With dual specs coming, I've been planning out some alt specs for my pally and druid. Let's start with the pally.
I've no interest in ret, so she'll be going holy during those times when no tank is needed (which is pretty often, it seems). I've been picking up a few offspec items from Naxx 10 and various other places, so this isn't as bad of a starting gear list as it could be.
Obtained:
Head: Helm of the Corrupted Mind with Arcanum of Burning Mysteries
Chest: Ornate Woolen Stola
Wrists: Bone-Framed Bracers (with spellpower enchant)
Gloves: Grips of Sculptured Icicles (with spellpower enchant)
Waist: Tainted Girdle of Mending (with belt buckle)
Legs: Standard Issue Legguards (with Sapphire Spellthread)
Weapon: Gavel of the Brewing Storm (with spellpower enchant)
Cloak: Shroud of Dedicated Research for now.
Neck: Lattice Choker of Light (25 badges) or Blood Sun Necklace
Libram: Libram of Renewal
To be Obtained:
Shoulders: Ferocious Pauldrons of the Rhino with Lesser Inscription of the Storm
Feet: Skywall Striders
Rings: Ring of the Northern Winds (quest reward from Storm Peaks), Annhylde's Ring
Trinkets: Egg of Mortal Essence, Mendicant's Charm, Badge of the Infiltrator
Shield: Protective Barricade of the Light
Pally's proposed holy spec: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sxA0gMzhiuMxRtZVcbx0h
Beacon of Light with crit talents. Why are there so many of them in the ret tree? No kings.
Glyphs:
Seal of Light
Holy Light
Flash of Light
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Etiquette
People always say it, but it's true....being polite and courteous, even in an online game where you'll likely never meet any of the people you interact with in person, can go a long way.
Generally, I try to ascribe to these simple rules when interacting with other people.
Generally, I try to ascribe to these simple rules when interacting with other people.
- Use correct spelling. No, really. Just use it. I know sometimes there isn't time or you really don't know how to spell "innervate" (it's not exactly common vernacular), but generally, try to spell things. It doesn't hurt to spell out the entire word either...will it really take you that much longer to type "you" as opposed to "u"? Some people say excessive abbreviation is an indication of a lazy player -- I'm not sure that's really true, but I know I don't like it because it looks dumb and because it makes me feel like I'm playing with a 12-year-old.
- If you are LFM for something, specify in your LFM message what exactly you are looking for (what class, spec, what instance, how much is cleared, and how far you intend to go).
- If you are LFG for something, do not say you are 3k dps if you are not really 3k dps. You don't really need to advertise yourself as "fucking dps yo." Yes, I see you are a warlock. Did you think you might be asked to tank?
- I understand that everyone's brand of humor is different, but if you really must be crass or lewd or overtly sexual or racist or whatever, at least try to make it not interfere with the progress of the group. I don't really want to wait around 15 minutes while 24 other people recover from the story of how you contracted herpes.
- When asking a person's spec, do it politely.
- If you're running a raid, do it professionally. State the rules outright and abide by them. Set the example and make everyone else abide by them. If someone isn't meeting your expectations, tell them so they can improve. If they still do not meet the requirements, replace them nicely.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Of Idiots and Aspects
My guild was able to field an entire Naxx-25 full clear on Valentine's night. That's fairly impressive...and sort of sad.
I haven't been raiding as much lately, which is partially due to real-life constraints and partially because both mage and druid need only 25-man upgrades but I can only realistically do one per week. The mage has a lot of second-best-in-slot items; the druid seems to be able to perform at the same level with lesser levels of gear (she's still in a few blues). But since I actually had plans on Valentine's Day, I missed this week's Naxx-25.
I've been busy gearing up my protection pally, who I think is finally at a level where her gear no longer makes me cringe. She's ready to main-tank Naxx-10 and has already done VoA and Sartharion this week.
But, since the guild's scheduled continuation of Naxx-25 on Sunday night was no longer needed since they already cleared it, they decided to do a Maly-25 instead. It went very well and we two-shot it. Since I still haven't gotten around to doing the Aces High quest, I'm still fairly shaky on Phase 3, but I've had a lot of chances to field-practice the technique now. My druid has already successfully done Malygos-10, it seems the 25-man version is actually easier.
I do think Arcane is a better spec for Malygos than Frostfire, once you get into the rhythm of the fight. Arcane is all about timing. Once you try the fight enough times, you get a feel for when there are natural breaks in the timing that allow for you to Evocate or reposition or do whatever else you need.
The Malygos Fight
I started out by popping Icy Veins to speed up initial casting. Keep in mind that at this point there's no sparks down yet. After the first vortex phase and a spark comes down, I sit squarely in it and pop Arcane Power. At that point someone's already popped Bloodlust usually, so there's a little window of time in which to just go balls-to-the-wall. POM-AB can be saved with Arcane Barrage and Fire Blast for vortex phases. After the second vortex I'll usually need to Evocate. I do it once more, during Phase 2, and mana gem in between as needed. I've been having no mana problems since I fixed my spec to include Student of the Mind.
Phase Two is still my least favorite phase, because it's possible to get into a rotation. Half the time is spent running between balls and trying to target stuff in the air anyway. And Phase Three just involves spamming the rotation over and over (1-1-2 or 3-3-3-4). On our successful attempt, only a few people died on Phase 3, everyone else stayed up and we finished with almost a minute to spare.
3-Fail Sarth
After finally getting the Champion of the Frozen Waste on my mage (long overdue, in my opinion, since she was ready for that title a long time ago), I decided to try main-tanking Sarth for a shot at my tier gloves, and joined a pug. What a mistake that was...
I'm used to seeing undergeared people in Sarth-10, since well-geared people don't bother with it anymore, but it seems that each Sarth-10 pug just gets worse and worse. I started thinking something was very wrong when five people, including a healer, didn't go into the portal on the first drake, and died. That drake took about five minutes to kill. The two hunters were doing 900 and 1000 dps, respectively. The healer that died, a very undergeared priest, was using Binding Heal as her most frequently used cast, and Healium who is extremely well geared (just got the Malygos-25 robe) soon found out that this priest had never healed before. Not just had never healed a raid before -- had never healed before, at all. She didn't even know how to "target the main tank." We were basically doing Sarth with one healer.
Five people, all from the same guild, including this priest and the two hunters, earned their very first Emblem of Heroism on that first drake. Not even a single heroic completed, or even attempted, as our number-one-dps (a rogue) pointed out. The hunters were now claiming lag as a factor in their performance.
We keep clearing trash, during which I find out that my offtank (another prot pally) is very good. Offtanking is a fairly involved and often thankless role, but he does it admirably -- he picks mobs off of me to tank, doesn't try to taunt off me, goes into the portals, and doesn't die. His gear is actually better than mine in some slots, but he's not enchanted, so I ended up with more effective health and avoidance. The other priest used this time to discover that Flash Heal and Greater Heal are better spells than Binding Heal. The hunters continue to lag, or just suck, or both.
I expected to wipe on the first actual Sarth attempt, and we did. What was surprising was that after five people died on the first Flame Wall (guess who they were...) the five that remained (me, the offtank, Healium, a dps warrior, and a rogue) brought Sarth to 6% until we finally wiped from being overwhelmed.
We rez everyone and try again. The two hunters died again on the first Flame Wall (if they were actually lagging, this is pretty understandable since I've definitely experienced this problem before myself, and it's infuriating). But everyone else, to their credit, learned quickly and didn't die until the very end, and we ended up killing it. The less fail of the two hunters won his tier gloves. Face now planted squarely in palm.
Just goes to show how easy the current content actually is, I suppose. Nothing in this game is an actual gear-check except for Sarth with drakes up.
I haven't been raiding as much lately, which is partially due to real-life constraints and partially because both mage and druid need only 25-man upgrades but I can only realistically do one per week. The mage has a lot of second-best-in-slot items; the druid seems to be able to perform at the same level with lesser levels of gear (she's still in a few blues). But since I actually had plans on Valentine's Day, I missed this week's Naxx-25.
I've been busy gearing up my protection pally, who I think is finally at a level where her gear no longer makes me cringe. She's ready to main-tank Naxx-10 and has already done VoA and Sartharion this week.
But, since the guild's scheduled continuation of Naxx-25 on Sunday night was no longer needed since they already cleared it, they decided to do a Maly-25 instead. It went very well and we two-shot it. Since I still haven't gotten around to doing the Aces High quest, I'm still fairly shaky on Phase 3, but I've had a lot of chances to field-practice the technique now. My druid has already successfully done Malygos-10, it seems the 25-man version is actually easier.
I do think Arcane is a better spec for Malygos than Frostfire, once you get into the rhythm of the fight. Arcane is all about timing. Once you try the fight enough times, you get a feel for when there are natural breaks in the timing that allow for you to Evocate or reposition or do whatever else you need.
The Malygos Fight
I started out by popping Icy Veins to speed up initial casting. Keep in mind that at this point there's no sparks down yet. After the first vortex phase and a spark comes down, I sit squarely in it and pop Arcane Power. At that point someone's already popped Bloodlust usually, so there's a little window of time in which to just go balls-to-the-wall. POM-AB can be saved with Arcane Barrage and Fire Blast for vortex phases. After the second vortex I'll usually need to Evocate. I do it once more, during Phase 2, and mana gem in between as needed. I've been having no mana problems since I fixed my spec to include Student of the Mind.
Phase Two is still my least favorite phase, because it's possible to get into a rotation. Half the time is spent running between balls and trying to target stuff in the air anyway. And Phase Three just involves spamming the rotation over and over (1-1-2 or 3-3-3-4). On our successful attempt, only a few people died on Phase 3, everyone else stayed up and we finished with almost a minute to spare.
3-Fail Sarth
After finally getting the Champion of the Frozen Waste on my mage (long overdue, in my opinion, since she was ready for that title a long time ago), I decided to try main-tanking Sarth for a shot at my tier gloves, and joined a pug. What a mistake that was...
I'm used to seeing undergeared people in Sarth-10, since well-geared people don't bother with it anymore, but it seems that each Sarth-10 pug just gets worse and worse. I started thinking something was very wrong when five people, including a healer, didn't go into the portal on the first drake, and died. That drake took about five minutes to kill. The two hunters were doing 900 and 1000 dps, respectively. The healer that died, a very undergeared priest, was using Binding Heal as her most frequently used cast, and Healium who is extremely well geared (just got the Malygos-25 robe) soon found out that this priest had never healed before. Not just had never healed a raid before -- had never healed before, at all. She didn't even know how to "target the main tank." We were basically doing Sarth with one healer.
Five people, all from the same guild, including this priest and the two hunters, earned their very first Emblem of Heroism on that first drake. Not even a single heroic completed, or even attempted, as our number-one-dps (a rogue) pointed out. The hunters were now claiming lag as a factor in their performance.
We keep clearing trash, during which I find out that my offtank (another prot pally) is very good. Offtanking is a fairly involved and often thankless role, but he does it admirably -- he picks mobs off of me to tank, doesn't try to taunt off me, goes into the portals, and doesn't die. His gear is actually better than mine in some slots, but he's not enchanted, so I ended up with more effective health and avoidance. The other priest used this time to discover that Flash Heal and Greater Heal are better spells than Binding Heal. The hunters continue to lag, or just suck, or both.
I expected to wipe on the first actual Sarth attempt, and we did. What was surprising was that after five people died on the first Flame Wall (guess who they were...) the five that remained (me, the offtank, Healium, a dps warrior, and a rogue) brought Sarth to 6% until we finally wiped from being overwhelmed.
We rez everyone and try again. The two hunters died again on the first Flame Wall (if they were actually lagging, this is pretty understandable since I've definitely experienced this problem before myself, and it's infuriating). But everyone else, to their credit, learned quickly and didn't die until the very end, and we ended up killing it. The less fail of the two hunters won his tier gloves. Face now planted squarely in palm.
Just goes to show how easy the current content actually is, I suppose. Nothing in this game is an actual gear-check except for Sarth with drakes up.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Tanking Basics 101: Mitigation and Avoidance
Basic Tank Mechanics
Q: What exactly do tanks do, and how do they do it?
A: They take lots of hard hits without dying, and they allow no one else but themselves to be so hit.
So a tank's role breaks down into survival and threat. Threat is a lot less of an issue now than it used to be, so I think it is fair to say that a tank gears for survival first, then threat, then maybe dps. I realize that tank dps is getting to be a valid issue now that tanks can actually do above 200 dps, but no tank in a progression role has the luxury of gearing for damage (unless you tank with damage, as may be the case with druids). His dps is going to come from his stats, which naturally comes from better gear.
Q: How does a tank survive?
A: Two stats that tanks and ONLY TANKS care about --> mitigation and avoidance.
They are not the same thing. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion or general disagreement about the relative values of these two stats, so let's look at them more closely, since you will use them to evaluate the overall "goodness" of a tank.
Mitigation refers to damage mitigation; as in, the amount of damage you take when you get hit. It doesn't assume you'll miss, dodge, or parry the attack. It's not based on chance, or procs -- it's active all the time. Your damage mitigation comes from how much armor you have (it can also depend on your block value, but we'll get to that later). It also has nothing to do with how hard spells hit you; it has to do with physical damage only.
Avoidance is your chance to avoid damage completely. It is the base miss chance of the attacker, coupled with your block/dodge/parry. These days, most people count block only as a mitigation talent (more on this later). Generally speaking, a tank's avoidance is his miss/dodge/parry. Again, this has nothing to do with avoiding spell damage, that's just school-based resistance.
Then there is the matter of Effective Health. This is basically how much damage something has to do to you to kill you, and it directly relates to your armor and stamina. Let's assume you're offtanking Patchwerk and you eat a Hateful Strike -- you don't dodge, block, or parry it, it hits you squarely on the face. All that's saving you from death is your effective health -- part of that hit was mitigated by armor, and the rest was soaked up by your Hit Points.
There's also defense. Is defense a mitigation or an avoidance stat? It depends -- under the defense cap, more defense will be a mitigation stat because it will lessen the chance a mob will crit you for 200% of normal damage. That's very bad, in case anyone was wondering. Above the cap, defense adds additional block/dodge/parry, so it is then an avoidance stat.
Finally, there's block rating and block value. I said earlier that most consider block to be a mitigation stat only. The reason for this is that unless your block value is high enough, you won't block all of the damage of the attack, you just block a part of it -- in which case, you've blocked (or mitigated) part of the damage. You can think of block rating as being an avoidance stat and block value being a mitigation stat, but most people just consider block rating and value to be both mitigation because you won't block all of the damage of a boss attack in most cases. What this means, additionally, is that once a tank becomes block-capped (he has 102.4% avoidance, which we'll cover later also), that his block rating becomes effective health, because every attack that gets through will be at least partially blocked. That part that you blocked relates to your block rating, and it equates to more damage that you can absorb.
Q: What is a block cap?
A: When a mob tries to hit a player, the damage done is the result of one dice roll (0-100) based on the following attack table:
Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Crit
Crush (not possible at level 80)
Hit
While it is one roll, the values of all of these are summed up in descending order, so that if your tank's combined miss + dodge + parry + block is above 100%, there's no room on the table for a crit, a crush, or even a normal hit. Every hit was at least partially blocked.
In other words, when you roll a dice between 0 and 100, it lands somewhere between 0 and 100. When you sum up the values on that table in descending order, if you find that the combined percentages of your miss/dodge/parry/block is over 100, that means that the value of the dice roll always falls within the realm of miss+dodge+parry+block. Everything else has been pushed off the table. That's the block cap. That's what used to be called the uncrushable cap in TBC.
For example, let's say your miss+dodge+parry+block is 100, your miss is 10%, your dodge is 20%, your parry is 20%, and the 50% left is block. That means 0-10 is miss, 10-30 is dodge, 30-50 is parry, and the rest is block. The dice rolls 43, and that falls within the parry percentage, so you parried that attack. The next attack is 89, and that falls within block, so you block that attack. Probably not the entire hit, though...how much of it you blocked has to do with your block value.
How Tank Stats Relate to Tanks
Well, not all of these stats relate to all tanks, for example. Druids can't block (they don't wear shields) and they can't parry (they don't tank with weapons, although a giant bear with a mace in their mouth might actually be really scary). Their mitigation comes solely from armor because of the inability to block. Their avoidance comes mostly from dodge and defense.
Death Knights also don't block. They make up for it by having armor that scales higher than for warriors and paladins.
Druids can effectively get 540 defense just from talents alone. It doesn't mean that defense doesn't help druids, it just means that they don't need it to be uncrittable.
What is better, avoidance or mitigation or effective health or defense?
It depends.
You need to be defense capped, first and foremost. It's not hard. Do everyone a favor and don't go anywhere without being defense capped. You're not a tank until you are, you're just a liability.
If you are defense capped but cannot get block capped, it makes sense to gear/enchant/gem for more effective health (more mitigation and block) perhaps over avoidance. Higher-end tanking gear has avoidance on it, luckily it also has more effective health as a general rule.
Q: What exactly do tanks do, and how do they do it?
A: They take lots of hard hits without dying, and they allow no one else but themselves to be so hit.
So a tank's role breaks down into survival and threat. Threat is a lot less of an issue now than it used to be, so I think it is fair to say that a tank gears for survival first, then threat, then maybe dps. I realize that tank dps is getting to be a valid issue now that tanks can actually do above 200 dps, but no tank in a progression role has the luxury of gearing for damage (unless you tank with damage, as may be the case with druids). His dps is going to come from his stats, which naturally comes from better gear.
Q: How does a tank survive?
A: Two stats that tanks and ONLY TANKS care about --> mitigation and avoidance.
They are not the same thing. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion or general disagreement about the relative values of these two stats, so let's look at them more closely, since you will use them to evaluate the overall "goodness" of a tank.
Mitigation refers to damage mitigation; as in, the amount of damage you take when you get hit. It doesn't assume you'll miss, dodge, or parry the attack. It's not based on chance, or procs -- it's active all the time. Your damage mitigation comes from how much armor you have (it can also depend on your block value, but we'll get to that later). It also has nothing to do with how hard spells hit you; it has to do with physical damage only.
Avoidance is your chance to avoid damage completely. It is the base miss chance of the attacker, coupled with your block/dodge/parry. These days, most people count block only as a mitigation talent (more on this later). Generally speaking, a tank's avoidance is his miss/dodge/parry. Again, this has nothing to do with avoiding spell damage, that's just school-based resistance.
Then there is the matter of Effective Health. This is basically how much damage something has to do to you to kill you, and it directly relates to your armor and stamina. Let's assume you're offtanking Patchwerk and you eat a Hateful Strike -- you don't dodge, block, or parry it, it hits you squarely on the face. All that's saving you from death is your effective health -- part of that hit was mitigated by armor, and the rest was soaked up by your Hit Points.
There's also defense. Is defense a mitigation or an avoidance stat? It depends -- under the defense cap, more defense will be a mitigation stat because it will lessen the chance a mob will crit you for 200% of normal damage. That's very bad, in case anyone was wondering. Above the cap, defense adds additional block/dodge/parry, so it is then an avoidance stat.
Finally, there's block rating and block value. I said earlier that most consider block to be a mitigation stat only. The reason for this is that unless your block value is high enough, you won't block all of the damage of the attack, you just block a part of it -- in which case, you've blocked (or mitigated) part of the damage. You can think of block rating as being an avoidance stat and block value being a mitigation stat, but most people just consider block rating and value to be both mitigation because you won't block all of the damage of a boss attack in most cases. What this means, additionally, is that once a tank becomes block-capped (he has 102.4% avoidance, which we'll cover later also), that his block rating becomes effective health, because every attack that gets through will be at least partially blocked. That part that you blocked relates to your block rating, and it equates to more damage that you can absorb.
Q: What is a block cap?
A: When a mob tries to hit a player, the damage done is the result of one dice roll (0-100) based on the following attack table:
Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Crit
Crush (not possible at level 80)
Hit
While it is one roll, the values of all of these are summed up in descending order, so that if your tank's combined miss + dodge + parry + block is above 100%, there's no room on the table for a crit, a crush, or even a normal hit. Every hit was at least partially blocked.
In other words, when you roll a dice between 0 and 100, it lands somewhere between 0 and 100. When you sum up the values on that table in descending order, if you find that the combined percentages of your miss/dodge/parry/block is over 100, that means that the value of the dice roll always falls within the realm of miss+dodge+parry+block. Everything else has been pushed off the table. That's the block cap. That's what used to be called the uncrushable cap in TBC.
For example, let's say your miss+dodge+parry+block is 100, your miss is 10%, your dodge is 20%, your parry is 20%, and the 50% left is block. That means 0-10 is miss, 10-30 is dodge, 30-50 is parry, and the rest is block. The dice rolls 43, and that falls within the parry percentage, so you parried that attack. The next attack is 89, and that falls within block, so you block that attack. Probably not the entire hit, though...how much of it you blocked has to do with your block value.
How Tank Stats Relate to Tanks
Well, not all of these stats relate to all tanks, for example. Druids can't block (they don't wear shields) and they can't parry (they don't tank with weapons, although a giant bear with a mace in their mouth might actually be really scary). Their mitigation comes solely from armor because of the inability to block. Their avoidance comes mostly from dodge and defense.
Death Knights also don't block. They make up for it by having armor that scales higher than for warriors and paladins.
Druids can effectively get 540 defense just from talents alone. It doesn't mean that defense doesn't help druids, it just means that they don't need it to be uncrittable.
What is better, avoidance or mitigation or effective health or defense?
It depends.
You need to be defense capped, first and foremost. It's not hard. Do everyone a favor and don't go anywhere without being defense capped. You're not a tank until you are, you're just a liability.
If you are defense capped but cannot get block capped, it makes sense to gear/enchant/gem for more effective health (more mitigation and block) perhaps over avoidance. Higher-end tanking gear has avoidance on it, luckily it also has more effective health as a general rule.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Tree Durid iz 4 Heel
i. Introduction – FHQ ("Frequently Heard QQs")
ii. Roles and Spells
iii. Talents and Builds
iv. Comparative Druid Stats
v. Gearing for Raids
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
vii. Meters and You
viii. Consumables
ix. Recommended Addons
Introduction – FHQ ("Frequently Heard QQs")
QQ: Resto druids can’t heal tanks!
AA: You’d be surprised. One of the nice things about resto and its synergy with the balance tree is that you can spec/gear/glyph to fill whatever role you like, or design a spec that does everything pretty well. Resto druids have a very respectable arsenal for dealing with tank damage, which will be covered later on. It depends on playstyle and what the druid is comfortable with, but we’re definitely not gimped in this respect.
QQ: Resto is not good at end game content!
AA: That may have seemed the case in TBC, with the lack of a smart group heal, but it is certainly not the case now. As mentioned before, druids are extremely versatile and people are starting to recognize this. I’ve personally been involved in Naxx 25s sporting an entire forest of trees, and my very first Malygos-10 kill had a healing team comprised of three resto druids. It may just be that resto is a popular class to play right now. There’s even talk of them being overpowered.
QQ: Resto druids are overpowered!
AA: Maybe a bit – but you have to remember that a class that relies so much on delayed payback of benefit received will have to work a lot harder to make sure that the player did indeed receive the benefit of the heal, especially when the other healers in your raid will be quick to overwrite your HoTs. I’m always top on the activity meters, even ahead of pally tanks and other GCD-heavy classes. Maybe the general feeling that the current content is not terribly challenging for healers is helping to add to this (mis)conception.
QQ: Nourish is useless!
AA: That depends on how you’re using it. Are you using it to try to out-spam a pally? In that case, it probably is. Are you using it to augment the healing done by Wild Growth after you have applied WG on 5 targets? If so, you might appreciate it a lot more.
QQ: Wild Growth is useless!
AA: I’m surprised that I hear this, but I do. It may seem this way if you are part of a very proactive healing team, in which case, it may just be a matter of timing. Once you learn the encounters better, you may find the throughput of this spell increasing. Also, remember that the use of WG is not limited to its raid heal capacity but also to buff your next Nourish on the affected targets – think of it as a self-buff to Nourish.
ii. Roles and Spells
Druid healing is unique in a number of ways. The reliance of HoTs is the obvious example, but Blizzard has been actively designing spells to allow us to utilize “heal combos,” which is a very interactive and engaging healing method. Not everyone likes it, but I personally do.
I don’t want to go through every spell and explain what it does – I imagine you can read a tooltip. What I want to do in this section is go over some scenarios and evaluate what spells are good for certain occasions, and why.
Main Tank Healing
Glyphed Regrowth spam with the proper gear (this requires a fair amount of haste and spellpower) and talents (Nature’s Grace, Improved Regrowth, Nature’s Majesty) is extremely powerful. Each regrowth you apply is essentially buffing itself, as well as probably critting, applying Living Seed, and decreasing the cast time of the next one. This makes it an extremely good tank-healing spam spell.
The best use of Nature’s Swiftness is clearly with the unglyphed Healing Touch, since the glyph will halve its healing output.
Do not let the Lifebloom stacks fall off. Druid healing output depends on HoT uptime.
Nourish is low on the list because although it will get the benefit from all the HoTs already up, most of the time Regrowth will still outperform it.
Main Tank Healing (post 3.1)
Several things are different now. Both Nourish and Regrowth have the 25% crit (down from 50% on just Regrowth). Nourish, Swiftmend, and Regrowth will now proc Living Seed. This is a good thing! With the new Nourish glyph set to outperform the current Regrowth glyph as a MT healing glyph, and the increased mana cost to Lifebloom, you may want to alter your tank healing style.
Raid Healing (e.g. Malygos)
Use Wild Growth whenever the cooldown is up, then quickly Nourish the people it hits. Target the tank to get the melee group. Target yourself and run into the caster group. Get creative with how you control who it hits.
Throw HoTs around, liberally – but make sure you follow up, because even if you don’t have to worry about someone else overwriting your HoT, chances are the damage might come too quickly for slow healing to keep up. Rejuv, LB, and WG are now designed to be used in conjunction with Nourish.
Some druids really like glyphed Healing Touch (keep in mind that if you do this, you will have to find some other spell to use with Nature’s Swiftness). With the glyph and 5/5 Naturalist, cast time is down to 1 second, which basically turns it into a Flash Heal. I personally think Nourish is better, but I can see a good case made for glyphed HT, especially if you know you’ll always be raid healing. It’s also nice for leveling, since it’s the only “fast” heal you’ll have until you get Nourish.
I usually use Rejuv in conjunction with Swiftmend when I need to instantly heal someone – when nothing else is fast enough.
Don’t “forget” to use Tranquility (I do this a lot).
Tank and Raid Healing
iii. PVE Talents and builds
Here is an example of a “raid healing” build without glyphed Healing Touch:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0xG0zZZf0IufugiuVhst
This build picks up all the talents from resto that improves your HoTs and a few talents that help with Regrowth. It also picks up Genesis from the Balance tree and a few other talents to get to Nature’s Splendor, increasing Lifebloom’s duration to 9 seconds. Add the Lifebloom glyph to get 10 seconds. This build is for raid healing with HoTs, and assuming you’ll never use Healing Touch except with Nature’s Swiftness.
Here is an example of a “raid healing” build with glyphed Healing Touch:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0VG0zZZfVhuVuxiuVhst
The key here is 5/5 Naturalist, which in conjunction with the glyph will cause Healing Touch to have a 1-second cast time. Since you’ll be using Regrowth with Nature’s Swiftness instead, it picks up talents that buff Regrowth also.
Here is an example of a “Dreamstate” build.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html?tal=55320031003300300000000000000000000000000000000000000000023003331203150053105001200
Dreamstate is a talent in the Balance tree that regens 10% of your mana while casting. It used to be fairly popular back in the day before druids got Tree of Life form, as mana management was very much an issue for healers in Vanilla WoW. It has since fallen out of vogue, but I hear of it every now and then in Wrath, and with the coming nerfs to mana regen, some may find it interesting again. I’ve heard reports that it is quite effective in Wrath as long as you don’t mind not having Wild Growth. Since druids didn’t have a group heal until the end of TBC, this isn’t giving up that much for some druids.
The idea with this spec is to delve a little deeper into the Balance tree to pick up Lunar Guidance and Dreamstate. In return, you lose a little of the healing bonus to Tree of Life, your GCD on your HoTs is back to where it was pre-Wrath (1.5), and you lose Wild Growth. This spec will tend to favor Intellect a little more heavily than other builds. It will also benefit from haste, since as you get up into the realm of 500+ haste, your GCD on Lifebloom and Rejuv will start to approach what it would be with GotEM.
Here is an example of a Regrowth-glyph build:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html?tal=05320131003000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000023003331203150053105301351
This build uses Nature’s Grace to supplement Regrowth criticals (which, remember, is going to be very often) with a reduction in cast time of the next spell, and picks up Celestial Focus for some extra haste. Coupled with the Regrowth glyph, this makes for very powerful Regrowth-spamming. With this build, you would still use Healing Touch with Nature’s Swiftness, but you don’t have a 4-minute Tranquility. It’s still a very powerful raid healing build that doesn’t sacrifice any of the utility of Wild Growth or Lifebloom.
There are infinite more variations. You could design your own Dreamstate/glyphed Healing Touch spec and try to out-spam pallies. Anything is possible.
QQ: Why do none of these builds include Replenish (soon to be renamed Revitalize because for some reason it confuses people)?
AA: This is going to be complicated, because they are changing Revitalize to work with Wild Growth, which makes it ten times as useful as it previously was. The mana/rage/runic power gained is a minimal increase for most of the targets you cast this on when using rejuv, but Wild Growth ticks more often, affects more targets, and is used more often in general. It's certainly not a bad spell, but it may gain in popularity when it works with Wild Growth.
QQ: What’s the deal with Gift of the Earthmother (GotEM)? Why do most restos swear by it?
AA: GotEM increases the base global cooldown of your instant cast heals by 20%. That means that your Rejuv, WG, and most importantly, Lifebloom can be applied at a 1.2 GCD, instead of 1.5. You will need 655 haste rating at level 80, and 5 points in this talent, to get your HoTs on a 1-second global cooldown. This was actually nerfed in 3.0.8; previously, it scaled better with hsate because the bonus wasn't applied in any particular order, so you only needed 505 haste to reach a 1.0-second GCD. Nevertheless, most restos consider points spent in this talent to be well worth it – anything that allows you to apply HoTs faster just frees up that much time for other things, even if it’s just to compensate for lag effects.
iv. Comparative Resto Druid stats
Generally: Spellpower>Spirit/MP5/Intellect>Haste>Crit
A word about regen: The upcoming nerf to spirit-based mana regen means that although your in-combat regen will remain about the same, your OOC5SR (out of combat five-second rule regen) will take a hit. When I'm healing, I'm not out of the 5SR that often, except in certain fights (Heigan), and because of Clearcasting. Clearcasting is being changed also, so in general, Spirit will be devalued. What this may mean in practice is that you may aim to get your Intellect to Spirit ratio a little closer to 1:1 than it was previously. In other words, you may have to gem for Intellect. MP5 remains a secondary mana regen stat, but it might become a little more useful than it previously was.
Spellpower is fairly self-explanatory. Haste is still very good for restos, and a fair amount of leather healing gear comes with haste, even the tier pieces. You shouldn’t ever really need to gear for crit, in the same way that you never need to gear for Stamina. The amount that comes default on your usual gear is more than enough. Do try to replace all your old epics as you level to 80, even if you think the other stats are good enough to keep, the lack of scaling on stamina and intellect alone makes replacing those level 70 epics necessary.
As a healer, you should also be mindful of the overall pace of your guild when determining how best to outfit yourself. If you’re still in the progression phase, it might be a good idea to value mana regen slightly more, since fights will most likely last longer when you are just learning fights and the dps has not had a chance to gear up yet. Later on, when things are on farm, fights will be shorter, and tanks will have more health, so it might be more useful to drop some regen for spellpower.
v. Gearing for Raids
Don’t be afraid to equip cloth to start out with, the stats will be more in line with what you need until you’re doing Naxx. Heroic instances drop a lot of moonkin gear (crit gear) – don’t use it. There’s a couple of really good standout pieces that are easy to get for resto:
Helm: Helm of Anomalus (Heroic Nexus). Far better than anything else you can equip in this slot until Naxx.
Neck: Dragon Prow Amulet (trash drop from Heroic UK), Necromancer’s Amulet (Heroic CoS).
Chest: T7 piece (80 Emblems of Heroism)
Bracer: Handler’s Arm Strap (Heroic Drak’tharon)
Gloves: Grotto Mist Gloves (Heroic Azjol-Nerub), T7 piece (60 EoH)
Belt: Elegant Temple Garden's Girdle (40 EoH). Massively better than the leather version for resto, despite the armor downgrade.
Legs: Earthgiving Legs (leatherworking BOE)
Feet: Earthgiving Boots (leatherworking BOE)
Trinket: Talisman of Troll Divinity (Heroic Drak’tharon)
Weapon: War Mace of Unrequited Love (Heroic Nexus)
Offhand: Handbook of Obscure Remedies (EoH)
Idol: Idol of Lush Moss (EoH)
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
Gems:
Runed Scarlet Ruby and Sparkling Sky Sapphire for spellpower and spirit, respectively.
Purified Twilight Opal and Royal Twilight Opal are good choices for a purple gem, Luminous Monarch Topaz may be the gem of choice for regen (spellpower and intellect), and Reckless Monarch Topaz is an okay choice for orange. Gem to enhance the strengths of a piece, not to hide its weaknesses.
Enchants:
Head: Arcanum of Blissful Mending
Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Crag
Robe: Powerful Stats
Cloak: Greater Speed or Wisdom.
Bracers: Major Spirit
Gloves: Exceptional Spellpower
Legs: Brilliant Spellthread
Boots: Greater Spirit
Weapon: Exceptional Spirit, Mighty Spellpower
Glyphs:
Major glyphs:
Glyph of Swiftmend for sure. Probably one of the most OP glyphs in the game.
Other good choices:
Glyph of Regrowth for more tank healing oomph. Glyph of Nourish will be better once 3.1 hits. Glyph of Lifebloom is also useful. Glyph of Innervate is also nice, but you probably won’t need the benefit to yourself since you should have enough spirit to regen your entire bar anyway. It’s good if you never really need an Innervate and use yours on other people a lot.
Come 3.1 I'm going to be rolling with Nourish, Swiftmend, and Lifebloom.
Minor glyphs:
Not a lot of good choices until they finally make the druid form glyphs, which will probably be never. Glyph of Rebirth is pretty nice, saving you from having to restock a reagent.
vii. Meters and You
When crap hits fan, all healers basically heal the same way – find the button labeled “Heal” and push it.
Druids have the most unique healing style of any healer in the game, due to the necessity of using HoTs, most of which buff or enhance other heals the druid has. Because of this, keeping HoT uptime at the maximum will greatly contribute to your effective healing output more than anything else you can do.
You will never outspam a pally, or be as good at mitigation as a disc priest, but you are very well equipped to handle most situations just as well as, or better, than other healers. If you know your heals and which situations in which to best apply them, topping meters is very easy for a resto.
What do Healing Meters Actually Mean?
Generally, not a whole hell of a lot. How much healing you’re actually doing is something only you and the other healers can feel out. Meters can supplement this information, but it’s only a metric, nothing more. In healing, as in dps, there are usually one or two individuals that set the pace; everyone else works around them. In dps, you time your rotation to the rotation of the highest dps. In healing, you heal to pick up the slack of the highest healer. But that really depends on who you’re healing and what classes of healers are present. If you are a discipline priest, for example, your job is to help mitigate damage, so if you’re doing your job or until they allow shield mitigated damage to count as a heal on meters, your healing output will be low. If you happen to be a group healer, or a pally with the glyph, just throwing out random group heals at opportune times will push the meter up.
There are a lot of other reasons why healing meters are deceiving. Your raw healing output is going to depend on who your healing assignment is, for example. An overgeared group will require less overall healing because fights will be shorter, which will lower everyone’s healing output. For a druid, your overhealing is going to be low, and that is good. Whereas for a priest, for example, a certain amount of overhealing might not be a bad thing because they get mana back from it.
Meters are not all bad. They can reveal your miss/hit/crit rate, your rotation, your incoming damage, your deaths and the causes thereof. And they can be used to help diagnose problems if you find yourself running into trouble. But they should always be read with a grain of salt. Don’t assume that just because someone is low on the meters, that they are not doing their job. Conversely, don’t assume that just because you’re topping meters (which is easier for certain classes than for others) that you’re more useful or more important. It’s nice to be competitive, but healers, more than anyone else except maybe tanks, must work together -- or everyone dies.
viii. Consumables:
Tender Shoveltusk Steak for spellpower, Mighty Rhino Dogs for Mp5. A bunch of haste/crit food, which usually doesn’t work as well.
Spellpower elixirs for more spellpower, and Elixir of Mighty Mageblood or Elixir of Spirit for regen.
Flask of the Frost Wyrm is a great choice for more spellpower, for heavier progression some may prefer Flask of Pure Mojo for regen.
ix. Addons
It is highly recommended that you get some kind of Hot-tracking addon, so you can see who has your HoTs and their duration. DoTimer works pretty well. As a healer, the two package deals are Grid/Clique and Healbot. I use Clique/Pitbull myself because you can set up Pitbull to display your HoTs with their duration on the side of the target’s unitframe. Since downranking is out of the game, I have about 8 key-and-click binds set up with Clique to the different combos of my most used heals.
Make sure that whatever unitframe addon you are using can support showing party/raid pets (and that you know how to turn that functionality on and off, so you don’t have to stare at 25 player frames and 2 kitties, 4 ghouls, and a felhunter if you don’t want to). Not that you’re ever going to be healing hunter pets, mind you, but certain fights require healing dragon mounts (the Oculus, Malygos), which count as pets to the UI.
ii. Roles and Spells
iii. Talents and Builds
iv. Comparative Druid Stats
v. Gearing for Raids
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
vii. Meters and You
viii. Consumables
ix. Recommended Addons
Introduction – FHQ ("Frequently Heard QQs")
QQ: Resto druids can’t heal tanks!
AA: You’d be surprised. One of the nice things about resto and its synergy with the balance tree is that you can spec/gear/glyph to fill whatever role you like, or design a spec that does everything pretty well. Resto druids have a very respectable arsenal for dealing with tank damage, which will be covered later on. It depends on playstyle and what the druid is comfortable with, but we’re definitely not gimped in this respect.
QQ: Resto is not good at end game content!
AA: That may have seemed the case in TBC, with the lack of a smart group heal, but it is certainly not the case now. As mentioned before, druids are extremely versatile and people are starting to recognize this. I’ve personally been involved in Naxx 25s sporting an entire forest of trees, and my very first Malygos-10 kill had a healing team comprised of three resto druids. It may just be that resto is a popular class to play right now. There’s even talk of them being overpowered.
QQ: Resto druids are overpowered!
AA: Maybe a bit – but you have to remember that a class that relies so much on delayed payback of benefit received will have to work a lot harder to make sure that the player did indeed receive the benefit of the heal, especially when the other healers in your raid will be quick to overwrite your HoTs. I’m always top on the activity meters, even ahead of pally tanks and other GCD-heavy classes. Maybe the general feeling that the current content is not terribly challenging for healers is helping to add to this (mis)conception.
QQ: Nourish is useless!
AA: That depends on how you’re using it. Are you using it to try to out-spam a pally? In that case, it probably is. Are you using it to augment the healing done by Wild Growth after you have applied WG on 5 targets? If so, you might appreciate it a lot more.
QQ: Wild Growth is useless!
AA: I’m surprised that I hear this, but I do. It may seem this way if you are part of a very proactive healing team, in which case, it may just be a matter of timing. Once you learn the encounters better, you may find the throughput of this spell increasing. Also, remember that the use of WG is not limited to its raid heal capacity but also to buff your next Nourish on the affected targets – think of it as a self-buff to Nourish.
ii. Roles and Spells
Druid healing is unique in a number of ways. The reliance of HoTs is the obvious example, but Blizzard has been actively designing spells to allow us to utilize “heal combos,” which is a very interactive and engaging healing method. Not everyone likes it, but I personally do.
I don’t want to go through every spell and explain what it does – I imagine you can read a tooltip. What I want to do in this section is go over some scenarios and evaluate what spells are good for certain occasions, and why.
Main Tank Healing
- Lifebloom x3, rolling
- Rejuvenate, refreshing
- (Glyphed) Regrowth
- Living Seed proccing on Regrowth crits, which if you have Improved Regrowth, will be often even with low crit. This is a passive effect that provides a bit of a health buffer against incoming damage, like the priest’s Prayer of Mending, except that it doesn’t jump. It does help. Just because you don’t notice it doesn’t mean it’s not doing anything.
- Swiftmend
- Nature’s Swiftness + (Unglyphed) Healing Touch
- Nourish
Glyphed Regrowth spam with the proper gear (this requires a fair amount of haste and spellpower) and talents (Nature’s Grace, Improved Regrowth, Nature’s Majesty) is extremely powerful. Each regrowth you apply is essentially buffing itself, as well as probably critting, applying Living Seed, and decreasing the cast time of the next one. This makes it an extremely good tank-healing spam spell.
The best use of Nature’s Swiftness is clearly with the unglyphed Healing Touch, since the glyph will halve its healing output.
Do not let the Lifebloom stacks fall off. Druid healing output depends on HoT uptime.
Nourish is low on the list because although it will get the benefit from all the HoTs already up, most of the time Regrowth will still outperform it.
Main Tank Healing (post 3.1)
Several things are different now. Both Nourish and Regrowth have the 25% crit (down from 50% on just Regrowth). Nourish, Swiftmend, and Regrowth will now proc Living Seed. This is a good thing! With the new Nourish glyph set to outperform the current Regrowth glyph as a MT healing glyph, and the increased mana cost to Lifebloom, you may want to alter your tank healing style.
- Lifebloom - the new Lifebloom strategy to maximize your mana is to apply it slowly (don't cast 3 stacks upfront, but cast the next stack only when the first is about to expire). Let it bloom out, and reapply slowly. In between you have time to cast other HoTs, such as:
- Regrowth - no longer as good as a main-tank spam heal because of the changes to Nourish, but it is still useful for applying the HoT, and for the Living Seed bonus.
- Rejuvenation -- apply for its HoT
- Nourish. Glyphed and with the T7 bonus, this will be your main tank spam heal now. It heals for an additional 11% per HoT on the target, crits more, and procs Living Seed. It's also quite mana efficient. Spam until one of the above HoTs needs to be refreshed.
- Swiftmend and Nature's Swiftness as usual.
Raid Healing (e.g. Malygos)
- Wild Growth
- Nourish
- (Glyphed) Healing Touch
- Rejuvenation/Lifebloom
- Swiftmend
- Tranquility
- Regrowth
Use Wild Growth whenever the cooldown is up, then quickly Nourish the people it hits. Target the tank to get the melee group. Target yourself and run into the caster group. Get creative with how you control who it hits.
Throw HoTs around, liberally – but make sure you follow up, because even if you don’t have to worry about someone else overwriting your HoT, chances are the damage might come too quickly for slow healing to keep up. Rejuv, LB, and WG are now designed to be used in conjunction with Nourish.
Some druids really like glyphed Healing Touch (keep in mind that if you do this, you will have to find some other spell to use with Nature’s Swiftness). With the glyph and 5/5 Naturalist, cast time is down to 1 second, which basically turns it into a Flash Heal. I personally think Nourish is better, but I can see a good case made for glyphed HT, especially if you know you’ll always be raid healing. It’s also nice for leveling, since it’s the only “fast” heal you’ll have until you get Nourish.
I usually use Rejuv in conjunction with Swiftmend when I need to instantly heal someone – when nothing else is fast enough.
Don’t “forget” to use Tranquility (I do this a lot).
Tank and Raid Healing
- Everything you have :)
iii. PVE Talents and builds
Here is an example of a “raid healing” build without glyphed Healing Touch:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0xG0zZZf0IufugiuVhst
This build picks up all the talents from resto that improves your HoTs and a few talents that help with Regrowth. It also picks up Genesis from the Balance tree and a few other talents to get to Nature’s Splendor, increasing Lifebloom’s duration to 9 seconds. Add the Lifebloom glyph to get 10 seconds. This build is for raid healing with HoTs, and assuming you’ll never use Healing Touch except with Nature’s Swiftness.
Here is an example of a “raid healing” build with glyphed Healing Touch:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0VG0zZZfVhuVuxiuVhst
The key here is 5/5 Naturalist, which in conjunction with the glyph will cause Healing Touch to have a 1-second cast time. Since you’ll be using Regrowth with Nature’s Swiftness instead, it picks up talents that buff Regrowth also.
Here is an example of a “Dreamstate” build.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html?tal=55320031003300300000000000000000000000000000000000000000023003331203150053105001200
Dreamstate is a talent in the Balance tree that regens 10% of your mana while casting. It used to be fairly popular back in the day before druids got Tree of Life form, as mana management was very much an issue for healers in Vanilla WoW. It has since fallen out of vogue, but I hear of it every now and then in Wrath, and with the coming nerfs to mana regen, some may find it interesting again. I’ve heard reports that it is quite effective in Wrath as long as you don’t mind not having Wild Growth. Since druids didn’t have a group heal until the end of TBC, this isn’t giving up that much for some druids.
The idea with this spec is to delve a little deeper into the Balance tree to pick up Lunar Guidance and Dreamstate. In return, you lose a little of the healing bonus to Tree of Life, your GCD on your HoTs is back to where it was pre-Wrath (1.5), and you lose Wild Growth. This spec will tend to favor Intellect a little more heavily than other builds. It will also benefit from haste, since as you get up into the realm of 500+ haste, your GCD on Lifebloom and Rejuv will start to approach what it would be with GotEM.
Here is an example of a Regrowth-glyph build:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/druid/talents.html?tal=05320131003000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000023003331203150053105301351
This build uses Nature’s Grace to supplement Regrowth criticals (which, remember, is going to be very often) with a reduction in cast time of the next spell, and picks up Celestial Focus for some extra haste. Coupled with the Regrowth glyph, this makes for very powerful Regrowth-spamming. With this build, you would still use Healing Touch with Nature’s Swiftness, but you don’t have a 4-minute Tranquility. It’s still a very powerful raid healing build that doesn’t sacrifice any of the utility of Wild Growth or Lifebloom.
There are infinite more variations. You could design your own Dreamstate/glyphed Healing Touch spec and try to out-spam pallies. Anything is possible.
QQ: Why do none of these builds include Replenish (soon to be renamed Revitalize because for some reason it confuses people)?
AA: This is going to be complicated, because they are changing Revitalize to work with Wild Growth, which makes it ten times as useful as it previously was. The mana/rage/runic power gained is a minimal increase for most of the targets you cast this on when using rejuv, but Wild Growth ticks more often, affects more targets, and is used more often in general. It's certainly not a bad spell, but it may gain in popularity when it works with Wild Growth.
QQ: What’s the deal with Gift of the Earthmother (GotEM)? Why do most restos swear by it?
AA: GotEM increases the base global cooldown of your instant cast heals by 20%. That means that your Rejuv, WG, and most importantly, Lifebloom can be applied at a 1.2 GCD, instead of 1.5. You will need 655 haste rating at level 80, and 5 points in this talent, to get your HoTs on a 1-second global cooldown. This was actually nerfed in 3.0.8; previously, it scaled better with hsate because the bonus wasn't applied in any particular order, so you only needed 505 haste to reach a 1.0-second GCD. Nevertheless, most restos consider points spent in this talent to be well worth it – anything that allows you to apply HoTs faster just frees up that much time for other things, even if it’s just to compensate for lag effects.
iv. Comparative Resto Druid stats
Generally: Spellpower>Spirit/MP5/Intellect>Haste>Crit
A word about regen: The upcoming nerf to spirit-based mana regen means that although your in-combat regen will remain about the same, your OOC5SR (out of combat five-second rule regen) will take a hit. When I'm healing, I'm not out of the 5SR that often, except in certain fights (Heigan), and because of Clearcasting. Clearcasting is being changed also, so in general, Spirit will be devalued. What this may mean in practice is that you may aim to get your Intellect to Spirit ratio a little closer to 1:1 than it was previously. In other words, you may have to gem for Intellect. MP5 remains a secondary mana regen stat, but it might become a little more useful than it previously was.
Spellpower is fairly self-explanatory. Haste is still very good for restos, and a fair amount of leather healing gear comes with haste, even the tier pieces. You shouldn’t ever really need to gear for crit, in the same way that you never need to gear for Stamina. The amount that comes default on your usual gear is more than enough. Do try to replace all your old epics as you level to 80, even if you think the other stats are good enough to keep, the lack of scaling on stamina and intellect alone makes replacing those level 70 epics necessary.
As a healer, you should also be mindful of the overall pace of your guild when determining how best to outfit yourself. If you’re still in the progression phase, it might be a good idea to value mana regen slightly more, since fights will most likely last longer when you are just learning fights and the dps has not had a chance to gear up yet. Later on, when things are on farm, fights will be shorter, and tanks will have more health, so it might be more useful to drop some regen for spellpower.
v. Gearing for Raids
Don’t be afraid to equip cloth to start out with, the stats will be more in line with what you need until you’re doing Naxx. Heroic instances drop a lot of moonkin gear (crit gear) – don’t use it. There’s a couple of really good standout pieces that are easy to get for resto:
Helm: Helm of Anomalus (Heroic Nexus). Far better than anything else you can equip in this slot until Naxx.
Neck: Dragon Prow Amulet (trash drop from Heroic UK), Necromancer’s Amulet (Heroic CoS).
Chest: T7 piece (80 Emblems of Heroism)
Bracer: Handler’s Arm Strap (Heroic Drak’tharon)
Gloves: Grotto Mist Gloves (Heroic Azjol-Nerub), T7 piece (60 EoH)
Belt: Elegant Temple Garden's Girdle (40 EoH). Massively better than the leather version for resto, despite the armor downgrade.
Legs: Earthgiving Legs (leatherworking BOE)
Feet: Earthgiving Boots (leatherworking BOE)
Trinket: Talisman of Troll Divinity (Heroic Drak’tharon)
Weapon: War Mace of Unrequited Love (Heroic Nexus)
Offhand: Handbook of Obscure Remedies (EoH)
Idol: Idol of Lush Moss (EoH)
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
Gems:
Runed Scarlet Ruby and Sparkling Sky Sapphire for spellpower and spirit, respectively.
Purified Twilight Opal and Royal Twilight Opal are good choices for a purple gem, Luminous Monarch Topaz may be the gem of choice for regen (spellpower and intellect), and Reckless Monarch Topaz is an okay choice for orange. Gem to enhance the strengths of a piece, not to hide its weaknesses.
Enchants:
Head: Arcanum of Blissful Mending
Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Crag
Robe: Powerful Stats
Cloak: Greater Speed or Wisdom.
Bracers: Major Spirit
Gloves: Exceptional Spellpower
Legs: Brilliant Spellthread
Boots: Greater Spirit
Weapon: Exceptional Spirit, Mighty Spellpower
Glyphs:
Major glyphs:
Glyph of Swiftmend for sure. Probably one of the most OP glyphs in the game.
Other good choices:
Glyph of Regrowth for more tank healing oomph. Glyph of Nourish will be better once 3.1 hits. Glyph of Lifebloom is also useful. Glyph of Innervate is also nice, but you probably won’t need the benefit to yourself since you should have enough spirit to regen your entire bar anyway. It’s good if you never really need an Innervate and use yours on other people a lot.
Come 3.1 I'm going to be rolling with Nourish, Swiftmend, and Lifebloom.
Minor glyphs:
Not a lot of good choices until they finally make the druid form glyphs, which will probably be never. Glyph of Rebirth is pretty nice, saving you from having to restock a reagent.
vii. Meters and You
When crap hits fan, all healers basically heal the same way – find the button labeled “Heal” and push it.
Druids have the most unique healing style of any healer in the game, due to the necessity of using HoTs, most of which buff or enhance other heals the druid has. Because of this, keeping HoT uptime at the maximum will greatly contribute to your effective healing output more than anything else you can do.
You will never outspam a pally, or be as good at mitigation as a disc priest, but you are very well equipped to handle most situations just as well as, or better, than other healers. If you know your heals and which situations in which to best apply them, topping meters is very easy for a resto.
What do Healing Meters Actually Mean?
Generally, not a whole hell of a lot. How much healing you’re actually doing is something only you and the other healers can feel out. Meters can supplement this information, but it’s only a metric, nothing more. In healing, as in dps, there are usually one or two individuals that set the pace; everyone else works around them. In dps, you time your rotation to the rotation of the highest dps. In healing, you heal to pick up the slack of the highest healer. But that really depends on who you’re healing and what classes of healers are present. If you are a discipline priest, for example, your job is to help mitigate damage, so if you’re doing your job or until they allow shield mitigated damage to count as a heal on meters, your healing output will be low. If you happen to be a group healer, or a pally with the glyph, just throwing out random group heals at opportune times will push the meter up.
There are a lot of other reasons why healing meters are deceiving. Your raw healing output is going to depend on who your healing assignment is, for example. An overgeared group will require less overall healing because fights will be shorter, which will lower everyone’s healing output. For a druid, your overhealing is going to be low, and that is good. Whereas for a priest, for example, a certain amount of overhealing might not be a bad thing because they get mana back from it.
Meters are not all bad. They can reveal your miss/hit/crit rate, your rotation, your incoming damage, your deaths and the causes thereof. And they can be used to help diagnose problems if you find yourself running into trouble. But they should always be read with a grain of salt. Don’t assume that just because someone is low on the meters, that they are not doing their job. Conversely, don’t assume that just because you’re topping meters (which is easier for certain classes than for others) that you’re more useful or more important. It’s nice to be competitive, but healers, more than anyone else except maybe tanks, must work together -- or everyone dies.
viii. Consumables:
Tender Shoveltusk Steak for spellpower, Mighty Rhino Dogs for Mp5. A bunch of haste/crit food, which usually doesn’t work as well.
Spellpower elixirs for more spellpower, and Elixir of Mighty Mageblood or Elixir of Spirit for regen.
Flask of the Frost Wyrm is a great choice for more spellpower, for heavier progression some may prefer Flask of Pure Mojo for regen.
ix. Addons
It is highly recommended that you get some kind of Hot-tracking addon, so you can see who has your HoTs and their duration. DoTimer works pretty well. As a healer, the two package deals are Grid/Clique and Healbot. I use Clique/Pitbull myself because you can set up Pitbull to display your HoTs with their duration on the side of the target’s unitframe. Since downranking is out of the game, I have about 8 key-and-click binds set up with Clique to the different combos of my most used heals.
Make sure that whatever unitframe addon you are using can support showing party/raid pets (and that you know how to turn that functionality on and off, so you don’t have to stare at 25 player frames and 2 kitties, 4 ghouls, and a felhunter if you don’t want to). Not that you’re ever going to be healing hunter pets, mind you, but certain fights require healing dragon mounts (the Oculus, Malygos), which count as pets to the UI.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Fire and Ice (and Everything Nice): Mage PVE guide
Note: A lot of information, especially regarding Arcane, needs more testing.
i. Introduction – Mages in PVE
ii. PVE Specs, Arcane Blast, Frostfire Bolt
iii. Talents and Builds
iv. Comparative Mage Stats
v. Gearing for Raids
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
vii. Rotations
viii. Consumables
ix. Recommended Addons
i. Introduction – Mages in PVE
Mages, like warlocks, hunters, and rogues, have only one function – to do damage. Dual spec system will not allow mages to slip comfortably into a secondary function in PVE, and the need for CC has been largely negated by the ease of AOE tanking. Thus, it is crucial that good mages learn their primary role well.
Currently, the mage class is in a good state when it comes to competitive PVE dps. The pressure, therefore, is shifted into the individual, not the class designers, to perform up to their full capacity. Luckily, playing a mage is fairly simple.
(I am not going to really discuss the mage class and/or mage dps in comparison with other classes, except to say that if you only play classes because they are perceived to be OP, then you should play a game where you are guaranteed to win. Due to Blizzard still changing class mechanics around a lot, expect that there will be no clear-cut winner in the dps race for quite a while. In the meantime, there is plenty of room for skill and gear and close the gaps.)
This guide will concentrate on the two primary PVE specs: frostfire and arcane. I will not discuss frost as it is not considered as of 3.0.8 to be a competitive PVE damage spec.
For the math behind the theory, you should look at ElitistJerks as I will not reproduce it here.
ii. PVE Specs, Frostfire Bolt, and Arcane Blast
All information in this guide assumes level 80.
At the start of Wrath, Frostfire spec (often abbreviated as FFB for Frostfire Bolt) was the highest practical dps spec. There was some early theorycrafting done where pure fire still slightly outdamaged FFB, but only in the event that an arcane mage was present in the raid as a “slow slave” – to continuously Slow the target to apply the Torment the Weak debuff. This is obviously not something everyone can come to depend on.
With patch 3.0.8, deep Arcane becomes a strong PVE competitor, although only time will tell if it is truly a superior dps spec than Frostfire. Many mages that switched from FFB to Arcane with 3.0.8 report that it is an immediate dps increase over FFB, anywhere from +500-800 dps just from respeccing. It seems that Arcane is finally an extremely viable and competitive alternative to FFB. Many mages may prefer to play as Arcane because it is a more dynamic and “fun” playstyle. Arcane is also a good PVP spec for Wintergrasp and outdoor battlegrounds, but I will not cover the Arcane PVP spec here.
Currently, Frost falls behind the other two trees in damage, and although it continues to be a strong spec for survivability and for leveling, its endgame performance is lacking. There are plans to massively buff Frost dps for PVE as well as grant the water elemental the Replenishment ability (it is Blizzard's intention to make all three mage trees equally good for PVE. Whether this will actually pan out in practice is another story). It is still a good arena build, but since this is a PVE guide I won’t discuss PVP specs here.
A Word on Playstyle: Arcane vs. Frostfire
Arcane plays very differently from fire/frost or frostfire. As frostfire, your dps is limited by two things: cast time and crits. As Arcane, your dps is limited by your mana pool. As frostfire, you are juggling dots, cooldowns/trinkets, and procs. As Arcane, you are also juggling cooldowns and procs (no dots; you’re not a warlock), but now you must actively practice mana management. You can go balls to the wall until your mana bar goes limp, or you can concentrate on maximizing DPM (Damage Per Mana) for sustainable dps. Therefore, playing as Arcane requires the mage to have a sense of timing instead of simply applying a rotation over and over.
That's very nice on paper, but how do the two raid mage specs compare in practice?
Arcane does require a lot more micromanaging of your mana regen mechanics. Even with 3 mana gem charges, a 2-min Evocate, and one mana pot per fight, you will spend a lot of time staring at your mana bar trying to figure out exactly when the best time to recharge will be. And God help you if you are interrupted during Evocating. If you can talk a druid into Innervating you, so much the better, but with the new changes to spirit-based regen and mana management techniques, I wouldn't count on it too often.
Also, you don't have Dragon's Breath or Blast Wave, which are actually very nice talents in certain situations.
In return, you get some added mobility, a spellpower boost, and an extra 3% hit from talents, which works out to about ~80 hit that you don't need to gem/gear/enchant for.
FFB sees massive, massive crits -- with 35% crit and about 1730 spellpower, Frostfire Bolts hit for 12k. That's still nothing compared to the 14-15k Arcane Barrage crits I've been getting with Arcane Power up, but Arcane Power comes at a pretty heavy price. In the new patch, Arcane Power's mana cost will be reduced to 10%, as will the damage bonus.
Let’s now examine the two main nukes of the FFB and Arcane specs.
Frostfire Bolt: The tooltip for FFB is confusing, if you want to know exactly how your frost and fire talents interact with this spell, you may look at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=73FC37BB82E923B642094B4BF99785AE.app27_03?topicId=12661303549&sid=1. Basically, talents that refer to “fire” or “frost” spells affect FFB, talents that refer to specific fire/frost spells, such as fireball, do not affect FFB. If you are spell-locked while casting FFB, you will be locked out of both the fire and frost trees.
It does “frostfire damage,” which is a completely different type of damage from either fire or frost. It did both types of damage in Beta; not anymore. If a target happens to be immune to fire or frost, it will deal the other school of damage instead. It used to double-dip from the Frost talent Elemental Precision, where FFB received 6% spell hit instead of 3%. After Patch 3.0.8, this will no longer be the case and FFB will receive 3% as is intended. It has a 3-second cast time, which is not alterable with talents, only with haste.
Arcane Blast: Patch 3.0.8 changed this spell from its former unplayable version. Now, it does the following: Each time you cast Arcane Blast, the damage of all Arcane spells is increased by 15% and mana cost of Arcane Blast is increased by 200%. Effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 10 sec or until any Arcane damage spell except Arcane Blast is cast.
What this means is that as you chain Arcane Blast, each successive Arcane Blast will receive 15% more damage. Then, after you have cast 3 Arcane Blast, your next arcane spell will receive the damage bonus, at which point the damage buff will then wear off. If you do not want to incur the increased mana cost of Arcane Blast, you only cast one Arcane Blast, then a different arcane spell, then start over.
You can already see how the arcane playstyle will depend on mana. We will cover rotations later.
iii. Talents and Builds
Frostfire: The FFB raid spec is heavily fire-based. Cornerstone talents include:
Ignite
Flame Throwing (does not affect FFB but affects Scorch, Fire Blast, Pyroblast, and Living Bomb)
Pyroblast
Burning Soul
Improved Scorch
Master of Elements
Playing with Fire
Critical Mass
Fire Power
Combustion
Pyromaniac
Empowered Fire
Hot Streak
Living Bomb
Precision
Ice Shards
Piercing Ice
Icy Veins (in 3.0.8, FFB will benefit from the pushback protection in this spell).
With these talents, Frostfire Bolt receives a 315% critical bonus. In addition, crits proc Ignite, mana return with Master of Elements, and has a chance to proc Hot Streak.
What this means, in practice, is that the damage output is a lot streakier than playing as frost or playing as fireball/Fire. FFB still hits for about the same as fireball, but it crits for a lot more.
For comparison, here is my current build: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/mage/talents.html?tal=00000000000000000000000000000000550020123033310531203013512033030311030000000000000000
Notes: A little off from the cookie cutter single-target dps spec. I picked up Blast Wave because I like it. I don’t have Improved Fire Blast. I don’t have Incinerate. I don’t have World in Flames, which I actually wanted but couldn’t afford.
Arcane: Cornerstone talents include:
Arcane Focus
Arcane Concentration
Spell Impact
Arcane Meditation
Torment the Weak
Arcane Mind
Presence of Mind
Arcane Instability
Arcane Potency
Arcane Power
Arcane Empowerment
Arcane Floes
Mind Mastery
Missile Barrage
Netherwind Presence
Spell Power
Arcane Barrage
This is an example of an Arcane build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage=03000000000000000000000000002032030010000000000000000000230025230100330150323102505321&glyph=012004000000
Note that it has both Arcane Focus and Precision. Arcane is the only PVE spec that can gain 6% hit from talents instead of 3%. It also is the only mage spec that may benefit from spirit gear. The 2 points in Student of the Mind may be used instead on Magic Absorption, which trades off more mana regen in combat for some survivability. Magic Absorption is primarily a PVP talent, but I can see a good case being made for having it in PVE as well. It will depend, again, on how good your mana pool is. Also, this build does not include Slow as many bosses are immune to the effect. Torment the Weak, being that it now works off of other slowing effects such as Thunderclap, may still be useful enough to pick up even without having Slow, but I could see a good case being made for picking up Slow also.
iv. Comparative Mage Stats
Generally: Hit (until capped) >> Spellpower >> Crit/Haste
For Frostfire, assuming you have 3 points in Precision (and you should until your gear is good enough to move points away), you need 368 hit to cap your frost and fire spells, or 289 with a shadow priest or moonkin in the raid. For Arcane, assuming you have 3 points in both Arcane Focus and Precision, you need 289 to hit cap your arcane spells, or 210 with a shadow priest or moonkin.
Spellpower is fairly self-explanatory. Arcane mages gain 15% more SP with their Intellect. You can play around with the relative values of haste and crit. For Frostfire, obviously more of both is better, but since FFB shows remarkable returns with crit, I tend to value crit more highly than haste until you have 30% crit or so. Since haste is the only way to reduce the cast time of FFB, it is obviously also important. Luckily, a lot of caster gear comes with both.
Arcane gear isn't exactly the same as FFB gear, you need more haste and more Intellect than a typical FFB gearset has. Haste is far more valuable to an arcane mage than an FBB mage, and crit is less important. I typically run with 2 FFB mages in my raid, with about equal gear as me. My arcane set has about 8% less crit and 100 more haste than my FFB set. I do a lot more dps than they do, and my main nuke (AB) crits about as much as their main nuke (Frostfire Bolt) does. But a crit in arcane is just bigger numbers. It doesn't return mana, it doesn't proc ignite, it doesn't proc Hot Streak, and it's definitely not 315% of normal damage.
Here is the haste formula:
Haste Rating Required = ((Base Cast Time / Desired Cast Time) - 1) * 32.79 * 100
How much haste is required to get FFB down to 2.5 seconds?
A lot. Haste scales negatively as you acquire more of it. In the neighborhood of 330 or so haste, FFB will be 2.7 seconds, which is actually very usable.
Because of the way itemization works, generally a piece with two or three different stats is better for mages than a piece with slightly more of only one or two stats. For example, a cape with 30 crit and 50 spellpower is better than a cape with 60 spellpower only. Generally. Your mileage may vary.
v. Gearing for Raids
If you really need hit, the Ebonweave set is a possibility, but in general the tailoring pieces are not as good as they were in TBC even for beginning raiders. There is a good beginner guide available here: http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/01/10/arcane-brilliance-gearing-your-mage-up-for-naxx/.
The best indicator of your readiness for Naxx is your dps, not your gear. You can check it by practicing your rotation on a boss training dummy for a moment of two. If you can sustain 1800-2000 dps, you are probably ready.
Once your gear gets better, the 2-piece and 4-piece mage T7 bonus is actually very good, in comparison with older mage sets.
What does an example of a high level mage set look like?
Head: Gothik's Cowl. Better than Faerlina's Madness if you don't need the hit.
Neck: Cosmic Lights from Heroic Sapphiron
Shoulder: Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads.
Cloak: Shroud of Luminosity from heroic Maexxna.
Chest: Gown of the Spell-Weaver from Malygos-10.
Wrist: Bindings of the Expansive Mind from Razuvious-25.
Gloves: T7.5 piece
Belt: Cincture of Polarity, although Plush Sash of Guzbah is fairly comparable
Legs: Leggings of Atrophy if you don't mind losing the gem slots of the T7.5
Boots: Boots of Impetuous Ideals - Naxx25 trash drop
Weapon: Turning Tide - Heroic Kel
Offhand: Surplus Limb from heroic Patchwerk, only real upgrade from Ward of the Violet Citadel
Wand: Gemmed Wand of the Nerubians - heroic Anub'rekan
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
You’ll probably be gemming for hit a lot of the time (Rigid Autumn’s Glow). The Runed Scarlet Ruby is the spellpower gem, which is rather expensive since it requires Kirin Tor exalted to cut. Then there is Luminous, Potent, Veiled, and Reckless Monarch Topaz (9 spellpower and 8 int, 8 crit, 8 hit, and 8 haste, respectively) which are orange gems. It is probably best, unless you really need a socket bonus, to stick with spellpower and hit gems and let your gear stats do the rest. You don't really ever need to gem for intellect.
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond is the highest caster dps meta in the game right now, but its requirement (2 blue gems) is a bit odd for mages, and I would argue that it's a better meta for FFB than arcane anyway. The spellpower metas (Ember Slyflare is a good choice) are also good for mages as well.
For FFB spec, Glyph of Improved Scorch, Glyph of Molten Armor, and Glyph of Frostfire are the 3 major glyphs of choice. The new Glyph of Living Bomb is also going to be a top contender, and it's hard to figure out which of the three existing glyphs it gets to replace.
For Arcane, Glyph of Arcane Blast, Glyph of Molten Armor, and Glyph of Arcane Missiles are the glyphs of choice. If you find yourself short on mana often, the Glyph of Mage Armor may be more useful instead of Molten Armor. Glyph of Arcane Power is rather less good now that AP has been nerfed.
Enchant list follows below:
Head: Arcanum of Burning Mysteries
Shoulder: Lesser/Greater Inscription of the Storm
Chest: Super Stats / Powerful Stats
Cloak: Lightweave (if you are a tailor) or Greater Speed. Lightweave is getting massively buffed in 3.1 so it's going to be vastly superior to haste, come the patch.
Bracers: Greater Spellpower or Superior Spellpower.
Gloves: Exceptional Spellpower, Greater Blasting, Precision (20 hit)
Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle
Legs: Sapphire Spellthread
Boots: Icewalker
Weapon: Exceptional Spellpower
vii. Rotations
Frostfire rotation:
First and foremost, you must always keep Imp Scorch up.
Secondly, now that you have a DoT (Living Bomb), you should keep that up as much as you can, also.
Assuming you have the Scorch glyph...
Opener rotation: Scorch->Scorch->Living Bomb->FFB to infinity.
Reapply Scorch and LB as needed. Hot Streak Pyros are more important than reapplication of Living Bomb.
The timing on the Hot Streak Pyro can be played with. It doesn’t have to go off immediately. If it interrupts your rotation, you can defer it until your current cast is finished, or on new targets, apply 2xScorch first so the Pyroblast gets the increased crit effect.
Ignite munching is still a bug, and for anyone paying attention to your logs, it will show up as ignite damage randomly disappearing. Basically, it refers to the incident when fireball/FFB and Pyroblast land and crit at the same time and the ignite damage from FFB is “munched.” To the server, it looks as if FFB and Pyroblast were the same spell because they hit at the same time, so only one spell procs ignite. As Ignite adds up to a fairly nontrivial portion of your overall damage, this is a problem, and with Hot Streak, it happens enough to be noticed. The recommended workaround until Blizzard finds a way to fix this is to defer the Pyroblast until you have first cast a scorch or reapplied Living Bomb. Since scorch has no travel time, it will land before the pyroblast. The edited rotation looks like this…
FFB->FFB->(Hot Streak!)-> Scorch-> Hot Streak Pyro.
On ranged AOE pulls:
Living Bomb-> Flamestrike (full rank)-> Flamestrike (Rank 8)-> Blizzard
Yes, Flamestrike. You always want to pick a Living Bomb target that is not liable to die before the dot ticks to full. The two ranks of Flamestrike are so that the dots stack, but in practice, I find that 6 seconds of casting Flamestrike takes you out of the action for too long, so I only cast the first full-rank one and go straight to Blizzard.
On close up AOE pulls:
Living Bomb-> Dragon’s Breath->Flamestrike-> Cone of Cold-> Blizzard
I do recommend speccing into Blast Wave because it is useful in certain situations; however it is bad in raids and especially on trash AOE due to the knockback effect. It makes tanks incredibly unhappy, for one thing. However, I have found it worth the point spent on it; it is a good spell if you use it well. For example, there may be occasion where a trash slips through and comes straight for you. You can ice block, or if you think you can take it out, which you probably can, you can Frost Nova it in place and finish it off. Or, if you are feeling lucky, you can Blast Wave, knocking it back, then FN it in place, and finish it off. Same concept, more damage. You can also use it to push mobs off healers, to push mobs back towards the tank, or to control where adds go when you are put into a kiting role.
Arcane Rotation:
The optimal rotation is still being debated, and in a sense, it is hard to pin down because a lot of it will be situational.
Update (TL;DR version): With the new change to the Arcane Missiles glyph, and the nerfed coefficient on Arcane Barrage, the new optimal rotation is Arcane Blast x3->Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage OR Arcane Barrage if no Missile Barrage. It is recommended to use the rotation Arcane Blast x1-> Arcane Missiles-> Repeat for a mana-conservation rotation instead.
Full math (from EJ):
Nice, huh? What does it mean?
First, it means that ABx3->Missile Barrage is the best dps at an insane mana inefficiency.
Secondly, it means that ABx3->MB if procced or ABarr otherwise is a close second in dps at better mana efficiency (over longer periods of time. The first rotation is never going to be possible because Missile Barrage will never have 100% uptime). Thus, the second rotation is the best dps possible. Also, it is possible to increase the mana efficiency dramatically if you cut one AB buildup off the rotation.
Thirdly, it means that ABx3->AM is the one that best balances dps and mana efficiency.
Basically, think of it this way. With FFB, you have one dps speed. With arcane, you have 3 -- fast, medium, and slow.
Fast burn-> (Arcane Power/Bloodlust) 3AB->ABarr | Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage-> repeat. Retardedly mana inefficient, cannot be sustained for very long.
Medium burn-> Above rotation without Arcane Power/Bloodlust, or 2AB->ABarr | Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage-> repeat
Slow burn-> 1AB->ABarr | Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage-> repeat. Incredibly mana efficient, you could do this all day.
Generally, it is best to save AP for Bloodlust time, and use your own Icy Veins in another burn cycle when BL is down. Nerfed Arcane Barrage is no longer worth casting except to clear the AB buildup, or on the move. You can dynamically switch from Fast Burn to Medium Burn when your mana supply is drying up, or even to Slow Burn if you absolutely are running bone dry and it's another 30 seconds or so to mana gem/evocate.
A good use for POM is to apply it at the start of the 3xAB spam, to hasten the first one and apply the damage bonus more quickly. Very good when you need to apply AB on the move.
Use Arcane Power when you would have used Combustion as FFB. It will drain your mana fairly quickly though, so beware.
Also, Icy Veins syncs up well with the 2-min cooldown of Evocate, allowing you to use Icy Veins, and then Evocate afterwards.
On AOE pulls: Flamestrike->Blizzard still works well on ranged pulls. On closeup AOE pulls, you're stuck with Blizzard and Arcane Explosion. Have fun.
A Note on Mirror Image:
Mirror Image is kind of interesting. For one thing, you have no control over what they hit, so they might be off firing frostbolts at Faerlina’s adds, for example, when you don’t want them to. They are hyper-aggressive and completely oblivious to whatever you are doing. They also randomly sheep things, and they have polymorph spells that you don’t. On the other hand, they can be used to soak up boss debuffs that may save another raid member from having to take them. They can be used to even out the streaky dps of FFB spec, but on a lot of bosses they will be one-shotted by AOE damage, so use them early. Play around with the timing a bit. Your mileage may vary.
viii. Consumables
Flask of the Frost Wyrm (+125 SP for 2 hours) is going to be the flask of choice.
You can supplement this with Firecracker Salmon/Tender Shoveltusk Steak (+46 SP, 40 stam), or a Great Feast. There is also a bunch of crit/haste food available.
There is also Snapper Extreme/Worg Tartare if you need 40 extra hit.
ix. Recommended Addons
Decursive
Omen
Recount
Quartz
DoTimer
Autobar
Boss Mods
Decursive is a must-have for any class that can…decurse.
The threat library has been overhauled and now Omen works even for people that don’t have Omen. Even with the new tank threat buffs, you will sometimes still pull agro, so you need to know where you stand.
Pure dps classes love dps meters. But Recount is more useful for the other information it tracks – deaths and how, dispels per fight, who’s healing who, who’s hitting what, who’s taking damage from what, and what spells you’re using and how often they hit/crit/miss. Think of it as a performance evaluator, not an epeen meter (that rogue that lags on trash pulls is totally capable of spanking your butt on boss fights – where it really matters). If you find Recount is too performance intensive, Wow Web Stats will accomplish the same thing.
Quartz is a nice addition for anyone with a cast bar.
DoTimer is useful to track your Living Bomb and Scorch uptimes.
Autobar isn’t really necessary, but it’s very useful. It dynamically changes based on your abilites and bag contents, and can be used to quickly reach all those things you need in the course of a raid, such as consumables, mana strudels, healthstones, mana pots, mana gems, trinkets, even pets.
i. Introduction – Mages in PVE
ii. PVE Specs, Arcane Blast, Frostfire Bolt
iii. Talents and Builds
iv. Comparative Mage Stats
v. Gearing for Raids
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
vii. Rotations
viii. Consumables
ix. Recommended Addons
i. Introduction – Mages in PVE
Mages, like warlocks, hunters, and rogues, have only one function – to do damage. Dual spec system will not allow mages to slip comfortably into a secondary function in PVE, and the need for CC has been largely negated by the ease of AOE tanking. Thus, it is crucial that good mages learn their primary role well.
Currently, the mage class is in a good state when it comes to competitive PVE dps. The pressure, therefore, is shifted into the individual, not the class designers, to perform up to their full capacity. Luckily, playing a mage is fairly simple.
(I am not going to really discuss the mage class and/or mage dps in comparison with other classes, except to say that if you only play classes because they are perceived to be OP, then you should play a game where you are guaranteed to win. Due to Blizzard still changing class mechanics around a lot, expect that there will be no clear-cut winner in the dps race for quite a while. In the meantime, there is plenty of room for skill and gear and close the gaps.)
This guide will concentrate on the two primary PVE specs: frostfire and arcane. I will not discuss frost as it is not considered as of 3.0.8 to be a competitive PVE damage spec.
For the math behind the theory, you should look at ElitistJerks as I will not reproduce it here.
ii. PVE Specs, Frostfire Bolt, and Arcane Blast
All information in this guide assumes level 80.
At the start of Wrath, Frostfire spec (often abbreviated as FFB for Frostfire Bolt) was the highest practical dps spec. There was some early theorycrafting done where pure fire still slightly outdamaged FFB, but only in the event that an arcane mage was present in the raid as a “slow slave” – to continuously Slow the target to apply the Torment the Weak debuff. This is obviously not something everyone can come to depend on.
With patch 3.0.8, deep Arcane becomes a strong PVE competitor, although only time will tell if it is truly a superior dps spec than Frostfire. Many mages that switched from FFB to Arcane with 3.0.8 report that it is an immediate dps increase over FFB, anywhere from +500-800 dps just from respeccing. It seems that Arcane is finally an extremely viable and competitive alternative to FFB. Many mages may prefer to play as Arcane because it is a more dynamic and “fun” playstyle. Arcane is also a good PVP spec for Wintergrasp and outdoor battlegrounds, but I will not cover the Arcane PVP spec here.
Currently, Frost falls behind the other two trees in damage, and although it continues to be a strong spec for survivability and for leveling, its endgame performance is lacking. There are plans to massively buff Frost dps for PVE as well as grant the water elemental the Replenishment ability (it is Blizzard's intention to make all three mage trees equally good for PVE. Whether this will actually pan out in practice is another story). It is still a good arena build, but since this is a PVE guide I won’t discuss PVP specs here.
A Word on Playstyle: Arcane vs. Frostfire
Arcane plays very differently from fire/frost or frostfire. As frostfire, your dps is limited by two things: cast time and crits. As Arcane, your dps is limited by your mana pool. As frostfire, you are juggling dots, cooldowns/trinkets, and procs. As Arcane, you are also juggling cooldowns and procs (no dots; you’re not a warlock), but now you must actively practice mana management. You can go balls to the wall until your mana bar goes limp, or you can concentrate on maximizing DPM (Damage Per Mana) for sustainable dps. Therefore, playing as Arcane requires the mage to have a sense of timing instead of simply applying a rotation over and over.
That's very nice on paper, but how do the two raid mage specs compare in practice?
Arcane does require a lot more micromanaging of your mana regen mechanics. Even with 3 mana gem charges, a 2-min Evocate, and one mana pot per fight, you will spend a lot of time staring at your mana bar trying to figure out exactly when the best time to recharge will be. And God help you if you are interrupted during Evocating. If you can talk a druid into Innervating you, so much the better, but with the new changes to spirit-based regen and mana management techniques, I wouldn't count on it too often.
Also, you don't have Dragon's Breath or Blast Wave, which are actually very nice talents in certain situations.
In return, you get some added mobility, a spellpower boost, and an extra 3% hit from talents, which works out to about ~80 hit that you don't need to gem/gear/enchant for.
FFB sees massive, massive crits -- with 35% crit and about 1730 spellpower, Frostfire Bolts hit for 12k. That's still nothing compared to the 14-15k Arcane Barrage crits I've been getting with Arcane Power up, but Arcane Power comes at a pretty heavy price. In the new patch, Arcane Power's mana cost will be reduced to 10%, as will the damage bonus.
Let’s now examine the two main nukes of the FFB and Arcane specs.
Frostfire Bolt: The tooltip for FFB is confusing, if you want to know exactly how your frost and fire talents interact with this spell, you may look at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=73FC37BB82E923B642094B4BF99785AE.app27_03?topicId=12661303549&sid=1. Basically, talents that refer to “fire” or “frost” spells affect FFB, talents that refer to specific fire/frost spells, such as fireball, do not affect FFB. If you are spell-locked while casting FFB, you will be locked out of both the fire and frost trees.
It does “frostfire damage,” which is a completely different type of damage from either fire or frost. It did both types of damage in Beta; not anymore. If a target happens to be immune to fire or frost, it will deal the other school of damage instead. It used to double-dip from the Frost talent Elemental Precision, where FFB received 6% spell hit instead of 3%. After Patch 3.0.8, this will no longer be the case and FFB will receive 3% as is intended. It has a 3-second cast time, which is not alterable with talents, only with haste.
Arcane Blast: Patch 3.0.8 changed this spell from its former unplayable version. Now, it does the following: Each time you cast Arcane Blast, the damage of all Arcane spells is increased by 15% and mana cost of Arcane Blast is increased by 200%. Effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 10 sec or until any Arcane damage spell except Arcane Blast is cast.
What this means is that as you chain Arcane Blast, each successive Arcane Blast will receive 15% more damage. Then, after you have cast 3 Arcane Blast, your next arcane spell will receive the damage bonus, at which point the damage buff will then wear off. If you do not want to incur the increased mana cost of Arcane Blast, you only cast one Arcane Blast, then a different arcane spell, then start over.
You can already see how the arcane playstyle will depend on mana. We will cover rotations later.
iii. Talents and Builds
Frostfire: The FFB raid spec is heavily fire-based. Cornerstone talents include:
Ignite
Flame Throwing (does not affect FFB but affects Scorch, Fire Blast, Pyroblast, and Living Bomb)
Pyroblast
Burning Soul
Improved Scorch
Master of Elements
Playing with Fire
Critical Mass
Fire Power
Combustion
Pyromaniac
Empowered Fire
Hot Streak
Living Bomb
Precision
Ice Shards
Piercing Ice
Icy Veins (in 3.0.8, FFB will benefit from the pushback protection in this spell).
With these talents, Frostfire Bolt receives a 315% critical bonus. In addition, crits proc Ignite, mana return with Master of Elements, and has a chance to proc Hot Streak.
What this means, in practice, is that the damage output is a lot streakier than playing as frost or playing as fireball/Fire. FFB still hits for about the same as fireball, but it crits for a lot more.
For comparison, here is my current build: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/mage/talents.html?tal=00000000000000000000000000000000550020123033310531203013512033030311030000000000000000
Notes: A little off from the cookie cutter single-target dps spec. I picked up Blast Wave because I like it. I don’t have Improved Fire Blast. I don’t have Incinerate. I don’t have World in Flames, which I actually wanted but couldn’t afford.
Arcane: Cornerstone talents include:
Arcane Focus
Arcane Concentration
Spell Impact
Arcane Meditation
Torment the Weak
Arcane Mind
Presence of Mind
Arcane Instability
Arcane Potency
Arcane Power
Arcane Empowerment
Arcane Floes
Mind Mastery
Missile Barrage
Netherwind Presence
Spell Power
Arcane Barrage
This is an example of an Arcane build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?mage=03000000000000000000000000002032030010000000000000000000230025230100330150323102505321&glyph=012004000000
Note that it has both Arcane Focus and Precision. Arcane is the only PVE spec that can gain 6% hit from talents instead of 3%. It also is the only mage spec that may benefit from spirit gear. The 2 points in Student of the Mind may be used instead on Magic Absorption, which trades off more mana regen in combat for some survivability. Magic Absorption is primarily a PVP talent, but I can see a good case being made for having it in PVE as well. It will depend, again, on how good your mana pool is. Also, this build does not include Slow as many bosses are immune to the effect. Torment the Weak, being that it now works off of other slowing effects such as Thunderclap, may still be useful enough to pick up even without having Slow, but I could see a good case being made for picking up Slow also.
iv. Comparative Mage Stats
Generally: Hit (until capped) >> Spellpower >> Crit/Haste
For Frostfire, assuming you have 3 points in Precision (and you should until your gear is good enough to move points away), you need 368 hit to cap your frost and fire spells, or 289 with a shadow priest or moonkin in the raid. For Arcane, assuming you have 3 points in both Arcane Focus and Precision, you need 289 to hit cap your arcane spells, or 210 with a shadow priest or moonkin.
Spellpower is fairly self-explanatory. Arcane mages gain 15% more SP with their Intellect. You can play around with the relative values of haste and crit. For Frostfire, obviously more of both is better, but since FFB shows remarkable returns with crit, I tend to value crit more highly than haste until you have 30% crit or so. Since haste is the only way to reduce the cast time of FFB, it is obviously also important. Luckily, a lot of caster gear comes with both.
Arcane gear isn't exactly the same as FFB gear, you need more haste and more Intellect than a typical FFB gearset has. Haste is far more valuable to an arcane mage than an FBB mage, and crit is less important. I typically run with 2 FFB mages in my raid, with about equal gear as me. My arcane set has about 8% less crit and 100 more haste than my FFB set. I do a lot more dps than they do, and my main nuke (AB) crits about as much as their main nuke (Frostfire Bolt) does. But a crit in arcane is just bigger numbers. It doesn't return mana, it doesn't proc ignite, it doesn't proc Hot Streak, and it's definitely not 315% of normal damage.
Here is the haste formula:
Haste Rating Required = ((Base Cast Time / Desired Cast Time) - 1) * 32.79 * 100
How much haste is required to get FFB down to 2.5 seconds?
A lot. Haste scales negatively as you acquire more of it. In the neighborhood of 330 or so haste, FFB will be 2.7 seconds, which is actually very usable.
Because of the way itemization works, generally a piece with two or three different stats is better for mages than a piece with slightly more of only one or two stats. For example, a cape with 30 crit and 50 spellpower is better than a cape with 60 spellpower only. Generally. Your mileage may vary.
v. Gearing for Raids
If you really need hit, the Ebonweave set is a possibility, but in general the tailoring pieces are not as good as they were in TBC even for beginning raiders. There is a good beginner guide available here: http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/01/10/arcane-brilliance-gearing-your-mage-up-for-naxx/.
The best indicator of your readiness for Naxx is your dps, not your gear. You can check it by practicing your rotation on a boss training dummy for a moment of two. If you can sustain 1800-2000 dps, you are probably ready.
Once your gear gets better, the 2-piece and 4-piece mage T7 bonus is actually very good, in comparison with older mage sets.
What does an example of a high level mage set look like?
Head: Gothik's Cowl. Better than Faerlina's Madness if you don't need the hit.
Neck: Cosmic Lights from Heroic Sapphiron
Shoulder: Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads.
Cloak: Shroud of Luminosity from heroic Maexxna.
Chest: Gown of the Spell-Weaver from Malygos-10.
Wrist: Bindings of the Expansive Mind from Razuvious-25.
Gloves: T7.5 piece
Belt: Cincture of Polarity, although Plush Sash of Guzbah is fairly comparable
Legs: Leggings of Atrophy if you don't mind losing the gem slots of the T7.5
Boots: Boots of Impetuous Ideals - Naxx25 trash drop
Weapon: Turning Tide - Heroic Kel
Offhand: Surplus Limb from heroic Patchwerk, only real upgrade from Ward of the Violet Citadel
Wand: Gemmed Wand of the Nerubians - heroic Anub'rekan
vi. Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants
You’ll probably be gemming for hit a lot of the time (Rigid Autumn’s Glow). The Runed Scarlet Ruby is the spellpower gem, which is rather expensive since it requires Kirin Tor exalted to cut. Then there is Luminous, Potent, Veiled, and Reckless Monarch Topaz (9 spellpower and 8 int, 8 crit, 8 hit, and 8 haste, respectively) which are orange gems. It is probably best, unless you really need a socket bonus, to stick with spellpower and hit gems and let your gear stats do the rest. You don't really ever need to gem for intellect.
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond is the highest caster dps meta in the game right now, but its requirement (2 blue gems) is a bit odd for mages, and I would argue that it's a better meta for FFB than arcane anyway. The spellpower metas (Ember Slyflare is a good choice) are also good for mages as well.
For FFB spec, Glyph of Improved Scorch, Glyph of Molten Armor, and Glyph of Frostfire are the 3 major glyphs of choice. The new Glyph of Living Bomb is also going to be a top contender, and it's hard to figure out which of the three existing glyphs it gets to replace.
For Arcane, Glyph of Arcane Blast, Glyph of Molten Armor, and Glyph of Arcane Missiles are the glyphs of choice. If you find yourself short on mana often, the Glyph of Mage Armor may be more useful instead of Molten Armor. Glyph of Arcane Power is rather less good now that AP has been nerfed.
Enchant list follows below:
Head: Arcanum of Burning Mysteries
Shoulder: Lesser/Greater Inscription of the Storm
Chest: Super Stats / Powerful Stats
Cloak: Lightweave (if you are a tailor) or Greater Speed. Lightweave is getting massively buffed in 3.1 so it's going to be vastly superior to haste, come the patch.
Bracers: Greater Spellpower or Superior Spellpower.
Gloves: Exceptional Spellpower, Greater Blasting, Precision (20 hit)
Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle
Legs: Sapphire Spellthread
Boots: Icewalker
Weapon: Exceptional Spellpower
vii. Rotations
Frostfire rotation:
First and foremost, you must always keep Imp Scorch up.
Secondly, now that you have a DoT (Living Bomb), you should keep that up as much as you can, also.
Assuming you have the Scorch glyph...
Opener rotation: Scorch->Scorch->Living Bomb->FFB to infinity.
Reapply Scorch and LB as needed. Hot Streak Pyros are more important than reapplication of Living Bomb.
The timing on the Hot Streak Pyro can be played with. It doesn’t have to go off immediately. If it interrupts your rotation, you can defer it until your current cast is finished, or on new targets, apply 2xScorch first so the Pyroblast gets the increased crit effect.
Ignite munching is still a bug, and for anyone paying attention to your logs, it will show up as ignite damage randomly disappearing. Basically, it refers to the incident when fireball/FFB and Pyroblast land and crit at the same time and the ignite damage from FFB is “munched.” To the server, it looks as if FFB and Pyroblast were the same spell because they hit at the same time, so only one spell procs ignite. As Ignite adds up to a fairly nontrivial portion of your overall damage, this is a problem, and with Hot Streak, it happens enough to be noticed. The recommended workaround until Blizzard finds a way to fix this is to defer the Pyroblast until you have first cast a scorch or reapplied Living Bomb. Since scorch has no travel time, it will land before the pyroblast. The edited rotation looks like this…
FFB->FFB->(Hot Streak!)-> Scorch-> Hot Streak Pyro.
On ranged AOE pulls:
Living Bomb-> Flamestrike (full rank)-> Flamestrike (Rank 8)-> Blizzard
Yes, Flamestrike. You always want to pick a Living Bomb target that is not liable to die before the dot ticks to full. The two ranks of Flamestrike are so that the dots stack, but in practice, I find that 6 seconds of casting Flamestrike takes you out of the action for too long, so I only cast the first full-rank one and go straight to Blizzard.
On close up AOE pulls:
Living Bomb-> Dragon’s Breath->Flamestrike-> Cone of Cold-> Blizzard
I do recommend speccing into Blast Wave because it is useful in certain situations; however it is bad in raids and especially on trash AOE due to the knockback effect. It makes tanks incredibly unhappy, for one thing. However, I have found it worth the point spent on it; it is a good spell if you use it well. For example, there may be occasion where a trash slips through and comes straight for you. You can ice block, or if you think you can take it out, which you probably can, you can Frost Nova it in place and finish it off. Or, if you are feeling lucky, you can Blast Wave, knocking it back, then FN it in place, and finish it off. Same concept, more damage. You can also use it to push mobs off healers, to push mobs back towards the tank, or to control where adds go when you are put into a kiting role.
Arcane Rotation:
The optimal rotation is still being debated, and in a sense, it is hard to pin down because a lot of it will be situational.
Update (TL;DR version): With the new change to the Arcane Missiles glyph, and the nerfed coefficient on Arcane Barrage, the new optimal rotation is Arcane Blast x3->Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage OR Arcane Barrage if no Missile Barrage. It is recommended to use the rotation Arcane Blast x1-> Arcane Missiles-> Repeat for a mana-conservation rotation instead.
Full math (from EJ):
| cycle | dps | mps | dpm | dpm tradeoff (next cycle) | dpm tradeoff (cycle 2) | general use | note |
| AB3+ [mbarr] | 5495.957 | 387.9541 | 14.17 | -1.85 | mana dump / during AP | cast mbarr only at 3 stack | |
| AB AB AB ([mbarr] or abarr) | 5132.355 | 190.8791 | 26.89 | 1.85 | main cycle / during AP | ||
| AB AB AB AM | 5070.111 | 157.7089 | 32.15 | 1.88 | 1.88 | main cycle / during AP | |
| AB AB ([mbarr] or AB AM) | 5031.662 | 146.4452 | 34.36 | 3.41 | 2.27 | main cycle | |
| AB ([AB mbarr] or abarr) | 4760.778 | 87.75334 | 54.25 | 4.62 | 3.60 | mana saving | * see note below |
| AB ([mbarr] or abarr) | 4677.5 | 74.82857 | 62.51 | 6.44 | 3.92 | mana saving | * see note below |
| AB AM | 4184.583 | 32.69562 | 127.99 | 11.71 | 5.99 | mana saving |
Nice, huh? What does it mean?
First, it means that ABx3->Missile Barrage is the best dps at an insane mana inefficiency.
Secondly, it means that ABx3->MB if procced or ABarr otherwise is a close second in dps at better mana efficiency (over longer periods of time. The first rotation is never going to be possible because Missile Barrage will never have 100% uptime). Thus, the second rotation is the best dps possible. Also, it is possible to increase the mana efficiency dramatically if you cut one AB buildup off the rotation.
Thirdly, it means that ABx3->AM is the one that best balances dps and mana efficiency.
Basically, think of it this way. With FFB, you have one dps speed. With arcane, you have 3 -- fast, medium, and slow.
Fast burn-> (Arcane Power/Bloodlust) 3AB->ABarr | Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage-> repeat. Retardedly mana inefficient, cannot be sustained for very long.
Medium burn-> Above rotation without Arcane Power/Bloodlust, or 2AB->ABarr | Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage-> repeat
Slow burn-> 1AB->ABarr | Arcane Missiles if Missile Barrage-> repeat. Incredibly mana efficient, you could do this all day.
Generally, it is best to save AP for Bloodlust time, and use your own Icy Veins in another burn cycle when BL is down. Nerfed Arcane Barrage is no longer worth casting except to clear the AB buildup, or on the move. You can dynamically switch from Fast Burn to Medium Burn when your mana supply is drying up, or even to Slow Burn if you absolutely are running bone dry and it's another 30 seconds or so to mana gem/evocate.
A good use for POM is to apply it at the start of the 3xAB spam, to hasten the first one and apply the damage bonus more quickly. Very good when you need to apply AB on the move.
Use Arcane Power when you would have used Combustion as FFB. It will drain your mana fairly quickly though, so beware.
Also, Icy Veins syncs up well with the 2-min cooldown of Evocate, allowing you to use Icy Veins, and then Evocate afterwards.
On AOE pulls: Flamestrike->Blizzard still works well on ranged pulls. On closeup AOE pulls, you're stuck with Blizzard and Arcane Explosion. Have fun.
A Note on Mirror Image:
Mirror Image is kind of interesting. For one thing, you have no control over what they hit, so they might be off firing frostbolts at Faerlina’s adds, for example, when you don’t want them to. They are hyper-aggressive and completely oblivious to whatever you are doing. They also randomly sheep things, and they have polymorph spells that you don’t. On the other hand, they can be used to soak up boss debuffs that may save another raid member from having to take them. They can be used to even out the streaky dps of FFB spec, but on a lot of bosses they will be one-shotted by AOE damage, so use them early. Play around with the timing a bit. Your mileage may vary.
viii. Consumables
Flask of the Frost Wyrm (+125 SP for 2 hours) is going to be the flask of choice.
You can supplement this with Firecracker Salmon/Tender Shoveltusk Steak (+46 SP, 40 stam), or a Great Feast. There is also a bunch of crit/haste food available.
There is also Snapper Extreme/Worg Tartare if you need 40 extra hit.
ix. Recommended Addons
Decursive
Omen
Recount
Quartz
DoTimer
Autobar
Boss Mods
Decursive is a must-have for any class that can…decurse.
The threat library has been overhauled and now Omen works even for people that don’t have Omen. Even with the new tank threat buffs, you will sometimes still pull agro, so you need to know where you stand.
Pure dps classes love dps meters. But Recount is more useful for the other information it tracks – deaths and how, dispels per fight, who’s healing who, who’s hitting what, who’s taking damage from what, and what spells you’re using and how often they hit/crit/miss. Think of it as a performance evaluator, not an epeen meter (that rogue that lags on trash pulls is totally capable of spanking your butt on boss fights – where it really matters). If you find Recount is too performance intensive, Wow Web Stats will accomplish the same thing.
Quartz is a nice addition for anyone with a cast bar.
DoTimer is useful to track your Living Bomb and Scorch uptimes.
Autobar isn’t really necessary, but it’s very useful. It dynamically changes based on your abilites and bag contents, and can be used to quickly reach all those things you need in the course of a raid, such as consumables, mana strudels, healthstones, mana pots, mana gems, trinkets, even pets.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The nerfbat smiles at us all, and all a man can do is smile back.
We're WoW players. We've been around a long time. We've seen Tier sets that pigeonhole hybrid classes into one (healing) role. We've seen shadow priests used as healers with no itemization until Blackwing Lair and beyond. We've seen all raiding mages forced to spec a certain way until BWL and beyond. We've seen a pally class where the supposedly strongest single target healer in the game only had two heals in their entire repertoire and a seal/judgement system that, while central to class mechanics, had nothing to do with them. We've seen druids forced into subpar healing roles, two entire trees more or less ridiculed. We've seen warlocks with subpar dps and nothing to be done about it. We've seen raids where if you wanted to tank, you rolled a warrior, end of story.
And still, people played the game. Those shadow priests, holy pallies, prot pallies, ret pallies, moonkins, feral druids, fire mages, fury warriors, destro locks, etc....soldiered on. And today, they have more options to play their toon the way they want to. You want to dps as a paladin? Fine, go to it. You have gear upgrades that actually give you stats you need, that are plate, not leather, not mail. You have a better, more tightly organized tree, making it easier for you to do what you do best. And you have raids that will actually take you as dps without having to be Esotarious, the god-paladin of Argent Dawn.
And still, so many classes complain about their supposed "inbalance" and the lack of love to their trees, to the point where it becomes a game-quitting decision. You all have no idea. You never had it this easy.
Priests, I know that as the only healing class forced to wear cloth, you're at a disadvantage when it comes to gear. Not only do all the other healers have the option to downgrade to cloth, but mages and warlocks and moonkins all want to roll on your shit. Yes, the itemization in Wrath sucks right now for you. I know that Circle of Healing is getting a cooldown soon, possibly making the Holy tree less desirable. Yes, I know that Rapture in the Disc tree is currently bugged so that it's a hard tree to play if you don't have the mana regen for it. Yes, I know that you cannot dispel poisons so a lot of heroic instances are hard for you to heal. Yes, I know that the complexity of the shadow rotation has increased, and that you might find yourself out-dpsed on the meters, at least until you hit 75 and then and start spamming Mind Sear to inflate your dps like all the other classes that have AOE. Yes, I know that Hymn of Hope is kind of stupid and that Dispersion doesn't seem like a worthy 51-point talent.
Is this enough to quit the game over?
Well, I don't know, you tell me. Are you the kind of person who only does something if it's easy?
Why don't you talk to holy pallies, who sat by and watched while ret got massively buffed, while gameplay for them stayed essentially the same (and let's not even get into the prot pallies that left the class in disgust because of the prot warrior buff. If you're a prot pally who thinks the spec is worthless now, then yes, you probably should quit, and good riddance). Or to resto druids, who throughout all of Burning Crusade dealt with their hots getting overriden in higher level raids, to the point where Nihilum's druid class leader complained that restos couldn't get a raid spot in Sunwell level content?
You have an entirely overhauled new tree designed to be an even better main tank healer than holy paladins, who have long since filled that role. Discipline is actually a worthwhile tree now! And shadow dps seems fine at level 80. Yes, it's complex. So is being a death knight. Does that mean it's any less rewarding to play? Shouldn't that make it more so?
There will always be a class that can do certain things better than you. You cannot do everything best, and if you can, you probably should be nerfed. Instead of despairing over the differences, and whining about them every chance you get, why don't you instead re-evaulate what you do have, and try to find ways to use them better?
Some people don't play their class because it's OP. They play them because they enjoy it, and they use skill to cover their weak areas, realizing that a scenario that may be difficult for them may be easier for someone else -- but that it works both ways. Blizzard is in a tuning stage right now and the round of nerfs and buffs will continue for a little while longer. If you wring your hands in despair and reach for the cancel account page every time they change something, or compare every little difference to what used to be and what others have, then maybe it's best that you quit, because frankly I worry about your mental stability.
I can understand leaving the game for other reasons -- it's not fun anymore, you're moving on, etc. But quitting because of a sense of inferiority is just silly. It's a game. It's not like life, where you're born with an identity and stuck with it forever. Make the best of what you have, reroll, or quit.
This goes for everyone, not just priests. Ret paladins, hunters -- you knew it was coming. I guess you'll actually have to be skilled and geared instead of just OP now. Isn't that a novel concept? Maybe you should feel what it's like to be a mage in Burning Crusade, knowing that past Karazhan you'll always be considered an inferior dps class. And we're still here. Well, some of us are. We stuck with it because we enjoyed playing it and we had faith in our ability to be of some service to the raid even if we can't sneak off with Number One on the charts all the time. And let's not even go into the PVP aspect of it...
Perhaps, someday, Blizzard will tune the game perfectly so that all classes are unique, yet equally viable in all situations. Until that day comes, get used to the roller coaster.
And still, people played the game. Those shadow priests, holy pallies, prot pallies, ret pallies, moonkins, feral druids, fire mages, fury warriors, destro locks, etc....soldiered on. And today, they have more options to play their toon the way they want to. You want to dps as a paladin? Fine, go to it. You have gear upgrades that actually give you stats you need, that are plate, not leather, not mail. You have a better, more tightly organized tree, making it easier for you to do what you do best. And you have raids that will actually take you as dps without having to be Esotarious, the god-paladin of Argent Dawn.
And still, so many classes complain about their supposed "inbalance" and the lack of love to their trees, to the point where it becomes a game-quitting decision. You all have no idea. You never had it this easy.
Priests, I know that as the only healing class forced to wear cloth, you're at a disadvantage when it comes to gear. Not only do all the other healers have the option to downgrade to cloth, but mages and warlocks and moonkins all want to roll on your shit. Yes, the itemization in Wrath sucks right now for you. I know that Circle of Healing is getting a cooldown soon, possibly making the Holy tree less desirable. Yes, I know that Rapture in the Disc tree is currently bugged so that it's a hard tree to play if you don't have the mana regen for it. Yes, I know that you cannot dispel poisons so a lot of heroic instances are hard for you to heal. Yes, I know that the complexity of the shadow rotation has increased, and that you might find yourself out-dpsed on the meters, at least until you hit 75 and then and start spamming Mind Sear to inflate your dps like all the other classes that have AOE. Yes, I know that Hymn of Hope is kind of stupid and that Dispersion doesn't seem like a worthy 51-point talent.
Is this enough to quit the game over?
Well, I don't know, you tell me. Are you the kind of person who only does something if it's easy?
Why don't you talk to holy pallies, who sat by and watched while ret got massively buffed, while gameplay for them stayed essentially the same (and let's not even get into the prot pallies that left the class in disgust because of the prot warrior buff. If you're a prot pally who thinks the spec is worthless now, then yes, you probably should quit, and good riddance). Or to resto druids, who throughout all of Burning Crusade dealt with their hots getting overriden in higher level raids, to the point where Nihilum's druid class leader complained that restos couldn't get a raid spot in Sunwell level content?
You have an entirely overhauled new tree designed to be an even better main tank healer than holy paladins, who have long since filled that role. Discipline is actually a worthwhile tree now! And shadow dps seems fine at level 80. Yes, it's complex. So is being a death knight. Does that mean it's any less rewarding to play? Shouldn't that make it more so?
There will always be a class that can do certain things better than you. You cannot do everything best, and if you can, you probably should be nerfed. Instead of despairing over the differences, and whining about them every chance you get, why don't you instead re-evaulate what you do have, and try to find ways to use them better?
Some people don't play their class because it's OP. They play them because they enjoy it, and they use skill to cover their weak areas, realizing that a scenario that may be difficult for them may be easier for someone else -- but that it works both ways. Blizzard is in a tuning stage right now and the round of nerfs and buffs will continue for a little while longer. If you wring your hands in despair and reach for the cancel account page every time they change something, or compare every little difference to what used to be and what others have, then maybe it's best that you quit, because frankly I worry about your mental stability.
I can understand leaving the game for other reasons -- it's not fun anymore, you're moving on, etc. But quitting because of a sense of inferiority is just silly. It's a game. It's not like life, where you're born with an identity and stuck with it forever. Make the best of what you have, reroll, or quit.
This goes for everyone, not just priests. Ret paladins, hunters -- you knew it was coming. I guess you'll actually have to be skilled and geared instead of just OP now. Isn't that a novel concept? Maybe you should feel what it's like to be a mage in Burning Crusade, knowing that past Karazhan you'll always be considered an inferior dps class. And we're still here. Well, some of us are. We stuck with it because we enjoyed playing it and we had faith in our ability to be of some service to the raid even if we can't sneak off with Number One on the charts all the time. And let's not even go into the PVP aspect of it...
Perhaps, someday, Blizzard will tune the game perfectly so that all classes are unique, yet equally viable in all situations. Until that day comes, get used to the roller coaster.
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