, using demon soul, decent caster 5 man buffs). But I keep seeing opposite information on stat priorities, so I have reforged my gear about 8 times in the last week trying to work out what the heck I need to do in order to improve my damage output. I know I'll always be a 6-8ker on trash, because lol ramp up time getting shadow embrace up, but I'm looking for any real advice.

I know I need to re-enchant my new boots, and the one point in demo is non negotiable until we start raiding: it's far too valuable for my solo pve sanity.

The lock!

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/doomhammer/kildock/simple

I know bupkis about warlocks, but if you're turning 10k or so in 5mans in heroic gear, I'd say you're spot on. This is generally the high end in heroics from what I"ve been seeing.

Our guild hunter maven runs survival and he'll pull down 11-12k. Most runs I'm in have folks gearing like I am turning in 10-11k. My shaman is in mostly 346 gear, with a couple of 359s, and one lone 333 trinket (damned thing...) and I generally pull down 11.5k steadily, if nothing untoward happens (like tanks that can't hold aggro or healers that won't heal dps). My own priority system probably isn't well dialed in--enhsim is still shaky right now--but since I'm competitive in heroics at the moment, I figure I'm doing something right.

I could do better on trash, even with the shitty ramp up time. I'm too lazy to deal with the imp soulfire buff on trash packs, even if it is a huge unskippable dps boost. Fuck 2.7s hard casts every 13 seconds while trying to keep unsynced dot timers going. :P

Yeah, eff trash dps -- 10-11k is more than fine for bosses. I've seen destro warlocks do more dps than afflic, but I haven't seen too many locks in H-pugs in the first place. I gotta say that succubus + fear glyph combo looks pretty nice, I haven't seen any locks with it (I haven't seen many locks with glyphed fear period, but that's a rant for another day). 

Unholy DKs, enh shaman and surv hunters seem to be top of the heap atm. Kind of annoying that my better-geared ele shaman only does 9k to my new-85-with-zinrokh DK's 13k no matter how hard I push my buttons (all 4 of them!), but at least I have heroism and CCs and totems... and stuff. (Speaking of which, has the unholy DK nerf gone in yet, or is it slated for a future hotfix / mini patch?)

Glyphed Fear is great (since it can take a minor bleed and still stick), the main issue with it is control: pets still consider fear and root to be *not CC* and when I fear something my pet will use her newly buffed 20 yard lash of pain on it until I tell her to stop. But yeah, glyphed out for it, locks are pretty much the go to form of CC imo. Fear works on nearly anything (you can fear the undead casters in HoO. Seriously  :uhrr: ), seduce works on a lot, and banish has the advantage of being one of the few forms of CC that you can cast into the melee/incidental cleave pack without issues. It helps a lot in H-Stonecore where if anyone screws up you can banish the transformed earth eles (though stupidly, their flagged as interruptable but totally isn't AE channel still continues when banished)

Yet still in a pug, I never get a CC icon <3

Does anything know much about MC? I've been using it to CC some packs and usually it works as advertised, other times it breaks instantly, then instantly again when recast. As far as I can see there is no AoE damage or interrupt going on, I might be wrong though.

I haven't used it since vanilla, but back then really odd things would cancel it, like pressing Jump. I'll poke at it when I get home on a few random orcs while doing dailies.

edit: on that note though, if you're doing HoO with a warlock, enslave a Void Seeker, just do NOT keep it through Rajh (it breaks his encounter in a hilarious way), they hit for ~14k/pop and the two in the trash pull before setesh have a 9k AE shadowbolt (the ones that pop out of doors only have that immunity to healing thing, but still melee for 14kish.)

Instant 17k dps lock for as many bosses as you re-enslave him <3

I'm taking about it breaking the instant it lands. It seems somewhat random, and I should probably take the time to go through the log sometime. It's not a miss or a resist though since my view jumps to that of the mob for the split second, then the channel breaks.

Care to expand on that? Might be interesting to do just to see what happens.  I could use a bit of Hilarity in the average HoO pug.

They drop a void zone that heals ~10%/second that you need to move them out of on the trash pull.

When I had one on Rajh, he did his center stomp/AE move that we all burn through.. but his health wasn't going down.

Turns out he killed my void seeker in the AE, since enslaved demons don't have avoidance, which dropped a 10%/second healing zone that he was rooted in. So he went into Fire AE mode and came out at 100% ;)

Do you have spell queuing enabled?

Yes, but I wouldn't queue anything after MC; I guess I might have double spammed the button.

Mind Control checks resist, hit, and range every tick rather that just at the start of the cast, with a second check right after the spell is cast (heartbeat resist is the term Blizzard uses).  The range check is, as I recall, designed so that as you approach the max range of the spell the chance to get a resist increases significantly.

Well it wouldn't be a miss since I'm way overcapped for hit (lolhealergear), and I'm usually well within max range thanks to mind soothe. It could be a resist I guess, but getting 2-3 back to back without even a second of channel seems odd.

The first check is at cast.  The second check is at ~0.5 seconds in.

This was happening with my Hex in VP yesterday. Turned out the rogue was putting fucking poison dot on the Adept. Dipshit.

The heartbeat CC breaks make me rage on my resto shaman sometimes (it's not an issue on my ele spec, since I'm hit-capped). Hex breaking 4 seconds after it's applied, even without the mob taking any damage... fffuuuu. Same with bind elemental, but at least that's recastable.

How did he manage that without hitting it?

Fan of Knives?

I would have suspected that FoN damage would break the Hex rather than the poison.  Then again, I don't really know what the break chance/damage relation is.

From what I saw from our mutilate rogue the actual FoK damage is pretty pitiful, the poison does an overwhelming majority of the damage, if they're AoEing with it.

My new issue is, as a tank, the mage (or et al.) not ccing of the pull, but doing it on one of the mobs I am swiping (or HotRing on my pally). HEY DUMMY!!! DON'T CC the mob right next to me, then bitch that it aggros you next cooldown!

He was hitting it. Took me a while to work out what was going on but when the tank said "sap star, hex moon" the rogue was sapping the star and then stabbing the moon target, before my hex landed.

I was tanking a group last night where I would mark a trap for the hunter, and he'd walk in front of me and drop an ice trap on the ground. THANKS. THAT IS SO HELPFUL. ><

You know, tanks managed for YEARS having hunters drop traps in front of them.  :oh_i_see:

Yeah, and we've moved beyond the dark ages! We even let hunters into groups now!

BUT THEY NINJA OUR STUFF.

Man, the stat revamp has lead to some hilarious ninja accusations. Like boomkin rolling on a spi/int staff and getting yelled at for it, and people telling my DK to stop rolling on dps 2h weapons STILL. :P

Yeah.  I got told off for rolling on a hit cloak - because it also had dodge.  That's part of the problem now;  there's really no set 'tanking' stuff for warriors, so the itemisation leads to confusing like this.

Reforging was a fuck stupid idea, followed closely by fucking Mastery.

Plate tanking gear is Dodge or Parry with Mastery (or sometimes Hit or Expertise) and there's about as much of it as there is for other "role plus armor type" combinations from a quick look on Wowhead.

Tanks have always dipped into "DPS gear" for their threat stats too.

Yeah, but you rarely get Dodge and Parry on the same item, so it's usually mixed with other stats.  The cloak I was talking about was Dodge and Hit.

Sure, I can reforge that to be Dodge, Hit and Parry, but the DPS can also reforge it to be Hit Dodge and, well, whatever the fuck they want.  That's why it really falls down - much smaller pool of items.  (Also, the weapons suck balls.)

This is in the initial instances of course - as far as I can see, the actual 'fit' of items gets a lot better in raids and with the Point gear, though I think that just makes it all the more stupid.

No dps should ever be rolling on something with dodge or parry, the only items that should cause fights really are the ones with 2 out of hit/expertise/mastery and nothing else, since people tend to put blinders on and not realize those stats are for everyone.

Getting yelled at as the tank for rolling on dodge/hit gear is just a sign of a really, really special snowflake dpser.

I was about to say, thats nothing to do with reforgin and mastery and everything to do with unbelievably stupid dps. Any item with dodge on it is a tank item - reforgin only allows you to swap 40% of the stat, so even after reforging its still a terrible item for dps. Heck, the raid feasts were originally giving anyone who had ANY dodge rating at all anywhere on their gear tank stats because blizzard assumed that every person with dodge must be a tank.

DPS are beyond stupid when levelling though - and I say that as a DPS class. Maybe its because of the long instance queuea, but they seem to feel the need to grab every item possible, possibly because it took them 30 minutes to queue.

You would think after X years people would have gotten a clue and rolled a class that can tank by now. It took me about five minutes to figure it out.

That or you would think blizzard would have gotten a clue and retrofitted tanking/healing specs into current dps only classes. I could easily see combat becoming a rogue tank tree. Likewise demonology becoming a warlock tank tree, with their demon form working like druid bear form. Those two trees are the respective red headed child trees of both classes, so neither would be missed. Arcane could become the Mage healing spec. Arcane Barrage = Holy shock. Arcane Missiles = Penance. Arcane Explosion = Holy Explosion. Arcane Blast = Heal. Throw in a couple more and you're set.

Sorry, servers are down. /derail

Lack of specs isn't really the problem, it's just the case that more than 60% of the population want to play and only want to play DPS.

The proportions of level 85 toons by class across all servers:

SOURCE (http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?serverid=-1&factionid=-1&minlevel=85&maxlevel=85&servertypeid=-1)

As you can see, there's no shortage of people playing classes that can tank and heal; they just don't want to.

And that's fine, if they can actually PLAY dps.

The issue is people when given the option still don't want to queue as anything with a high degree of responsibility. I see tons of ret pallies, shadow priests, arms/fury warriors, frost/unholy DKs, boomkins, and even ferals (lawl) queued as DPS who sit through the entire queue.

I queue as a healer or a tank when I want to play for a bit and get my dailies out of the way. I queue as DPS when I don't want to be stressed out over tanking or healing a pug.

But in general, giving every class a tank or healing spec wouldn't solve the queue times. The only way to solve the queue times would be to do that, and make healing/tanking instances end-of-wrath level easy again. Because right now starting out in 333ish gear as a tank? Heroic queues are going to stress you right the hell out in a pug.

Yup.  Tanking Pugs is no fun.  At all.

Agreed.  But the queue wasn't really great for DPS in LK either.

It wasn't terrible though.  In a session you could queue for your daily, get some shit done, have your instance pop and have a reasonable expectation of finishing it.

I didn't badge grind for heirlooms on any of my DPS, however.  1 minute queue times for slapping earth shield on a tank and autofollowing wasn't that unbearable.  :awesome_for_real:

Exactly.  I've got 3 tanks and I hate PUG tanking for all of them.  People are retarded.

I have been known to get in a group - do one pull and leave.*

*after I die horrifically, and spectacularly. I burn off the queue pvping then go back in hopefully to get a decent group.  My favorites are obvious guild groups that couldn't find a tank.

Am I correct in assuming that, once again, Blood Craze is useless shit?

The real issue is that those people aren't recognizing that DPS now does have a responsibility just as high as tanks and healers.  CC and focus fire have everything to do with the success of instances in Cata where it was never even cared about in LK.  Tanking and healing would be no big deal if everyone plays their part correctly.  Topping the dps charts is no longer an excuse of "I'm doing my part."  None of that matters if you are causing wipes.

The most frustrating part as a tank right now is that you simply can't salvage a group anymore with your own play. In Wrath, a good tank and a good healer could solve a lot of heroic problems. In this iteration, forget it. You can't put the group on your shoulders and hope for the best.

Which was terrible gameplay (a solid tank or healer being able to carry an entire heroic run), but made for easy LFD experiences. I could happily queue a heroic run on a protadin and waltz through.

It was terrible gameplay, but I controlled my own destiny to a degree even when the RNG came up snakeyes on retarded dps. Now, you just enter into these things with a sense of hopelessness, and in about another week, you can expect that the majority of tanks will have stopped queuing all together.

In a few more weeks, I suspect tanks will stop queuing due to a lack of rewards for doing it (chaos orb chance and VP for your daily is about it) because the tank rewards from the JP vendor are terrible (they have threat stats all over half the pieces. Nobody cares about threat stats anymore)

But my DK is well into the "can pull a lot of bullshit in a heroic" territory again already, and I've only got an average ilvl of around 340 equipped. There are still some bullshit bosses (Oz without a charge ability is bullshit, hell most of stonecore is bullshit. A few interrupt heavy fights where the tank can't solo interrupt), but lately I've just been running with "trap/sap whatever you want" and AE pulling the rest as long as the healer can deal with it. Give me T11 epic pieces next content patch and I'll probably stop bothering to sap/trap.

Yeah.  Me, Shaman Healer, Mage, Warlock, BearTank.  Heroic Votex.

It was utter bullshit, due to the tank charging in and trying to dps down all the groups.  Here was a group who (apart from me, Fury) had CC coming out of our arseholes.  Did we bother ?  Nope.  The double ramp with the 6 mobs didn't even get caster CC and we wiped 3 times by the time we got to Mr Dragon, despite me saying 'er, chaps, this would go easier with us CC a couple of these guys'.

Each player had around 10k dps and even Mr Bear Tank was well up at 9k.  But it was an exercise in utter fucking futility by the time these fucking retards got to the Faraday Cage mobs with the wondrous instant 200k healers.  I was the only fucking one pounding on the Adepts while they all focused on the other chaps.

Take Recount to FUCK and play the fucking game.  In a way, it was a learning curve for me at the start when I realised that my DPS didn't matter jack fuck if I didn't get away from Ozruks Shatter.  I got shit from that fight for having lower overall dps than the other two corpses.  I bet they didn't do that much on Ozruk himself.  :uhrr: 


On an unrelated note, I agree that the JP rewards are kinda all over the place for Warrior tanks.  Spent a fair bit thus far and I really feel like it's not been entirely worth it.

You had I think 3 usable CCs for VP (no sheeping elementals, I believe), and I'm iffy on Fear working there. I know there are a few pulls where you can't CC (the princes can't be banished, and there is at least a double pull of them)

But yeah, I had a group with my lock, an enhance shaman, and a hunter. And no CC marks in Grim Batol. Seriously? We have like, 6 concurrent crowd controls going on here. We can lock down the entire pull on the largest pulls in there, and our healer is OOMing every pull due to tank damage. Mark something!

Hell, I've taken to banishing without marks if nobody's marking CC. You know what? You can't break my CC, so you're just going to have to live with the idea that one of those mobs is controlled.

If DPS queues were what they were in Wrath, I would seriously consider switching specs just so I could make sure CC and interrupts were done right. Hell, I'm seriously considering collecting hit gear as a healer for the same reason, though having to watch enemy cast bars on top of cooldowns, raid frames, ground effects, and mana usage is tough.

Watching the Wife Shackle is a thing of beauty.  She's a fantastic Healer but the minute there's a loose undead on the scene, BAM, it's not moving.

If only she was as good at shackling IRL.  Still, you can't have everything.

Vortex has two parts, bear in mind, the elementals, which are trickier to CC, and the Faraday Cage chaps who really, really, really need CC.

The idea of running the Heroic without even trying is so oldskool and stupid as to beggar belief.

The humanoid section is getting nerfed pretty hard. The only reason you needed CC on it was that the healers would drop a minute long 200/300% haste buff on themselves and spam Flash Heal if you didn't murder them at low health/interrupt the initial heal. The only CC you really need is one of the healers in a two healer pack and someone interrupting/stunning the other.

The spam lightning on everyone constantly dudes are obnoxious, though.

Geez, I hope they don't nerf the humanoid section, actually. First, you can already cheat your way around two of the humanoid packs if you've got a rogue on board with a non-combat initiating sap (yay me) but also it's a reasonable case of using cc and interrupts in a way that most players ought to aspire to learn. As opposed to some of the boss interrupts which take place in the middle of all sorts of complicated emotes and spams and green shit on the floor and so on.

The instance that I think really needs a fix is Heroic Stonecore. Fuck but that gets boring and frustrating because of the trash. It would be one thing if the bosses were all ez-sauce and so the trash was the real challenge, but they're not.

The nerf is severely reducing the duration of the buff the healers put on themselves (desperate prayer? something like that) as a penalty for missing an interrupt on them. They get a little absurd with that buff up, and it's not dispelable.

HStonecore bothers me because of the amount of "one fuckup and it's a wipe" mechanics on bosses. Be it any of the abilities that will oneshot the tank on Oz, or the falling rocks of lawl on lady whatshername.

HSFK needs a serious trash reduction as well. That is a sloggy freaking instance.

I'm not sure the 2nd boss of heroic Grim Batol is a fair fight. I've had several instances where he draws a shield first and doesn't move out of the stonefall he laid out.

Also, the flaming arrows seem over the top. Has anybody else had issues there, or were my healers just completely unprepared?

That fight flips from normal. Shield becomes by FAR the worst phase. The tank needs to be on the ball moving him out of cave ins due to shielding on a cave in, but you can deal with it if he's standing on one (his hitbox is large enough to dps from outside it, just don't run through him), and the arrows deal craploads more damage in heroic. Meanwhile dual blades is a joke that you just pop defensive cooldowns and wait out.

In general to avoid the "standing on a cave in" thing, your melee dps needs to be dpsing from farther away near the edge of his hitbox. The cave ins center on their random target, so worst case you wind up with one sitting next to one side during a shield phase, which is manageable.

Also, everyone should run to melee range during shield phase, and just circle strafe or run through (depending where the cave in is) to dodge the shield flame.

The problem we had were that arrows were owning the group in the face, and the priest couldn't keep up. They were hitting for 9k a pop and were unavoidable. I think the damage is too high for a damage effect that we can't reduce through smart play.

I still care about threat stats.  :heart:

I'm surprised a priest had issues with it. PoH is pretty much the be all end all raid damage spell. That and Mending work great for the arrows, to the point where my priest never actually noticed they hurt that much.

And ing: screw your threat stats! Seriously, threat is a joke right now :( I only use taunt if the mob that isn't on me is out of rune strike range.

I don't care about them because of threat. Tank DPS is always an incredibly underrated factor in group success.

True, but I think I'm playing the lowest or second lowest DPS tank. On an awesome day I can rock 6k with silly vengeance numbers.

My damage output is getting a huge buff next patch though (heart strike's getting buffed to sin)

Nah, you're just a pussy.  Higher DPS will sort that out.  Just keep kicking the DPS until you get some who have a fucking clue.

Not a bad idea. I like your thought process here.

And I am a pussy about heroics. I'd nerf em all and fuck the hardcore bullshit haters. We're not using these as the pinnacle of content.

We kinda are.  These queues are fuck stupid and I currently (right NOW) have 20 people on in guild and I can't get a 5 man together.

Fucking Hell, I honestly think I'm done with it now.

New Year, New Hobby.

Well, I'd ask if you can't get them together because of time problems, not caring, or in general people hate them?

Because if it's the last one, that speaks heavily to the design decisions Blizzard's made.

I have timezone issues getting 5 mans going in guild, but that's because it's a heavily west coast guild and I roll east coast times.

That and one of our 85s absolutely refuses to admit how awesome flight form is and is camping a mount like it's jboots.

He's camping the time-lost drake? Tell him to get a life.

The one in Deepholm actually, but yeah.

He's been at it all week of my trial.  Dood's a bit crazy like that.  I'd do guild-only groups, but the trial doesn't let me get past 80 and is a few days from running out.

Shame, too, because I have my new DK rotation up and Kild saying Heartstrike is getting a buff makes me happy.

The drake in deepholme pisses me off because I swear I saw it up at least once during my initial push to 85, but I was so intent on grinding that I never bothered googling some friendly elite that wasn't even silver to see if it was useful/rare. I just assumed it was a guard or quest mob.

Heart Strike now deals 175% weapon damage plus 15% per disease, up from 120% plus 10% per disease.
Improved Death Strike now increases the damage of Death Strike by 30/60/90%, up from 15/30/45%.

In addition, they're making Blood Shield roll now, so you don't wind up in a position where your second deathstrike erases the shield you had on previously.

The Death Strike glyph for frost and unholy will probably get mauled/removed before 4.0.6 goes live, because no matter how much they massage it, it's broken as sin for Blood spec unless you make blood shield only work in Blood Presence.

I'm with you there kildorn; the only other way to make it work would be to have changing presences remove the shield.

In my guild there are 2 tanks (one tank "retired" because he would rather DPS) and 4 main healers.  All of them geared their heroics out the first week content was out, and now only log in to bitch that the remaining 8-9 DPS who log on regularly aren't geared for raids yet.  So basically they all ran together, got geared up, and then ditched the rest of the guild to gear up on our own.  Which based on the average success rate of heroics (1+hrs when you do manage to finish, worse when you fail) is pretty much frustrating the hell out of me to the point where I don't think I'm going to bother raiding or heroic'ing or even logging in anymore.

And when I complained, I was told "just level your tank\healer instead!"

Selby I think the problem lies more with the content than your guildies. For a lot of people (myself included), heroics are simply not fun. In some zones, every single trash pull is a hassle, and I've already started skipping certain optional bosses because they (Commander in SFK, Beauty depending on comp) or their trash (Mindbender and his goblin hordes) are just a huge headache. Some of the zones are pretty easy (Lost City is probably my favorite), while others aren't bad if you have the right comp. But I can't WAIT until I've gotten my last 3 pieces from the VP vendor and don't have to suffer through this bullshit anymore.

Besides me, we've got two other tanks in the guild. One of them (feral druid) can't be bothered to learn the heroic fights so he only comes to them as DPS but will tank raids. The other is a relatively new recruit, and hasn't really gathered up guildies for heroic runs yet. I'm hoping he does so, and gears up quickly so he can replace the feral druid as our dedicated OT.

It's funny, Lost City is one of the easiest instances there is, but I've had the 2nd most failures there.  (Vortex Pinnacle being the most.)   People fail on the CC or the simplest of boss mechanics.  Or, like tonight, you get that one asshat dps who aggros everything then bitches when he dies 5 times before the 3rd boss.  Something about that instance just makes people stupid.

"Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you."  I think the WoW devs should get this Nietzsche quote inscribed on their desks.

The shit you describe is why they should have thought twice about taking the wrench to heroics. They are a majority of the content in this game, and by making them borderline unplayable unless you roll a dedicated team, they have effectively deleted a large portion of their game. Yeah yeah, I know, 'but in a few months the next patch will come out and we'll all have purples and steamroll it.' Fuck that, 'our game will be fixed in a few months' is never an acceptable argument.

We all knew it was coming. I'm just wondering how long the bad taste will linger with people.

We're also assuming they will leave heroics alone in the next iteration. Who's to say they won't buff some of the content when the VP epics roll down to JP prices?

They'd need to buff the gear dropped in normals to do that, or it would become impossible to make the normal->heroic jump.

The only way they're getting "harder" is new heroics aimed at the higher tier, ala Trial of the Champ type things and the new heroics added later in wrath.

Anyone know of a mod that lets you display multiple reps in the XP bar area simultaneously?  I think Questhelper used to let you do that, but its functionality has been mostly assimilated by the stock UI.

The way I read Ghostcrawler's post, this is by design.

I wonder if Blizzard can profit from the population of players they are accommodating?

Ghostcrawlers post was actually a good one, with a great many salient points.

Fundamentally, however, I don't think he's RIGHT about where it actually IS right now.  I think what he describes is a good goal, but it's not there yet.

He admits there are changes to be made, but doesn't admit how much.  I suspect this is merely him being good at communication.

Need some advice on wtf I am doing wrong in The Oculus. Yeah, I read all the shit on it and followed stuff pretty much to the letter but my group is still wiping on regular.  I am running a green dragon and thus attempting to heal. Basically the fight starts and the tank flies in an engages. I spit the green stuff but am finding I can get maybe two off before the tank is dropping into the 70% health range and thus screaming for a health funnel. So I funnel and watch his health and my health drop until the yellow dragons freeze the boss. I then put a third spit on the boss and hit nightmare, then start healing again. Usually around the second enrage, I die horribly, and repeatedly while the tank is screaming for heals (while I am healing him). So what's the trick I am missing with this?

Don't bother with nightmare unless you're overgearing the fight. Just keep three stacks up on the boss (throw some on the adds too if you're feeling saucy, though it shouldn't be necessary) and heal whomever needs it. If people are dying too quickly for you to refresh your stacks and heal up as necessary, then either the adds aren't getting burned down or the tank is doing something wrong.

Yellow drakes aren't keeping him locked down enough is my guess.

It's been a while since I ran Oculus, so if it's changed recently this is probably wrong.

Is this a regular group, or a random run?  If it's a regular group, I'd talk to the tank.  There really isn't much to that dragon in normal, healing is pretty straightforward.  I might not cast nightmare if I'm low on health (I was always with groups that were well enough geared to blow through it), but otherwise it sounds like what I did when I ran it.  If I recall right, there's not much you can do besides health funnel, refresh dot, repeat.  When you say "I'm dying," what do you mean?  If mobs are hitting you, that's on the tank.  If you're blowing too much health on health funnel, I'd make sure that your dots are always up (you can cancel out of health funnel to refresh the dot and then re-funnel right away, faster than re-applying the three dots if they wear off) but otherwise, that's also on the tank (either he's not evading or not martyring, there's nothing you can do to heal better or faster in that fight if funnel is always up) or maybe the DPS if they're sitting on their ass while you're burning hp.  Might also be your gear level, if you're running through it to level (as opposed to running it with a half set of purples).  Vehicles scale with gear level, so that mucks up the balance in that fight a bit.  If I recall correctly, you can just set the best geared member of your party on the tanking dragon if you want, and he'll do just as well if he's a priest as he would if he was a warrior.

These are pugs and I am questing thru that dungeon atm. Basically I have the DoTs up and break funnel when I see them dropping, but I am hanging around 50-60% health the whole fight while the tank health is dropping like a brick. Being the healer, I am the victim of the bitching that I am not doing a good enough job. I have thick skin so I don't take it all that seriously, but when it happens several times, might as well be sure I am not actually doing it wrong. I can say that I am the first to die every time and my health never seems to regen faster than it drains even with a 3 stack. Last two pugs I was in, the tank was bitching how I was grabbing aggro and not healing so I was really not sure how or why. Figure I'd check in here to find out. The last time, the whelps seem to key right in on me and I could not break funnel to throw dots on any of them since the tank was sitting at 40%.

If adds are beelining you, fly closer to the tank, the red drake's breath is a 'cleave' that hops from dragon to dragon so if you're in close he'll have a better chance of hitting the ones that are coming after you. I still think the amber drakes are probably screwing this up, you shouldn't actually spend that much time getting beat on by the big dragon if the 3 of them are staggering their freezes and doing damage properly, since he'll go into the flyaround/orb chase phase at certain health % spots.

Oculus should proooobably not be in the random leveling rotation, frankly, the mechanics take a little getting used to.

Sounds to me like the tank is terrible.  His breath is not only a cleave, it is one of those "chain ligning" type things that gains in damage each time it jumps, and the whelps should spawn close enough to the boss that it should hit all of them nearly as soon as they spawn.  The tank may occasionally take "spike damage" when he needs to build dodge charges, but most of the time, the tank should not actually be takeing much damage at all.  If his hp is dropping like a rock, he is not managing his dodge stacks correctly, or is popping his "redirect ALL damage to me" special when he has very low dodge stacks.

Also, make sure your bronze drakes are co-ordinating their time stops durring enrages.  It also helps if the Bronze drakes actually know what the hell they are doing.  Half the time I did occulus, the people on bronze drakes did not understand that the channeled attack they have actually DOES NO DAMAGE on its own.  So they would sit there, and both channel away mindlessly untill they each reached 10 stacks, then attack and repeat.  You get a LOT more damage out of bronze drakes if they alternate one channeling and one nukeing untill the channeling one gets 10 stacks, then the nuker starts channeling, and when the guy with 10 stacks hits his nuke, the guy now channeling will almost instantly get 10 stacks.  After that, they can alternate channel / nuke on like a 2 second rotation and just obliterate the boss.

If you have enough health, casting your healer nuke is actually a good idea.  If i remember correctly, it leaves a debuff on the boss that reduces his Damage done by like 40% or something like that.

Honestly though, the biggest suggestion i would have if you are having problems in Occulus is: add another green drake.  1 Red, 2 bronze, 2 green should have no problem dealing with anything normal can do.

Will take all this into the next round. If we wipe and I am the only green, I'll suggest another green. Otherwise I'll keep doing what I do since that seems to be the way. Thanks for putting an old man's head at ease.

This.  The only time I ever had issues with health was when the healer was flat out not health funneling at all to me.  And if the little whelps are attacking everyone else the tank is not doing his job either.

I agree, Oculus is one that shouldn't be in there at all.  Based on my experiences with it a few weeks ago on an alt it's a combination of all the of the problems you're listing.  The tank doesn't know how to use the abilities given, the DPS blows Stop Time in rapid succession and the players are clueless of the mechanics of the fight.

In my fight the other two dps blew ST right at the beginning of the fight, on top of each other.. then the drakes kept aggroing the healer as the tank was doing the same screaming  01 is talking about.   I managed to pull aggro on the boss since I knew how to stack the DPS funnel and blow it, instead of just spamming the 1 key.  The only reason we lived was when my drake died, I knew that if I was over an Island I wouldn't fall to my death and would be able to DPS.  3 other dragons died after mine and I'd blown all my mage CDs before he died.   It's a lousy instance and nobody asks questions.. I should have known to just explain the fight as we were going to it.

Happy to report I finally got thru it, but had one amber dragon die and the others were a bit battered - tank was 50% as was I since i got to get off a stack of leech and drop nightmare twice. Now that that one is done I pray it doesn't queue up in random again... for a very long time.

The tank has no chance in hell of keeping aggro on that fight.  He's there to hit his "I am a grounding totem" type special while keeping evasion up, and to nuke whelps by shooting big dragon with his cleaving attack.

well, the tank isnt really a "tank" in the traditional sense, since yes, any good bronze should be able to rip aggro off him in short order.  The trick with the red is that he can redirect all damage to himself at key points, and combined with proper dodge stacks, completely nulllify all damage that is occuring for a good chunk of time.

I just made a flow chart...

Having fun  ----> Yes ----> keep playing
    !
    !
  No
    !
    !
Stop playing

I went with no.

Ok. Thanks for sharing.

Stupid question:

My paladin just dinged 84, and I'm looking at the endgame fairly soon.  Naturally, I'm kind of anxious about all the bitching over heroics.  So my question: is there any reason to run normal dungeons instead of heroics?  Can I get decent gear (some kind of set pieces) from that?  Also, what are the normal dungeons like in terms of difficulty?  Will I be OK waltzing into them with greens (haven't touched any of this expansions's dungeons yet so all my gear is quest greens).

Between Twilight Highlands quest rewards, faction stuff, and some runs of the 85 normals you can get into a full suit of ilvl 333 stuff, which will make a big difference in your ability to succeed in heroics. Greens into heroics is rough.

Yeah don't forget the faction stuff.  So many people I've talked to have forgotten they got to honored or revered while questing and don't go back to visit the vendors.

I'd say do /lfd for normal dungeons for a day or so; you'll get some rep, maybe an upgrade or two, and a feel for how dungeons work in Cata. Most of the boss fights are radically different on heroic, but you'll at least get used to ccing, avoiding fire, etc. and unlearning any bad habits from WotLK.

Either you people are insane or you are not talking about pugging heroics in Cataclysm.  Not enough tanks/healers are overgeared and still pugging heroics to be able to successfully finish them in pugs yet.

There is _no_ way that anyone can go into heroics without doing regulars first (more than a day or two, unless you're in dungeons for 24 hours straight).

You won't have the ilvl necessary to pug a heroic, for one thing, and if you're a dps trying to pug a heroic, you won't be putting out nearly enough damage to help your group.  If you're tanking or healing, don't even think about it .

Even the easy heroics are hard in a pug still.

I suspect that making the entry level for heroics ilvl 333 equipped would have made things a bit better, but it would have slowed the grind down a whole lot more.

Yeah, you have to do the normals to really prepare for the heroics...though, there are a few shortcuts. I was in heroics literally hours after hitting 85--but I had planned ahead some and had some luck.

Firstly, faction. Get it. Do the dailys where applicable and hit the 85 normals with the tabard as soon as you hit 84. Your group isn't going to love you, but it'll work. Guild groups are ideal. Quartermasters are your friend. Get friendly.

Secondly, and this only applies to those who thought ahead in LK: spend your JP at 85 on 346 gear. You did max that out, yes? Two items right there.

I am a JC and a shaman; I had 333 weapons from 83 on. Huge help. So did every other JC. For classes that can use claws, buy those puppies on the AH. Every JC can make them and they're cheap. Sadly, the JC rings and ammys are clownshoes on mats, so you'll never see them. What Bliz was thinking here I have no clue, but it was fucking stupid. My guess was it was to rely on alchemy to give them something to make money on, but it was still fucking stupid. The mats should have been a third of what they are on live. But I digress...

The AH. There are a lot of 333 tradeskill items and most aren't too expensive. There are a few 346 items and they are expensive. There will be occasional 359 world drop BoE epics, and they're bloody outrageous, but if you have the means they will cure what ails you. Money is for spending; that's why you have it. You'll make more.

Follow that advice and you won't spend quite so much time in normals. I still did quite a few for the experience of the fights and guaranteed JP. Heroics were a charlie-foxtrot (still are, really), but completion of normals was a given. Well, almost always.

There's also two functionally identical agility necks and rings and no craftable healer neck or ring. Even if the requirement of four Chimaera's eyes wasn't sufficiently retarded, how stuff like that made it through QA without anyone raising a flag baffles me.

Good advise there Shrike; that's about what I did on my Enh shaman: had a few Honored rep items available already and blew ~10k on the AH. After that it only took a few upgrades out of regulars and I was in heroics.

Running heroics in a guild group is a major advantage over running them in pugs.  I've been heroic-rated since shortly after hitting 85.  I've successfully finished 3 heroic pugs (out of 2x that many attempts).  I think my ilvl is now 339. 

I've just about given up on pug heroics, which means, I've about given up on my main.  For me, end game is bgs and heroic pugs.  I haven't enjoyed my hunter in bgs in this iteration at all.

Now I'm trying to find a fun alt to play in bgs.  Fooling around between boomkin/resto, shadowpriest, warlock, and nothing is grabbing me so far.  I don't understand mindspike well enough, and soulswap baffles me in pvp.  Boomkin feels weak, resto is more satisfying but I really need to learn it better.  My little worgen rogue (22 now) is fun in the bgs but completely op due to heirloom gear so I feel like I'm cheating (but my reflexes are way worse than my opponents so I consider it to be more of a handicap).

So, mindspike.  How do I work that into my rotation?  I'm so confused.

Soulswap.  Ditto.

Tyvm!

You don't work it into your normal SP rotation. So far as I can tell it follows the new paradigm of "lots of abilities, not all used at the same time."  Since it wipes dots I've found its best used just spamming 3 then a mind blast when clearing trash or soloing things way below your level. Those are most often dying before your dots fully tick off, so it seems to get its best leverage there.

Soul Swap has to be glyphed, then it's quite handy. Cast UA, Corruption, Agony on someone, soul swap, target someone else, soul swap again and it puts all three DOTs on the new person too. It doesn't swap Haunt. Use that insta cast tiny nuke to refresh UA.

I use mind spike mainly for stuff like dailies where the mobs have too little HP for DoTs to run full effect. Otherwise I only use it when Archangel is up, for 15 seconds when you get the big ++% dmg, otherwise I just stick to DoTs; even doing this may be a DPS loss I suspect.

It's also decent in PvP.

Thanks for the tips.

I just got dark intent on my warlock.  I cast this on my pet, yes?  (When solo or in bg, that is).  Who do I cast it on in a dungeon?

The Druid healer for 100% uptime.

Otherwise, anyone else that has 'over time' spells. 

But I really can't stress 'The Druid Healer' enough.

Any Shadow or Holy priest is a good choice too, since both churn out a lot of DoT and HoT spells.

Since your pet's cannot DoT or HoT, you'll only get the haste buff when you cast it on them.

Imps can DoT, but oh so rarely and uselessly as destro.

In instances:

Resto Druids, Holy/Shadow Priests, Survival Hunters are all primary choices.

Fire mages, boomkin as worst case.

why boomkin?  A boomkin has 2 fairly fast ticking dots that should have 99% uptime on anything said boomkin is dpsing.  Boomkin would seem a fairly obvious choice.

I think it's because those dots aren't their bread and butter like SWP or Rejuves are so they're not guaranteed 100% uptime.

Since the buff only has a seven second duration you need several DoTs or HoTs running to guarantee the uptime; Balance Druids aren't bad, but your best bet is a Shadow Priest.

There's a nice guide with numbers (http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/813759-Dark-Intent-The-Guide) on the mmo-champ forums if you really want to get technical.

Boomkin rank pretty high on that, oddly. I've had far more success with survival hunters than boomkin for uptime, though. Survival hunters proc like nobody's business, and my boomkin usually don't have shit for uptime stacks on me.

your boomkin is prob one of those people who is still stuck in the old "only cast dots after each Eclipse proc" rotation, instead of the new "keep all dots rollin all the time, clip the last tick when refreshing" model.