f13.net

So as I've said a few times, I've come back after a looong absence almost 2 months ago, and I've now got a whole bunch of alts I'd like to level, but I don't really have a fucking clue about. I pretty much decided to skip learning, since 4.0.1 was right around the corner, so now I'll ask questions from the more knowledgable f13ers about levelling builds for a few classes at various points below 80. With the dual spec cost reduction, I'll be getting this all round now.

Anyway, any advice people have would be welcomed, as well as anyone else who wants to chip in with similar questions or discussion etc.

I've got a Warlock I mostly used to solo. 52. Probably going to powerlevel through to about 71, but would like to get a clue anyway.
Wife has a Lock at 30, which will be played properly like a real character, duoing with my Priest.
Both locks were Affliction spec, until the most recent respec, when I played around with Demonology. Both look interesting, so both are likely to be dual in those two.

My 30 priest I'll be duoing with my wife. Original plan was SP, but with dual spec, I really have no idea about the other two. Healer, I'd guess. Whichever that is? Holy? What's the other one (for)?

Paladin. I PLed him through to 70 or 71 as Ret. If healing is fun, I might dual spec as Ret/Holy? Time to pick up those Holy heirloom shoulders?

Hunter. Level 40. I know nothing about hunters. I played for about 3-4 months in vanilla and haven't touched him since. Pets didn't have talents back then, so I really have NFI on what to do.

Thinking of starting a Warrior. When can they dual-weild 2-handed swords? (Fury, right?) And should I try to get 2 of that Heirloom 20hander for this purpose? Maybe I'll wait for Worgen/Goblin.

Also thinking of starting a Shammy. Might wait for the new races, though.

Death Knight. I have NFI. Played it as Unholy when they came out, but I understand they changed a few times before the latest change, so the little I'd learned and forgotten is irrelevent now anyway.

Rogue, 71. Used to be my main for quite awhile through TBC. I was mostly Mutilate spec, but I understand that combat was actually much more useful for levelling. I've heard it just got hosed, so not sure.


I'm pretty much interested in talent spec advice, so I can then have a fool around and learn to play them (again). I'm still figuring out my Mage, but now the frost/triumph badge changes have gone through, I can be much mroe relaxed and enjoy the alts now.

I still love Unholy for DKs.  Pets, spell & disease damage and it just feels more like a juggernaut of destruction than Frost ever did to me.   Frost has better control and mitigation talents and might have better AOE via Howling Blast, I'm not sure.   At this point I'm just playing what I enjoy, not what's best dps.

Priest specs Holy is the purest healing but disc is also primarily a healing spec.  There's some DPS talents in the tree, so you COULD level with it if you wanted.. but you'd be crazy to do it instead of shadow once you have dual specs.  Disc used to be called the PVP spec, but it works equally well in PVE.  As far as I know Holy's strength vs Disc is it's AOE healing abilities, particularly now that you can Chakra down a healing area like DPS specs can lay down Consecrate, Blizzard, Hellfire or D&D.

Rogues are saying combat got hosed because it now has a build-up mechanic like Mut. did.  It used to be that combat would start out high and stay that way, so switching targets didn't hurt it.. not the case now.   I haven't taken my rogue through any dungeons to check out how much of that is just whining, though.  (There's even fewer tanks since the patch so dungeon queues on my BG have been 20-30 mins for DPS where they used to be 10-15)

Warriors can still dual-wield Weaps with Titan's grip (Yes, Fury) BUT one of the pisser side effects of the talent revamp is you can't reach the end of the trees until level 69.  This sucks a lot for those who bought dual heirlooms for their Wars and were doing BC content just fine until this change, thankyouverymuchyouassholes.

Warlocks, no idea atm. I'd suggest going with whatever you are vaguely familiar with and seeing how it plays. Afflic still looks like it's got the best self-healing.

Priest healing is good right now, especially Discipline. Disc is more about shields and has some different mechanisms from other healing classes, e.g. Prayer of Mending that jumps from person to person. Once you get used to it they're great dungeon healers.

Paladins seem to be upset with how Retribution and Prot are now but the Holy ones sound very happy. Not played with mine yet, despite him being my best geared character probably.

Hunter levelling rocks as BM right now. Really enjoyed the hour I spent with my level 71 one yesterday. 20+ pets, no ammo, ranged traps, awesome.

Warrior doesn't seem *nearly* as bad for tanking as I was expecting. Just taken my lvl 76 Prot dude through 2 dungeons and they went fine. Sure the occasional Ele shaman or warlock pulled some agro but fuck 'em. I warned them that AOE threat had been nerfed. Once they'd been rezzed a couple of times they seemed to learn fast. Plus Prot is great for levelling. You're practically invincible. And you never need step outside of instances all the way to 80 if you want.

Also, while levelling anything, mining/herbalism and skinning. ALL ores, metals, leathers and herbs seem to be selling *really* well atm. I'm making upwards of 1000g/day just from the stuff I'm gathering from levelling 3 chars.

Warlock - I've played demo after the patch on world mobs (no dungeon yet).  Rotation seems pretty straightforward for leveling.  Macro /petattack to your soul fire.  Cast soul fire, cast immolate, dead.  If there are multiples, cast gul'dan and rain of fire.  For fun change into your demon self and kill many at the same time.  If you want to try to do the "round em up!" trick, I don't recommend the Felguard.  He does nice damage, but he is significantly more squishy than he used to be.

I've spec'd destro, but haven't played it yet.  Seems similar to WotlK... which you haven't played.  nevermind!  :)

From the crying, it seems like afflic has damage issues, but I don't know that you'd notice that for leveling.

Shaman - I'm liking the changes to enhancement.  RNG is still part of the damage output, but in a "wow! that was nice" way, not in a, "proc dammit!" way.

Warrior -
Prot is the best choice for leveling.  You just have so much more survivability and the damage output is decently close to the other two.
Fury - You don't get to dual weild swords until you get the top-level talent in fury (I don't know what level that is anymore).

Oh, crying! What about? Nerfed damage or OP?

Hunter Ferocity Pet (http://www.wowhead.com/petcalc#zMd00sc00hok) - I like to have a point in Bloodthirsty, so that I only have to feed my pet if he gets killed.

Hunter Tenacity Pet (http://www.wowhead.com/petcalc#0RzGzrMz0z0o)

These are from the perspective of level 80, so you'd have to work into them if you're starting at 40.

Obviously you can tweak these to your own preferences, and it's cheap to buy a pet respec.

I didn't put in a Cunning build because I almost never run with a cunning pet.

Regarding your Hunter's own build, I have grown to enjoy Survival for solo PvE work. This might be because I raided as SV through WotLK. Between the nerfs to BM, and the pet-unfriendly boss encounters in Ulduar, I switched to SV to see how I liked it, and now I prefer it. YMMV of course.

Looking over my DK in the Armory, I notice her harpoon has Block now.  Does it add to parry now?  I can't think of why a two-handed weapon would have been given block otherwise.

Anyone got any ideas what to do with a level 70 rogue in terms of spec (and weapons)? He's currently Combat and I don't like it at all - it's useless in dungeons, absolutely pathetic DPS. Things die too fast to get any kind of cycle up. Even on bosses his DPS is terrible.

Nerfed.  Seems folks felt that Affliction warlocks weren't doing good damage.  Not sure if this still applies after last nights server-side patch.

I'm only now really getting up to speed on my shaman. The alts, not so much.

Shaman. Man, go enhance. If you're starting a new one from scratch, they've massively improved the early game. Most core enhance abiitles are now baseline (like DW--no more 2handers). Primal strike gives you an early substitute for stormstrike, so it's not all auto-attack/shock for 30 levels. Gear wise, get two Mass of Magowan's, the AGI mail pieces, and just go to town. Looks like fun, really. Hell, I might make a goblin. Someday. Maybe.

Warrior. No clue now. I'm still inclined to arms/protection. My advice would be to level as protection, for what it's worth. My draenei warrior leveled as arms and that worked out pretty well. She's stuck at 58, though, and likely to remain there until Cataclysm. The night elf...eh, need to look at her, but no time as of right now.

Hunter. No clue here either. I'm hearing good things about the focus, though. Frankly, I couldn't stand hunters after vanilla. Weirdo, hard to play attack cycles and bloated specs kept me from really getting into them. I'm seriously thinking of finally leveling mine to 80 this next week or two. Looks good on the surface right now. Plus she has a lot of PvP gear for the 79 bracket and...well...could be fun.

Paladin. Looks like a trainwreck from where I stand. My prot pally is on hold until I can sit down and spend a few hours studying the New Stuff. I'm staying protection.

Death knights. Well, dps blood is dead, so I have some work to do here for my PvE and PvP specs. Unholy is looking REALLY good. Also pretty complex with a new priority system. This wouldn't normally bother me too much, but there's no Shock and Awe for DKs and similar things for them I"ve never gotten to work successfully. Acherus is deader than Elvis, and I have no clue what to use for a disease/rune tracking addon. I'm lacking good 1handers, so DW is out. Unholy is looking awfully good, but it's going to seriously need a proc tracking addon. Needs more research and experimentation.

If you find a good Rune tracker let me know. I never bothered before because as a blood tank without that stupid Death Rune talent you never needed it; now that said talent is baseline I always end up heart striking instead of waiting a tick to death strike.

I think that is some kind of armory bug. That harpoon shows a block value when you see it anywhere on the armory but not on sites like wowhead, etc.

On priests, both disc and holy are healers, they just have a different style. I just started a new priest myself last night, and getting penance (the special disc spell) at level 10 is pretty hilarious. It kills everything I've come across so far in one hit (with weapon/shoulder/chest heirlooms, no trinkets.)  :awesome_for_real:

Specing seems super easy for DPS now if you know what spec you want. Basically you pick a tree and then take all the DPS increasing talents and add a few flavor talents on the way to the bottom.

Ret (http://wowtal.com/#k=7BIoAqz.a6d.paladin.). The two points in Eye for an Eye could go anywhere, you just need 2 to advance to the 31 point talent.

Unholy DK (http://wowtal.com/#k=7CkgaK1b.a6d.deathknight.) Has 2 spare points to put where you want.

Pretty much every class and spec combo in the game is at the moment viable for level grinding.

The heirloom weapons do not exist for a fury warrior at the moment, everything available is sub-optimal or requires you to switch weapons or specs once you hit level 69.

What about two of these? I've got the AGI Mail and enough honor to probably get a pair of these..

http://www.wowwiki.com/The_Blessed_Hammer_of_Grace

I'm pretty much over grinding heroics for heirloom gear. Just want to spend my masses of honor and I'm done.

Thank you. I have a single heirloom 2-h, and was considering buying a second one. You just saved me a shitload of honor.

1. Spellpower is not an enhancement stat.
2. They're main hand weapons, you could only equip one.

These (http://www.wowhead.com/item=48716) are your optimal enhancement weapons.  They're also passable warrior weapons if you go Fury and build towards Single-Minded Fury, though Strength > Agility.

I suspect that the new quest rewards will probably include enough decent weapons to cover your needs as you're leveling in any case.

It's worth noting: most spellpower weapons have noticeably lower DPS.

Easiest way to tell a caster 1h weapon for a long time was seeing "41.4 DPS" on the top of the tooltip. Didn't even have to read the stats!

After level 60 anyway, unless they changed the scaling below that at some point recently.

I've tried a few. DKIRunes seems OK. It's disease tracking is superior to Acherus, but the runepower is a little less obvious. Rune cooldowns are decent, but, again, not quite up to Acherus, but they work. It's UI is fairly customizable.

Got my DK squared away as unholy. This has possiblities. Still getting used to it, but the empowered pet is something else. Disease spreading is way more conveniant. Individual damage hits aren't anything like blood used to be, but there's an awful lot of it flying around, and it's mostly magic based. The only catch is more buttons. Gonna need that G13.

Yes, but those require grinding heroics. And I'm done with that now. Thanks anyway for the info.

I'm leveling a Prot Paladin in 4.0, from lvl72 onwards. I have no basis for comparison yet, but damage seems to be through the roof, thanks to kickass AoEs and prot mechanics to support them. Avenger's Shield is critting at 6-7k and the cooldown gets refreshed constantly.

I dug out my level 63 DK, decided to give blood tanking a go. Does anyone have any general advice, it's one of my most disregarded alts, but dicking around at 80 has limited charms right now. Other than achievements there's not much I care about enough to do.

If you are looking for purely runes, you should check out Engraved (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/engraved.aspx). Its very sexy, and works very well with the way runes refill now.

Not my UI. Ill try and post a pic of mine when I get home.


The only problem is that it hasnt been updated for 4.0.1 yet, and so a bunch of the options are broken. If you have a text editor and the ability to find and relplace a few words you can fix it yourself.


I am really liking it a lot. After doing the fix, set the runes to "Fill" as their refresh option, and make sure Prioritize Runes is checked. Its really sexy and works great with the sequential rune refresh.

I also use CLCDK for tracking cooldowns and diseases as well as for helping with the ability priority.

For hunter, BM is good if you're solo.  If you plan on pugging dungeons, Survival will probably be more satisfying.  Hunters are pretty weak right now so you might not enjoy it as much as other classes.

Priest is more fun than it's ever been, in my opinion.  Shadow is just ridiculous.  Disc is very fun for healing single targets and for pvp.  I haven't tried holy yet.

(I still haven't played my DK or my lock or my pally since 4.0 - but my frost mage is superfun.)

Have everyone but the warriors(s) online now and doing their thing.

DK. Dual-specced as 2h frost dps and 2h (what else?) blood tank. Settled into both and both work well. Only complaint about blood is there's an awful lot going on and keeping track of it all can get pretty hairy. On the other hand, it does work well and it's not a twitchy spec--at least so far. Frost flat out rocks the house, dps-wise. Howling blast is sooooooooo gettting nerfed...

Paladin. Straight up protection spec. Haven't bothered with the offspec at all. I want to keep that as PvP protection, but it'll have to wait for the expansion and later in life. This works really well. A bit warriorish in some ways, but I'm liking it. I mark targets for my dps as a rule now--and they usually ignore it--and frequently die. Oh well. This is going to get really interesting in Cataclysm.

Shaman. Same ol', same ol'. Big gap in the priority system, but work over on EJ has Unleashed Elements looking VERY beefy for Cataclysm. Still class numbah one for me.

Hunter. Finally resurrected the hunter. I do like the focus. A lot. I've cordially detested the hunter class since TBC and this brings back the vanilla fun for me. Spam the big attacks then fall back on steady shot until focus regens, then bring the hurt again. BM specced, and planning on staying that way. Seems a lot less awkward now.

Rogue. Still hate them and can't bring myself to play mine. Yet. Kinda need her professions, but...still don't like the class.

The simplest tip for blood DK is that diseases are more or less optional now. Maybe put them on at the start if you have the runes, otherwise just boil blood and mash strikes.

You'll want diseases up on a boss fight, but otherwise just put D&D down and mash blood boil whenever you have blood runes available. Blood boil should be glyphed. Use rune strike whenever it lights up. Keep death strike in mind to refresh your shield. Don't spam it, but keep it close. Get used to seeing your health pogo around. The class has a lot of cooldowns to blow if things get dodgy. Most of your threat is going to come from blood boil, hearth strike, and rune strike. D&D rocks, but the long cooldown will be an issue at present. It'll be a staple in Cata, though.

Also, I doubt we'll be going disease-less that often in Cata. For one thing, we'll have outbreak and that will alleviate some of the GCD issues. For another, stuff shouldn't be dying in seconds, so there'll be time for the one GCD necessary to get them up. Lastly, dps will probably pull the horns in quite a bit in Cata, so snap threat shouldn't be quite such an abusive issue for the blood DK.

Hahahaha.  You have far too much faith in DPS.  They only care about bigger numbers.  If they die, it's the tank's and healer's fault.

Unfortunately, this is true and will never change as long as we have active dps meters.

You do Zero DPS while dead though!

They only care about dps right now, not over time. Duh!  :facepalm:

Heh.

Time spent while dead does not count towards the DPS calculation.  Time spent typing about how the tank's shield has Int instead of doing damage does not count.  Time navel gazing does not count.  All damage done, however, still does.

Which is really convenient.  They can auto-attack a critter, have no time spent towards the calculation, and claim their power is incalculable when they throw a divide by zero error.

I am relatively forgiving of gearing wackiness in terms of actually doing anything other than /facepalming on /g about it - I'd rather grit my teeth and get the instance done with, for the most part.  Even so, I would probably drop group if I saw a warrior tank zone in with a +int shield.

Elitist!  :angryfist:

Been playing my priest the past few days or so (lvl 74 now).  I have dual spec with him too so he's shadow and holy.  Thought I'd try my hand at healing for a bit to reduce my waits in LFG que.  Do all priests have mana issues or does it get better once you hit and get some decent gear?  I ask this because it seems that after every big pull I'm either well under 50% mana or close to zero, and almost every boss fight sees me at almost zero at the end.  And healing makes me realize that I'm not such a bad tank afterall seeing as how I'm pretty vigilant on seeing if my healer is ready for the next pull or not.  Most of the tanks I've gotten so far at this level....not so much. :ye_gods:

Can't say since 4.0 but yeah, holy priest mana took a while of gearing up at 80 to be non-scary.

This probably means nothing but I barely use any mana at all on my new little disc priest - but I'm only level 28 so far (leveling just through dungeons.)

Since 4.0 you have to be very selective on how you heal to manage mana better.  That was one of the biggest general changes in the system.  Blizz figured healers had it too easy and gimped their mana management.  High level equipment helps, but I noticed a huge drop in mana.  I used to never even look at my reserves except in very extreme raid situations.  Now I'm constantly working on keeping my reserves up.

You'll have to review all the different healing spells/methods and make sure you are using the right ones in each situation.  You can't just spam the quickest most mana hog spell throughout an instance anymore.  You have to be more selective.  I'm not just talking about Holy Priest.  This is for all the healing specs.

Now do all that while raid dancing in Hodir, Sind, Rotgut or Princes when you don't outgear them.   Good healers who can stay aware of raid mechanics and mana are going to be a shitload more valuable in Cata than they were in LK.   It also means you're going to be bitching at a lot of other healers who aren't able to juggle both balls.

Disc seems to be a much better spec for mana efficiency, I'm finding.  You can Smite heal forever.

Yeah, and a larger mana pool to start with too. Also they seem to have a lot of mana tools, there's Rapture, Inner Focus/Train of Thought, you can PI yourself during heavy heal phases, Divine Aegis generates a pretty good amount of free healing that is more or less guaranteed to not be overheal, etc.

Holy Priest mana efficiency is a real issue before 80, then in raid gear it becomes a non-issue.

Which chakra are you using? Holy has plenty of ways to burn through mana very easily in a very inefficient way. For dungeon running I'd suggest using heal most of the time, with the PoH chakra on certain fights. Heal is a very efficient heal, while PoH has a massive mana coast, and if you go splurging on PoH > CoH spam you will eat your mana very quick. The renew Chakra (which is being removed in the next patch) eats my mana hard at 80, so I can only assume it does horrible things at lower levels.

Not also that the Holy Tree is currently very poorly designed and offers little flexibility while forcing you to take terrible talents like Surge of Light (used to be great, now it is rotten).

For talents and glyphs I guess you should be aiming for something like THIS (http://wowtal.com/#k=OzBhoW.a7t.priest.Zd-p4) at 74. n.b. that CoH is the only genuinely useful Major Glyph, there are no other useful ones. Surge of Light is sadly unavoidable and you have to take every other talent pretty much except for Blessed Resilience (PvP only) and Spirit of Redemption (terrible now). The fact that there are only 5 loose points in the whole tree to get to the bottom is a massive design flaw and very irritating.

If mana is a real issue you could switch to disc; with a setup like THIS (http://wowtal.com/#k=1ujf5Ns.a7t.priest.qOzh92) you'll be hard pressed to go OOM, and you have a lot of utility. n.b. Disc has a lot more free points than holy and far fewer useless talents that are mandatory. There's actuallly two points more in Mental Agility than you need to fill the tree, and if you are fine for mana those can be moved to Darkness (shadow tree) for best benefit. Train of Thought is a very debatable talent, focused will, improved inner fire and reflective shield are right out.


Raiding as Disc I never use inner focus and frankly if I could drop the point I would. The only spell it is useful for boosting is PoH, and using GHeals to reset the timer through Train of Thought is a horribly ineffecient use of mana. The rest of the Disc tree is pretty good.

How is Spirit of Redemption terrible now? Still seems like 15 seconds of free, post death healing.

It used to buff your spirit by 15%.  Now it's just utility, personally I still think it's well worth the single talent point.

Oh, I never knew it had a spirit buff (but then, priest is one of my two non-80s).

It used to give 5% spirit which for a single point is really good. Nobody should ever be taking it for the post-death healing effect. You're not supposed to die, and if you're having to count on SoR then you are playing badly.

The elitism over 1s and 0s astounds me. 

I've known plenty of holy priests who needed no help from the tanks when it came to dying  :why_so_serious:

Spirit of failure is a good way to see who is standing in the cleaves.

As it stands, it's not so much a "Only useful when playing badly" as "15s of free healing x Probability of Death Not in Garbage Time" isn't really worth a talent point compared to points in say... Inner Sanctum or Darkness.

Except it's not Spirit of Redemption vs. IS or Darkness.  It's SoR vs. Tome of Light, Lightwell, and Surge of Light, all of which are pretty terrible.

EDIT: For reference, 2/2 ToL is worth ~60-65 MP5 assuming Holy Word: Sanctuary is on cooldown 100% of the time, unless I'm doing the calculations badly wrong.

Lightwell and Tome of Light, while not outstanding, are better than SoL and SoR though, and offer more (limited) utility. Lightwell has been buffed like crazy, unfortunately the biggest limitation (the fact that the other players need to use it) is still it's biggest problem, but most of the other issues it used to have are gone, and it does heal for an absolute ton for its mana cost. It's a bit depressing how Blizzard absolutely gutted previously good talents like Inner Focus, SoR and SoL in their new system.

I don't know how you're getting an efficiency value out of ToL though.

Lightwell, well, it's Lightwell: you either hate it or you don't.  I agree on SoL for now as it's really much more of a Cataclysm talent.  I guess you might take it if you liked using Serenity Chakra even now though.

As for Tome of Light, 15% off your Holy Word CDs per point is pretty good in my book.

-1([talented cost] - [cost]) / [cooldown] x [unit of measurement (5)]

Or:

-1([0.44 x 3863 x 0.7] - [0.44 x 3863]) / [40] x [5]
-1([1700 x 0.7] - [1700]) / [40] x [5]
-1([1190] - [1700]) / [40] x [5]
-1(-510) / [40] x [5]
510 / [40] x [5]
12.75 x [5]
63.75

Assuming it's used at every given opportunity, less use means less value.  I assume Sanctuary because it's the least efficient (44% of base mana / 40 second CD).

You know ToL reduces the cooldown on Holy Word spells, not the cost.

I switched to Disc. and healing now is much easier than it was with holy and I have no mana issues.  Plus smite healing is awesome. :heart:

Ha, brain spasm.  Ignore me.  It's an okay talent.

You probably have me pegged as dyslexic by now.