/played

Holy (the Tankadin's Alt)

2009-03-19T14:07:00.000-07:00

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

Etiquette

2009-02-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

Of Idiots and Aspects

2009-02-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

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.

Tanking Basics 101: Mitigation and Avoidance

2009-02-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Tree Durid iz 4 Heel

2009-02-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

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

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

If you have the Swiftmend glyph, it will not consume the Rejuvenation effect. Obviously, if you don’t have the glyph, it is best to use Swiftmend when Rejuv is about to expire to maximize the total healing done, but with the glyph you can do it whenever you want. Every fifteen seconds you have an instant cast heal that doesn’t eat a Rejuv charge. Rejuvenation by itself hits for ridiculous amounts, and can be seen as a way to augment the already periodic health buffer of Lifebloom.

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.

You can also just use Lifebloom like you did before 3.1, but it will cost more mana upfront. You can also just cast one Lifebloom, and let it bloom (which basically means you're just using it to buff Nourish, not for its periodic healing) -- probably not recommended unless you have both the glyph and the T7 bonus.

Raid Healing (e.g. Malygos)

Wild Growth
Nourish
(Glyphed) Healing Touch
Rejuvenation/Lifebloom
Swiftmend
Tranquility
Regrowth

Assume that in this situation, main tank healing is assigned to someone else. You are in charge of keeping the raid alive in a situation where everyone takes lots of unpredictable damage (or when everyone just takes lots of damage, such as in his vortex phase).

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 :)

Obviously you won’t be able to do everything, but you can do a lot of things well. The spec section below will provide more detail.

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.

Fire and Ice (and Everything Nice): Mage PVE guide

2009-01-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

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):

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.

The nerfbat smiles at us all, and all a man can do is smile back.

2008-12-10T16:05:00.000-08:00

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.

How to Mage: Heroic Edition

2008-12-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

The mage class is supposed to be a fairly simple class. It's so...basic. You sling spells at things, they blow up and die. Simple.

Well, okay, sometimes you turn things into a penguin. Which you should in heroics, because things hit hard, and tanks get nervous. You might find the setfocus-polymorph macro useful, because it will enable you to keep the sheep target as your focus for easy resheeping. Something like this:

#showtooltip
/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus]Polymorph
/stopmacro [nogroup]

You may have noticed that FFB is really slow. That's too bad, because there's nothing you can really do about that except to stack haste. Now, haste usually comes at the expense of crit, unless you are lucky enough to find a piece with both on it. They're fairly rare, right now. But don't destroy your crit rating that much, because with the FFB fire spec, it procs Hot Streak, which is a very, very nice dps boost. It's even better if you can proc it consistently. Anything from 25-30% crit on fire spells is a pretty good number to aim for, and considering that FFB hits like a truck (it has a crit modifier of 315%, properly talented), most people are saying that crit and haste are equally important for a mage to stack.

Keep your Living Bomb up. Keep your scorches up. Don't neglect your scorch because there will be a lot of situations where FFB is too damn slow to cast before something dies. You don't want to waste that cast, so cast a scorch/fireblast combo instead. It's fast, it's deadly, and it might proc a nice Pyroblast for you to hurl at the next dps target instead. Use with caution, however, as it's a bit of a threat jump.

Use Scorch/Fireblast/Pryoblast on heavy mobility fights, or something will probably smack you down while you're standing there charging your FFB. It's not optimal but it's better than being dead.

You have two spells which can be used to protect yourself or your healer. Dragon's Breath is a daze, Blast Wave is a knockback. Adds eating the healer? Blast Wave them off, the Frost Nova them in place.

Juggle your cooldowns for sustained high dps. You have three or four, depending on your spec -- Combustion for when you want those Hot Streak procs, Mirror Image for some nice extra firepower (also very nice for when the mob throws around random group damage, which sometimes goes to the image instead of a player), Icy Veins for some added quickness, and maybe a trinket or so. Are you going to be AOEing? As in channeling Blizzard? Pop your spell-damage trinket first.

Yes, that hunter next to you is OP. Yes, he's going to be nerfed soon. Watch out, mages. The nerf bat may be coming for you next. But that's ok, because we don't play our mages only when they are OP. We play our mages because we like them, and we are damned good at what we do.

Dear Heroic Healer (who used to be dps)...

2008-12-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

Dear Heroic Healer (who used to be dps),

I know, it's a hard world out there for you. You'd like to do heroics, you like being shadow, or ret, or moonkin, or elemental, because you lawlpwn and know how to play it -- but with the current shortage of healers at level 80, you'll never get into a group if you don't respec and heal. Now, I commend you for your sacrifice. I really do. It's a thankless job, made even more difficult nowadays with mages and warlocks and moonkins wanting to roll on your gear, and warrior tanks scoffing off the idea of CC because they need the rage, or death knights insisting that they can tank but that never use cooldowns and consequently stand there and get two shotted.

But seriously, if you haven't healed since vanilla WoW, and you're still rolling in your Burning Crusade dps epics (with the dps gems still in there, no less), and you don't even know how to spec a healer anymore, you just went through and picked all the talents that said "increase healing" on them...please, don't try to heal a heroic and pretend that it'll all be fine. It won't. Don't act like this instance is impossible just because you can't do it. It's not. Every healing class changed a lot, even over the course of the last few patches. Even people who have been healers for all of Burning Crusade got new talents and spells to play with -- and they, at least, knew that a talent called "pushback protection on healing spells" might well be a useful thing for a healer to have. You are going to walk into that heroic with your 1600 spellpower and 100 mana regen and probably get owned on the first boss. And you're going to find out that it's probably not as simple as you imagined.

My priest lead for MC used to simply tell people to "push the heal button." Unfortunately it's not that one-dimensional anymore (it never was, but if you were a real healer, you would have known that already). There are a lot of things besides pushing the healing button that you have to consider, such as: how do you manage your mana? How do you know when you must keep the individual topped off, or when it is ok to move first or dispel first or HoT them instead? How do you deal with group damage in a situation where you have to move around a lot? When you get silenced a lot? When two or more people are near death, one of which is yourself, in what order do you heal them? Which healing spell do you push so that you get the most bang for your buck? When the crap hits the fan? Will they be the same thing? What happens when you've got an add on you and the tank is preoccupied for the next few minutes with 10 other adds and a boss?

It might be the tank's fault, if he's not defense capped. Or it might be the dps's fault if they really are just not cutting it. But if the tank is dying while you're solo healing him, or the group dies because of unavoidable AOE damage, it's probably not their faults. It's yours.

So yes, former shadow priest still wearing the dps badge legs from the SSO island, who insists that he used Circle of Healing even though Recount shows not a single instance of that spell (are you sure you're not confusing it with Prayer of Healing?), or resto druid with hit gear who doesn't know how to heal more than one target at a time, you should probably run the normal level 80 dungeons and get some actual healing gear. Or at least try to research a good spec first. Because as it is, you're just wasting everyone's time.

With love,
Grim

Make me bad: Mage Edition

2008-12-10T14:34:00.000-08:00

Once again, I find myself in the position of gearing up for raids, but this time there are far fewer crafted items to help me along. The good news is that I seem to be okay to at least start Naxx already, being as the requirements to successfully start it seem to be a lot less stringent than they were to start Karazhan. The bad news is that I have very few ways to upgrade certain slots before raids:

Shoulders: except for the BOE from Naxx, which even if I were lucky enough to see on the AH anytime soon, should easily go into the realm of 5k gold, not too many upgrades. The new enchant for them is from Sons of Hodir, which I will need to grind to put on my crappy, crappy blue.
Legs: Short of H. Halls of Lightning or H. Utgarde Pinnacle -- and we all know how everyone loves doing those -- again, not that many upgrades. I don't like giving up crit for more spellpower when I make absolutely no use of spirit whatsoever.
Bracers: There are some decent ones from H. Oculus, but again, not too many upgrades. I need to put a spellpower enchant on the ones I have. They just seem almost not worth enchanting. I still can't get used to the sight of all these blues.

As for the cloak, I suppose I could get Loremaster of Northrend and craft the epic cloak with no stats, and enchant it with haste. It's really not a terrible idea, I need the money anyway. The headpiece can be upgraded with the engineering googles, but that will take a while.

For raiding I'll probably pick up Flask of the Frost Wyrm and some Succulent Orca Stew. I can hit cap FFB with just 2 gear switches, to cap out the other fire spells might not be possible right now. I'd like to shoot for 1400 spellpower, 30% crit, and 176 haste (which makes my FFB down to a 2.8 second cast).

Rotation is still a little bit up in the air. It will depend on whether I want to respec to get Living Bomb. I'm doing a solid 1.5k in heroics, which seems pretty standard for mages with no raid buffs. In Heroics, I find myself using scorch and fire blast a lot more than I thought I would. Sometimes you just don't have time to cast another FFB, and a Scorch/Fireblast combo is a good way to ensure death for a mob. Of course, ignite doesn't really do much for trash, but it's very good for bosses, or really anything that's up longer than a minute or so.

I'm also using the scorch/fireblast combo on a lot of mobility fights where I don't or can't stand long enough for 3 seconds (the last boss in Nexus, for example). It's suboptimal but better than death. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, it will proc the Hot Streak pyroblast for some extra damage.

To recap:
Enchants: Shoulders, cloak, bracers. New head enchant (might wait until later).
Hit cap: 289 (FFB), 367 (everything else). Soon this will just be a flat 367.
Consumables: Succulent Orca Stew, Flast of the Frost Wyrm.

I need better gems, but I can't afford them right now. Sigh.

One Month Later: Wrath in Review (Part 2)

2008-12-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

Magery at 80

A problem I had with the mage as I leveled was that I wasn't finding that many true upgrades. Not that my gear was exceptional or anything -- but it felt like the pieces I was getting just didn't match up, all the way up to level 80 dungeons. I've been 80 for a bit now, I've run some heroics, gotten 1 piece of emblem loot, and now I'm sitting at about 1300 spellpower, 27% fire crit, and 115 haste. Not too shabby, but not too great either, considering that was completely reachable at level 70 with Sunwell gear.

I dabbled in arcane before Wrath came out, but I leveled frost. It's still the best AOE grinding spec, it's decent for world PVP (although in the first few days, there was an unofficial cease-fire across the leveling zones of Northrend), and it has great survivability, which is key for those new dungeons where no one know what the hell is going on. I did well in damage meters, up until the last few levels before 80. At that point, ret pallies and DKs would pull ahead of me, mostly due to their AOE abilities and my hit rating.

At 75 I went frostfire, but hated it and switched back to frost. At 80, frostfire is much better. A little streaky, for sure, but certainly powerful. I can do a sustained 1500 dps, non-raid buffed, and can burst up to 2300 in certain situations -- and this is in level 80 blues, a few dungeon drops, and 1 emblem loot. Eventually I'd like to be reaching for 30% fire crit, 1500 spellpower, and 300 haste, but that will have to wait. Right now, the mage's progress is being hampered by a serious lack of healers available to do level 80 content.

I haven't seen very many good warlocks at 80, but hunters are completely OP and I hate them with a passion.

Druidism

My resto druid was next in line for a good leveling push, since the mage is going to have a hard time getting into my guild's Naxx run, which is being hampered by lack of healers and willing dps. Honestly, I'm not sure I want to go into Naxx with these OP hunters and DKs bragging about their dps as if it took skill to do. In any case, leveling as resto was easier than I thought, the new spellpower changes make a lot of difference, and I never run out of mana grinding. I never run out of mana healing either, the same stack of 20 waters lasted me for 5 levels. I can also solo elites as resto, it just takes quite a while. But I'm running into my limit of that now -- if the elite can't be rooted, then I have a bit of a problem.

My druid had fairly good gear -- at least BT level -- before Wrath. I've also found not that many upgrades, although she is definitely having an easier time of it than my mage, as I've already replaced a lot of my old world epics. Spellpower went up to about 1150, while my spirit based regen degraded with the level. With the gear changes, it stayed about constant up to 78. Healers are so in demand now that even badly geared ones make out all right -- I was healing Violet Hold (a 4 manned Violet Hold, as it turned out) at 71, Halls of Lightning at 75, and Oculus at 77. Cake.

Incidentally, if you happened to be shadow or dps or something all through Burning Crusade, and you leveled as dps, rolling on healing gear all the way, and suddenly decided to respec healing and jump right into heroics at 80 because you cant find a group willing to take you as dps -- no offense, but screw you. At least try to research a good healing spec instead of just "picking all the talents that have healing" on them. Healers have a hard enough time of it as it is, what with mages and warlocks rolling on their gear, and being difficult to level (sure it's more efficient to level as dps, but someone has to heal your sorry ass in normal dungeons, and I don't see you volunteering for the job, now do I?), we really don't need you coming in and giving us a bad name. Endrant.

Resto is poised to be great healers at 80. All the heavy mobility fights really favor a resto druid style, and fights that give priests and paladins trouble are remarkably easier for me. With the incoming nerf to Circle of Healing, more priests will probably go disc to become tank healers and "mitigators of damage," since deep Holy might not be worth it anymore. Druids and shamans will become group healers, which is fine with me, since Wild Growth is so good now. And I'm really looking forward to getting Nourish, which is like a better version of Flash Heal for the same mana cost.

I did briefly respec my Alliance priest to disc and healed a UK and Nexus, just to try it out. First of all, playing Alliance is so easy compared to Horde -- no one is spamming meters after every pull, huntards are still huntards, not that many people are 80 yet. Discipline is interesting, and in some ways, very counterintuitive, as you've been taught your whole career as a priest not to bubble the tank. A few things to improve on - I should get the glyph of Power World Shield, bind it to something in Clique, and also bind Pain Suppression to something. The biggest downside is the lack of effective group healing abilities, something which these dungeons also heavily favors. But Penance is a great heal, possibly the best in the game, since it is channeled and thus begins immediately, and if they fix Rapture, disc could be very powerful. Currently, however, you have to have pretty good mana regen to pull it off.

At 80 I would like to aim for about 1200 spellpower, 1200 regen on my resto druid. It is becoming desirable to stack both in almost equal amounts now instead of favoring regen exclusively. In terms of how I heal, it hasn't changed that much, but Nourish will completely alter the game.

Playing Paladin

I stayed off the ret bandwagon and stayed prot -- and already generated a few surprised looks from DKs fleeing the paladin to play a "better class." Well, holy paladins might have gotten a bit shafted, but the other two trees seem solid. Lots of changes to protadin tanking. You're using Seal of Vengeance now, judging Light, and you should be rolling in Sanctuary and Improved Devo aura. Always. Unless you undergear the instance, and then you need Kings.

I'm not really seeing much of a threat problem anymore, unlike what all the threads say. And the new Shield Slam will make leveling as prot so much easier, if it comes down to that. Eventually, I'll have to learn the 96969 rotation, which looks something like this:

Prep Seal
Avenger's Shield pull
0.0 Holy Shield (9)
1.5 Hammer of the Righteous (6)
3.0 Judgement (9)
4.5 Shield of Righteousness (6)
6.0 Consecration (9)
7.5 Hammer of the Righteous (6)
9.0 Holy Shield (9)
10.5 Shield of Righteousness (6)
12.0 Judgement (9)
13.5 Hammer of the Righteous (6)
15.0 Consecration (9)
16.5 Shield of Righteousness (6)
18.0 Holy Shield (9) ... and repeat.

Divine Protection for OSHIT situations, enrages, etc, or Lay on Hands for a extra heal on yourself.

One Month Later: Wrath in Review

2008-12-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

Wrath of the Lich King has been out for about a month, so now might be a good time to step back and reflect on all the new things that have happened, and how this game has changed. This will be a two-part series; in this post, I'll talk about the initial impressions of Northrend while leveling, and the follow up will discuss my admittedly limited impression of the end game (classes, specs, itemization, etc).

Leveling

I've leveled to 80 on my mage. Ghostcrawler mentioned that if you already have a level 80, you're pretty hardcore -- I guess that means my guild has a lot of hardcore players, since there's about 14 people that are 80 by now. I took my time with it and did it in about 2 weeks -- and that takes into account the fact that I would switch to my pally or druid in the early levels to tank or heal instances that didn't need dps. Leveling seems much easier than before, the quests are remarkably easier and even fun, in some cases. So easy, in fact, that I've been leveling other toons at the same time, so that now my druid is 78 and my paladin is 72. Pretty soon, I'll have two 80s -- the first person in my guild to accomplish that, but a measly feat compared to the efforts of some others on my server. Within a few days of the Wrath release, an Alliance warrior hit level 80 for the server first, and then a few days later, his Death Knight hit 80 to become the server first 80 Death Knight. I don't know whether to congratulate him or tranq him with an elephant sedative.

Death Knights

I was about 74-75 when the influx of power-leveling death knights hit Northrend, and ever since then we've been plagued (no pun, etc) with death knights of various calibers, all convinced they can solo Elune with only their pet. Some of them are fairly good, most of them are just OP, and a few are just resoundingly bad. It's one of those classes where you could just button mash and do decently on the meters, but the thing that irks me the most about them isn't how OP they are, but how cocky so many of them seem to be. Every last one is convinced that they don't need healing except on bosses (protip: yes, you do) or can pull aggro off the real tank with impunity (protip: no, you can't). I've heard from some DKs that they run into problems at the end game, but we'll see. Right now, the greatest variance between them seems to lie in the skill of the player behind them.

I did make one of my own. I intended just to try out the class a bit and reserve my DK name, but to my surprise, the starting zone quests were really fun and engrossing, the class mechanics interesting, and before I knew it, I was level 60 and in Outlands and trying to run a 5-DK Ramparts just like every other DK in the world. Blizzard really did their best to make them feel special and to give them a real backstory and a purpose in this universe, because it feels like a class that a lot of love and care was lavished on -- more so, maybe, than some other classes that have been around for years! But I want to wait to level it until the death knight craze dies down a bit.

Northrend

I love this continent. I loved Outland, too, because it really felt like a different planet, and was suitably flashy and spacey-looking to capture the imagination, but Northrend is something else entirely. It's got a beautiful, lush, Gothic feel to it, the music is sweeping and epic, and for the most part, the annoyances of questing in Outland, which was already a huge step up from questing in Azeroth, were done away with. A lot of the time, I found myself reading the quest text, getting engrossed in the storyline -- and I've already met the Lich King himself on more than one occasion. He's definitely not shy, like Illidan was.

For the most part, the instances were all really easy. We mostly just zerged every instance up to the level 80 ones, not even really taking time to learn boss strats. Once you start getting to Halls of Lightning, however, your tank's defense rating actually starts to matter, your healer's decaying spirit regen starts to make a difference, and all that hit rating that you can't make up because you are 4 levels lower than that level 81 boss really makes the instances become non-trivial. That's a good thing, on a lot of levels, though. My favorite one so far would probably be Utgarde Pinnacle, both because I've only done it once (once on normal, and once on heroic) and because the fights seem geniunely interesting. There are a lot of heavy mobility fights in these new instances. You didn't really have this in Outland, but in Northrend even normal dungeons emphasize quickness and careful repositioning.

Professions

I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of grind-worthy tailoring recipes this time around -- after getting to 410 (which required an epic amount of frostweave cloth by itself) and making my flying carpet just for kicks, I don't really have an incentive to level tailoring past 420 (and that only to get the cloak recipes, which are only available after achieving Loremaster of Northrend). On the plus side, there are new engineering googles out, and since I'm having trouble replacing my mage's headpiece with a true upgrade, I might just have to slog through and make those. The engineering bike is, right now, a little above my pay grade.

I was going to make my pally's second profession Inscription, but now I'm starting to think that there's no need to have an inscriptor of my own. The most useful thing to have had is an Enchanter, but it's too late to level one from scratch. Cooking also seems to be something that I should have leveled when I had the chance, but there's still time -- my druid can be the herber/alchemist and the cook, my pally can mine, and my mage can produce tailoring greens to be DEed for mats. I guess. Might as well get some use out of it..

...to be continued.

Saving Hyjal, Post-Patch

2008-11-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

My poor guild. After being 5/6 SSC and 1/4 TK for the longest time, we finally set foot into Mount Hyjal after 3.0.2 hit. We've had people that were geared for BT and even fine to start Sunwell, but being "casual" raiding means that you simply don't have the push from below to keep going. Well, with the expansion barely a week away. some people decided they had to see T6 content before we outlevel it again, and so over the course of two nights, we went 5/6 Hyjal. I know it doesn't count, per se, but it's still not a bad haul for people who's never been there before.

I like the instance, actually. If you'you have to clear trash anyway, it might as well be in waves, where the trash comes at a predictable, brisk pace. And none of the bosses, with the exception of Archimonde, really seem that hard. It's also steeped in lore, so I got to see Nordrassil and even took a dip in the Well of Eternity, which is probably the blood elf equivalent of the pilgrimmage to Mecca.

My mage was deep fire and rolling with the Spellfire/Spellstrike set before the patch. I had 1124 damage, 29% crit, and I was hit capped. Even then I could barely pull above 1k dps on most boss fights. Since deep fire became boring post-patch, I respecced frost and swapped into some SSO badge vendor gear. My hit rating took a beating (I always thought it was a silly stat to have to gear for anyway), my crit went down to a paltry 22%, and my spell damage stayed about constant at 1100 even, unbuffed. After properly enchanting my gloves as I was supposed to long ago, I finally settled into a hit rating of 155 -- still 20 something off from the new cap, with 3/3 Elemental Precision.

Pretty big difference. Frost, like fire, is all about using the cooldowns at good times. With fire, you had Combustion, Icy Veins (if you were specced for it), and a trinket to juggle. As frost, you have the elemental, Icy Veins, and trinket. The elemental comes up pretty often overall, with Cold Snap. I was pulling 1.2k - 1.3k easily on boss fights, when I got lucky, and I was even more surprised to see that my crit number on frostbolt was much higher than I expected. I was critting every 2/3 bolts. With numbers like that, I can afford to swap in the Lightning Capacitor over Quagmirran's Eye, which despite being a low level trinket, I still use because I like the haste proc.

I only missed 1% of the time, despite the hit rating-- probably because we had shadow priests and elemental shamans in the raid. My frostbolts go in the region of 4-5k damage each -- no 6k fireballs, but they have a shorter cast time. Overall it makes a big difference, as I was actually doing more dps than another mage who never missed. AOEing is when the frost mage truly shines; despite the fun AOEs in the fire tree, a lot of them require you to be close up to execute, which is never good -- and nothing beats out frost-talented Blizzard (except a talented Seed of Corruption, apparently. Damn those locks). And of course, my general stats went up a lot -- I went from only 8k health to about 10k raid buffed, and 11k mana. This combined with the innate survivability of frost made me a lot more confident that I would live to see the fight's end. I think I could afford to be second instead of first on the damage meters if it meant I had a smaller repair bill :)

Speaking of meters, I wasn't first or second -- averaged over two nights I'd say I came in about 3rd overall and 5th on boss damage alone. Who did I lose to? One warlock (because of SoC), some ret paladins, a hunter, another mage. And that was taking into account some bad lag on my part, a lot of timing mistakes, and some stupid deaths. Overall, I'm quite pleased. It could have been better, but for a first raid I'll gladly accept those numbers.

And I got Nethervoid Cloak to show for my trouble.

Post-Patch: Resto Druid Review

2008-10-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

I'll be honest: I think resto made out very well in this patch. I know some druids (Marilyn from Nihilum, for one) were complaining that they weren't getting raid spots in Sunwell level content pre-patch, but since I hit 70 on my tree, I've been raiding whenever I can, and overall I'd say my performance (as a grossly undergeared healer) was very satisfactory. I measure how well I healed by two things: my overall healing output, and my overhealing output. High on one and low on the other generally means I'm making good use of my spells. I've managed to make a very strong showing, matching the healing of better geared people, just by keeping up my HoTs, being proactive, and using Wild Growth whenever possible.

First of all, being able to root indoors is nice, even though as a healer I rarely bother to do it. That means that Nature's Grasp, which is now baseline and works in all forms, also works indoors, which is very useful in heroics. Now that Healing Touch is castable in tree form, I find myself using it a bit more, but it does make Natural Shapeshifter rather useless -- except that you need it to get to Master Shapeshifter, which is well worth the investment. The only complaint I have about the new talents is that since Tree of Life no longer grants extra spirit, I find myself having less spirit than I'm used to and having to scramble to find it on my gear instead. I'm not too worried about it, since I never seem to run out of mana anyway, but since Improved Tree of Life grants extra healing power based on spirit, it's still a very important stat. I did pick up Living Seed (since Regrowth crits all the time now, it's pretty much a guaranteed application, and works kind of like Prayer of Mending except that it doesn't jump around) and Replenish, but not Gift of the Earthmother. I can see where it would be useful, but I just don't have enough points to go around. I'm hoping that with some haste gear, the lack of this talent won't matter too much. Wild Growth is, definitely, one of the best things about new resto. It heals for about twice as much as Circle of Healing over its full duration; if you can manage to pop it on two or more groups in a raid, I'd think that the days of druid healers bottoming out the meters is a thing of the past.

I did pick up Genesis and Moonglow to balance out some of the lifebloom nerf; with 10 more points I will pick up Nature's Splendor. I'm looking forward to Nourish because we'll be able to pull off "combos" with this spell -- Wild Growth the group then spam Nourish on everyone. For that reason I didn't take the Healing Touch glyph -- I still want a big heal available to me, since Nourish will be the Flash Heal of choice at 80.

Now, if only they would make those form-altering glyph available, I'd be a happy tree. Here's an idea -- make a glyph so that tree form is a green tree instead of a dead, brown one. Or maybe, make it so that the tree slowly turns green as it heals and then goes back to brown if enough time elaspes without a heal. Wouldn't that be cool?

Post-Patch: Tankadin Review

2008-10-29T15:18:00.001-07:00

Reading tankadin forum posts before the patch was like putting out a cigarette in your eye and then eating it. The eye, not the cigarette.

A bit exaggerated, perhaps, but I'm going to stand by it. With the joyous cries of ret paladins in the background, the prot pally community became divided into the "QQ" team and the "Sucks to your QQ" team. The former was convinced that they were losing their AOE tanking niche to warriors, arguing that since warrior mitigation trumped pally mitigation unless the pally had Sanctuary on and the warrior didn't, the era of the Prot Pally was over. The latter pooh-poohed the concerns, saying that come Lich King, they and not their guild warriors would still be main tanks because they were better and the warriors had no interest in tanking. Neither side liked to be relegated to being "specialty" tanks -- you don't spec prot because you want to tank adds, you spec prot because you want to tank bosses, dammit. The issue remained hotly debated up to patch day, and then everyone was running around trying to figure out where all their defense went, and in the end it didn't matter anyway because all the paladins specced ret.

Updated tests done by the maintankadin community found that paladin and warrior mitigation remained comparable at end-game, which was also confirmed by beta testers. Although the concerns of the tankadins were valid, at this point it's beginning to look like a nonissue. There's a huge difference between being the best man for the job and simply being allowed to do the job because there isn't anyone else. However, it's looking as if the new Blizzard design philosophy is to make all tanks equally valid at everything. It's a nice idea, but I have my doubts. Warriors and paladins might be more or less equal, but druid tanks seem to be getting the short end of the stick, with no matching AOE tanking ability. And the role of death knights remains up in the air, since they must have amazing dodge and parry values to make up for their lack of block. We'll see.

Overall, I would have to say that I'm very pleased with the prot changes. For one thing, aggro issues are a thing of the past. I even traded in my spell damage weapon for King's Defender, to help with the damage output of Hammer of the Righteous. I don't really have any strength gear, so with Touched by the Light, my spellpower comes to only 363. No impact on threat at all -- if anything it's far, far better than before. For another thing, I don't have to waste a GCD of my threat rotation on refreshing a seal, now I just pop one at the start of every fight. Lastly, I've a new spell to work into my threat rotation, which at the moment isn't so much a rotation as simply mashing the buttons as soon as their cooldowns are up.

Improved Devo Aura is a nice welcome change, and I anticipate that it will become the prot pally's aura of choice. I've been putting up such amazing damage numbers with Ret aura, though, that most of the time I still leave that on. Its damage has been increased and now scales with your spellpower. I discovered this quite by accident when I was dueling a rogue. He was used to simply out-damaging me, but I won the first duel easily. For the second duel I just stood there with Ret Aura up, and by the time he finally brought my health down to 1% (I still have a lot of avoidance), the ret aura alone had brought him to a third of his health.

The new Sanctuary is admittedly very nice -- in a melee instance the amount of mana regained leaves me with almost no downtime between pulls. Hammer of the Righteous, however, remains my favorite change. It's a great 51-pt talent -- a talent actually worthy of the investment. Now, paladins will want a hard-hitting main hander (which means, thankfully, no more tanking with mage swords) and will be able to dps a bit better as prot, as well as offtank more easily for those (hopefully rare) times that you will be called on to play wingman to a better tank.

If death knight dps is anything like what people say it is, hopefully we won't see an overabundance of tanks at level 80. Even so, my guess is that good, experienced tanks will always be needed, especially Horde-side. Tanking is a lot more fun now that I don't have to constantly be pulling aggro back from someone, that's for sure. Most of the time I even out-dps one of the dps!

Post-Patch: Mage Review

2008-10-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

It is no hyperbole to say that, for some, the coming of Patch 3.0.2 "Echoes of Doom" heralded the end of the world (of warcraft). There had been class-altering changes before (Lifebloom changed the way druids heal, Vampiric Touch changed the purpose of shadow priests, the removal of the "dead zone" and the normalization of all hunter pets conspired to make hunters even cheaper than they already were), but never before had such sweeping changes been visited on every class. The dust has not completely settled yet, but the storm of flames, QQing, outcry, relief, disdain, and demands for nerfs, buffs, and balance seem to have more or less leveled out. Only time will tell who came out the real winners in this patch. If Blizzard did their jobs right, it will be everybody and nobody -- and whether that is ultimately a good or bad thing is something I haven't completely decided yet.

Overall, my impression is positive. The mage class, for example, received a much-needed workover. By anyone's standards, mages were somewhat lackluster in the Burning Crusade -- they went from kings of ranged dps and battlegrounds in Vanilla WoW, to sub-par raid dps and acceptable pvpers, depending on spec. The changes promised to put the "cannon" back in "glass cannon," and so far I think it has worked out great. Some of the juicier changes are as follows:

Arcane
Arcane is different from the other two mage trees -- always was, and still is. It doesn't play like a fire or frost mage. You have a rotation, but it's not static, you have better burst and poorer mana control, and it is the only spec where your dps is not determined by cast time and crits, but by your mana pool. It's basically just a fun spec to play, and new Arcane is incredibly powerful and versatile -- it's fast, powerful, highly mobile, flexible, and best of all, PVP-viable.

Magic Absorption gives you 80 resistance to all magic schools at level 80. The blood elf racial gives you another 3% to all schools. Focus Magic is a nice fire-and-forget -- cast it on a holy paladin, elemental shaman, boomkin, or another mage, and reap the benefit for another half hour. Prismatic Cloak gives you an instant Invisibility, and Arcane Floes allows you to use it every 2 minutes. Torment the Weak is a great incentive to actually pick up Slow for PVP, and even PVE. By the way, Slow now also works on cast time, which makes it far more useful than it ever was. This far down in the tree, everything is golden: Missile Barrage is a huge dps boost when it procs (and since it procs on Arcane Barrage and Arcane Missiles, it procs a lot), Netherwind Presence gives a flat haste increase, which is always useful, and Arcane Barrage is probably the best new mage spell, ever. It almost, but not quite, makes up for the 200% mana nerf on Arcane Blast, which renders the spell almost completely useless in PVE.

I haven't tried it in battlegrounds yet, but that is where I imagine this tree will really shine. In raids, with a rotation of ABa-AM (with more AM if MB procs), I find the damage is too spiky to be consistent dps, but maybe I just need more practice. I definitely see potential here.

Fire
My guess is that the fire tree will be utilized more to provide synergy with Frostfire bolt later on. Right now, the fire tree comes up short as a standalone tree, unlike the other two trees, and it doesn't show the flexibility of Arcane or Frost. The AOEs are nice, but some mages report that Blizzard is still out-dpsing all the AOEs in the Fire tree. Disappointing, to say the least. Fire is still a strong raid dps spec and Frostfire/Deep Fire may become the raid spec of choice at level 80. It is too early to tell.

Not much has changed with the fire playstyle, except that every now and then you get a free Pyroblast. Blast Wave now has a knockback, which is nice for the few PVP fire mages out there, and may be useful if you are AOEing in PVE and need to get some things off you really quickly. Firestarter seems nice, but I can't really think of too many situations in which I'd actually use Flamestrike even if it was instant. Hot Streak will be a nice dps boost, but Living Bomb is a resounding disappointment for PVE. It's lackluster in comparison to Seed of Corruption, a trainable spell, and simply doesn't seem worth the extra point. Still, don't discount the fire tree at level 80. I'm a Pyromaniac at heart, so I hope to see this tree made fun again later.

Frost
Frost is sitting pretty right now, no question about it. I was never interested in it before, mostly because I like the chaos of just blowing things up and frost always seemed more about control and flying under the radar. But now the frost tree is a thing of beauty. It's still great for PVP, with a ton of survivability, and the addition of some new goodies makes it the best PVE dps spec. Imbalanced? Maybe -- but again, the addition of Frostfire bolt may yet change everything.

You'll still want Icy Veins and Elemental Precision, but now you'll also want Shatter for PVE because of a nice little talent called Fingers of Frost. Shattered Barrier is nice too, because the frost nova it generates is off the GCD, giving you an increased chance of living and being able to step back and throw off a quick Ice Lance combo. The mana regen from Improved Water Elemental is a little subpar (the days of heady mana regen from 1.2k spelldamage shadow priests are, alas, at an end) but it is party-wide-- and the elemental lasts 5 seconds longer. Everything dies so quickly now that on boss fights I can pop the elemental and Icy Veins, Cold Snap, then do it again immediately thereafter for maximum dps. Then, of course, there's Brain Freeze, which is also a nice dps boost. Deep Freeze is still rather useless in PVE and seems to exist solely to allow mages to kill resto druids.

In Review
I've never been one to take the alleged accusations of imbalance too seriously. Just because SK Gaming doesn't want to bring mages to Sunwell, it doesn't mean your guild won't bring you. In fact, unless you happen to be in the top 5% of guilds who exist solely to clinch world firsts and min-max, chances are good that your guild will bring their best and most loyal players along, without worrying too much about which class is the most optimal. And half of the WoW player base is terrible anyway; you can do better than those people in your sleep. As for the other half, you should be able to close the gap with skill and dedication. In fact, when a class or spec is deemed lacking is when I become most motivated to play it, because when I top damage meters, it will be solely because of skill, and not because of class mechanics.

Well, min-maxing will still go on, but I predict in a somewhat dampened form. In any case, I think mages are well poised to benefit greatly from all the new changes, and I am looking forward to leveling mine first when the Lich King rolls out. I will see Dalaran a full two levels ahead of everyone else. Bet you wish I would port you, hmm?

WoW lore for dummies

2008-10-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time (specifically, in January 2006), I picked up a copy of what was then not-yet-known as Vanilla WoW with a Best Buy gift card, because my friend had played it all during Christmas Break, and by then I just had to see for myself what was so damn interesting. Then, some stuff happened, and before I knew it, I had 4 level 60s, and the first expansion was coming out.

Now, I have 5 level 70s, and another expansion is on the way. I've leveled, specced, rerolled, respecced, grinded honor, grinded mats, raided, joined guilds, left guilds, created guilds, RPed, farmed exotic pets, all to throw it away and do it all over again. I've gone to Blizzcon and lined up at midnight openings. I've "quit" twice and come back twice. But the one thing I have not done is gained an understanding of the lore. I hadn't played the Warcraft series, so although I love the richness and depth of the Warcraft universe, I simply don't know it that well.

This is my attempt to organize the lore in a way that makes sense to me.

The Beginning
The world was created by Titans shaping order out of chaos. The Twisted Nether housed malicious demons (including the Eredar sorcerers, like Prince, and the Nathrezim or dreadlords, like Varimanthras) so the Pantheon of the Titans appointed Sargeras to fight them back. He was eventually depressed and overwhelmed by evil and decided that it was the natural order of the universe and that the Pantheon was responsible for life's problems. So he freed all the Eredar and dreadlords and raised his army, the Burning Legion. Kil'jaeden and Archimonde of the Eredar became commanders of his army, Kil'jaeden subdued the dreadlords, commanded by Tichondrius (who was killed by Illidan after consuming the skull of Gul'dan), and Archimonde subdued the pit lords, led by Mannoroth (killed by Grom Hellscream).

While all this was going on, the Titans came upon a world called Azeroth, run by elementals worshipping Old Gods. The elemental lords are:

Therazane the Earthmother (who looks like Princess in Maraudon)
Al'Akir the Windlord (his son, Thunderaan, was killed by Ragnaros in an internal power dispute, but his essence was bound to an amulet, which was then broken and kept by Garr and Geddon. When you get both pieces and kill Thunderaan, you get his sword, Thunderfury).
Neptulon (who controls the Hydraxis Warlords and fights Ragnaros for power), and
Ragnaros (who was summoned by Emperor Thaurissan in an attempt to win the war against the Wildhammer and Ironforge clans, but instead ended up creating Blackrock Mountain and enslaving the Dark Iron dwarves).

The Titans defeated them and banished them to the astral plane. They also chained the Old Gods under the earth (only C'Thun is alive and on Azeroth now, although Hakkar may also be one). After that, they raised the earthen, made one continent (Kalimdor) and made the Well of Eternity in the middle, from which all life was to spring. They also empowered the leaders of the five dragonflights to watch over the world:

Nozdormu (bronze), Time
Alexstrasza (red) Life
Ysera (green) Dreams
Malygos (blue) Magic
Neltharion (black) Earth

In time, the Night Elves settled around the Well and became immortal. They found demigods such as Cenarius (the son of Malorne and Elune) and began to study druidism. Then their queen Azshara and her Highborne servants began to study the secrets of the Well and discovered magic. They became haughty, withdrawn, and reckless.

The War of the Ancients

Sargeras persuaded Azshara to help him invade Azeroth. She opened a portal in the middle of the Well and the Legion poured through. Malfurion, Illidan, and Tyrande set out to find Cenarius to enlist some help, and he promised to enlist the dragonflights. However in the middle of the assault, Neltharion started burning up and went crazy (possibly because he was corrupted by the whisperings of the Old Gods imprisoned beneath the earth). He renamed himself Deathwing and drove the other flights off the field. In desperation, Malfurion determined to destroy the Well. Illidan, addicted to the magic, abandoned them and went to warn Azshara. Malfurion and Tyrande stormed the palace and they fought a battle which tore the Well apart. It blasted the continent open, the Well became the Maelstrom, and the Highborne were dragged into it, to become naga. They made a new city underwater, called Nazjatar. Illidan, however, escaped with vials of the Well's water.

The surviving night elves landed on Hyjal, on which they found Illidan had made a new well. Malfurion decided to imprison him and set Maeiv Shadowsong to be his jailor. Over time, they rebuilt. The dragonflights emerged from hiding, and agreed that the new Well needed to be safeguarded, so they planted the World Tree (Nordrassil) over it. Ysera bound the tree to the Emerald Dream and the druids to it, as well. Druids must hibernate to reestablish their pact with the Dream. Also, as long as the tree is alive, the night elves will remain immortal. The reason they are not is because Malfurion used the tree against Archimonde in the Battle of Mount Hyjal.

The remaining Highborne, led by Dath'Remar Sunstrider, who were still addicted to magic, were proving to be troublesome and rebellious, so Malfurion exiled them. They sailed to the other world and became the Sin'dorei, with one of Illidan's vials. Malfurion went into hibernation, leaving Tyrande, the High Priestess of Elune, to guard the elves.

The New World
The remaining High Elves went to Tirisfal and unsuccessfully lived there for a while, and then finally founded Quel'Thalas. They made a Sunwell from one of the vials. However, the nation of Amani forest trolls waged a war against them. They beat them back once, but the trolls began to wage war against them again, and this time, they needed help. So their leader Anasterion turned to the fledgling human nation, based at Strom and led by the Arathor, Thoradin. The elves trained 100 humans in the practice of magic, and together the elves and human armies crushed the Amani war machine. The Amani empire was crushed.

Aside: troll history. Long ago there was only the Zandalar, the most civilized and peaceful tribe. They fought the elves (which were probably descended from trolls by contact with the Well of Eternity) and the Quraji. Eventually they split up in the Gurubashi (jungle) and Amani (forest) trolls and the empires were split further when the continent was split apart. The Gurubashi turned to worship of the Old God Hakkar to help them increase their lands. The small Darkspear tribe broke away, went to Kalimdor, met Thrall, and they and their leader was captured by murlocs. Thrall broke free but Sen'jin, the leader, died. Thrall offered the trolls a place in the new Horde. The Amani fought the elves, and when the elves and humans joined an "Alliance," they joined the "Horde" under Zul'jin.

The 100 mages gave rise to a new generation of heedless magic users who went out and built Dalaran. Their magic attracted the Burning Legion, who started showing up in small numbers in Dalaran. The mages went to the elves and together they decided to empower one person to fight the Legion, while keeping the fact that the Legion was in Dalaran a secret. These are the Guardians of Tirisfal.

The human empires continued to grow. Gilneas, Alterac, and Kul Tiras all sprang up. Kul Tiras became strong as a fishing and merchant empire. However, the Arathor nation broke up. The lords of Strom went north and founded Lordaeron. The Arathi heirs went south and founded Stormwind in a land called Azeroth. Storm became its own empire named Stromgarde.

One of the guardians, Aegwynn, became very powerful and questioned the rule of the male Council of Tirisfal. She hunted the demons all the way to Northrend, where she found them enslaving dragons. With the dragons' help, she defeated them but Sargeras showed up. She battled with him and beat him easily, but he transferred his essence into her body. When the Council decreed that her time as a Guardian was over, she didn't trust them to choose a successor so she gave birth to her own, a son by Aran, the court conjurer of Azeroth. The son, Medivh, was left in the court of Azeroth, where he befriended Llane Wrynn, the prince, and Anduin Lothar, one of the last heirs of the Arathi. When he turned 14 the cosmic power inside him manifested and conflicted with Sargeras, and he fell catatonic. When he woke up, his friends had become regents of Azeroth.

Also, the dwarves emerged during this time. The sundering of the world caused them to go deep into their kingdoms (Uldum, Uldaman). When they came out, the Uldaman dwarves went to Khaz Modan and founded a new city, Ironforge. When the High King Anvilmar died, three factions warred over the city. The Bronzebeard, led by Thane Madoran, banished the Wildhamer, led by Thane Khardros, and the Dark Iron, led by Thaurissan. The Wildhammer went to Grim Batol and took up residence there, but the Dark Iron dwarves launched an attack on both kingdoms. The queen Modgud fought the Wildhammer king and killed him, but she was defeated and her soldiers destroyed. Thaurissan was then turned on by both armies, and trying to call upon magic to help him, he called up Ragnaros, which ended up making Blackrock Mountain and enslaving his people.

The Wildhammer eventually went to Aerie Peak, and the Ironforge dwarves built the Thandol span to retain relations with them.

Ride of the Horde
Kil'jaeden was looking for a way to weaken Azeroth for a second Burning Legion invasion, and he found the planet Draenor, inhabited by orcs and draenei. He began to infect the mind of the elder shaman Ner'zhul, but he wasn't willing enough. Gul'dan, his apprentice, was, however, and he made a backroom deal with Kil'jaeden in order to get the power promised to Ner'zhul. Gul'dan formed the Shadow Council to teach warlock magic to the orcs, which eventually ruined the planet. He read from the Cipher of Damnation and tore Draenor away from its connection to the elemental spirits, so elementals still run amok in Shadowmoon Valley. Then he slaughtered the draenei at the Temple of Karabor and made it his base, renaming it the Black Temple. Then, Gul'dan convinced all the orc chieftains, led by Grom Hellscream of the Warsong clan, to drink the blood of Mannoroth, whom the Shadow Council had summoned. Only Durotan of the Frostwolf clan did not drink, the others did and bound themselves to the Legion.

Then, the orcs, with Rend Blackhand at the lead, slaughtered almost all the draenei on the planet.

Sargeras, in the body of Medivh, promised to make Gul'dan a god if he led the orcs to Azeroth and found the undersea tomb where Aegwynn had hidden Sargeras' mortal body. The deal was too good to pass up. Gul'dan and Medivh opened the Dark Portal. Durotan still warned of trouble, but Gul'dan exiled him to the new world and then slaughtered his entire family except for a son, which was taken by a human and raised in captivity (Thrall). Then they invaded Azeroth and clashed with the Kingdom of Stormwind.

Llane Wrynn wanted to hold his position at Stormwind, but Lothar, with the help of Khadgar (Medivh's apprentice from Dalaran) and the half-orc assassin Garona Halfocen (who was actually sent to kill Medivh from Gul'dan to spy on him) managed to find out that Medivh was behind the invasion, and they went to Karazhan to kill him.

This was bad for Gul'dan, as he still did not know the location of the tomb, so he tried to enter Medivh's mind, but was in there when Khadgar struck the final blow, which sent him into a coma. Upon awakening, he found that Orgrim Doomhammer had killed the Shadow Council and Blackhand. Fearful for his life and deprived of his toadies, Gul'dan promised to raise a new army to replace the slaughtered warlocks. He killed his own acolytes and put their spirits into the bodies of fallen Stormwind soldiers, creating the first Death Knights. Doomhammer led these forces to beseige Stormwind. Llane was killed by Garona.

With the Stormwind lands in ruin and the city keep besieged, Lothar sailed across the world and united all the humans under his banner, becoming Supreme Commander of the Alliance forces. Even the dwarves of Ironforge and the elves of Quel'Thalas (under Anesterion) joined to help. Uther the Lightbringer, Admiral Daelin Proudmoore, and Turalyon were all leaders in the army.

The battle raged everywhere. The Horde even managed to turn the Demon Soul (the artifact that all the dragons put their essence into) against Alexzstraza and force her dragons to war with them. But at the crucial moment, Gul'dan's followers split oversea to find the tomb, Doomhammer's best chance was gone, and he had to retreat. Gul'dan raised the island from the sea but was torn apart by the crazed spirits in the tomb. Doomhammer's people crushed Gul'dan's forces and the rebellion, but they were beaten back to Blackrock Spire. The portal was cut off, and the remaining orcs were rounded up into internment camps.

Back on Draenor, Ner'zhul wanted to open portals to other worlds, but he needed powerful artifacts from Azeroth to do it. He sent Grom Hellscream and Kilrogg Deadeye to get them. Turalyon and the Archmage Khadgar went through the portal after them, and they fought in Hellfire Peninsula. Howerver, opening the portals would tear Draenor apart. Khadgar, Alleria Windrunner, and Turalyon destroyed the portal from their side, so that nothing could go through, even though it means they will be stuck there. Grom and Kilrogg, realizing that their race would be doomed, took their orcs and fled to Azeroth before the portal collapsed.

Ner'zhul went into the Twisted Nether but Kil'jaeden was waiting for him and none too pleased about his recent defeat. Ner'zhul was tortured and torn apart and his spirit placed in a block of ice. He was to serve his purpose, for the orcs are still bound to the legion, and if he succeeded, he could have a new body. His followers were turned into Lich sorcerers and his coffin cast into Northrend, where it came to resemble a throne. The Lich King's psychic powers grew and he found he could control the people of Northrend and also cause a plague which turned people into zombies. Tichondrius, the dread lord, was set to police Ner'zhul.

Some orcs led by Nekros took over Alexzstraza at Grim Batol using the demon soul, but she was freed by Alliance resistance led by Rhonin the mage. His orcs were also interned. Meanwhile, Blackmoore was molding the boy Thrall to be a weapon for him, but Thrall escaped and searched for others of his kind. Eventually he found Grom Hellscream, who with his Warsong clan was trying to run resistance against the enslavement of his people. He could not combat the lethargy from being removed from their warlock power source. He also found the remnants of the Frostwolf clan and realized he is Durotan's son. He took up his place as the new leader of the clan and Warchief of the Horde. He also found Ogrim Doomhammer. They laid waste to Durnholde, but Doomhammer died in the fray. Thrall took his hammer and, with the aid of Grom, starting laying waste to the internment camps.

In the meantime, the Lich King was finding opposition from the spider city of Azjol-Nerub. The spiders were immune to mind control and plague, but eventually he wore them down. He could raise their dead as undead and use them against their forces. He also adopted their architectural style.

Kel'Thuzad, a member of the Kirin'Tor who studied necromancy, heard Kel'Thuzad's call, and left his life to travel to Northrend and offer his services. He was then charged with forming a religion that worshipped the Lich King. He founded the Cult of the Damned, and they brought the plague cauldrons to Lordaeron to infect the people and turn them into zombies. That army was called the Scourge.

The Alliance was starting to fracture -- the tax money to rebuild Stormwind and to keep up and camps was making people unhappy. Also the elves had rescinded, although King Magni Bronzebeard was still loyal because the Alliance had saved Khaz Modan from the Horde. King Terenas of Lordaeron had a son named Arthas, a paladin of the Silver Hand. In his youth, he fought the Scourge, but was traumatized by seeing the corrupted grain turn citizens into undead. He killed off the citizens of Stratholme before they could become undead. He wanted to pursue the dreadlord Mal'Ganis into Northrend. Mal'Ganis was part of the plan to turn Arthas, by aking him obsessed with killing him. After killing Kel'Thuzad, but went to Northrend, picked up the Frostmourne sword and his spirit was torn apart. He was resurrected as a death knight and led the Scourge against his own people, killing his father.

Kel'Thuzad said he had to be resurrected, so Arthas fought all the way to Quel'thalas to dip his body in the Sunwell. He wiped out the elven nation in the process, killed Sylvanas Windrunner the Ranger-General of Silvermoon, and raised her as a banshee. In the aftermath of the Scourge invasion, Kael'thas had to blow up the Sunwell to get ride of the remaining Scourge. Then they went to Dalaran where they found the spellbook of Medivh, which allowed them to summon Archimonde. Archimonde appeared and made off for the World Tree. Medivh, come back as a herald of woe, came to warn the world of what was to come, but he had to trick Thrall and Jaina to Kalimdor. Jaina was born in the kingdom of Kul Tiras and her father was the grand admiral of the Alliance. She had been studying at Dalaran with Kael'thas and Arthas. On the way, Grom Hellscream and his people fell to bloodlust and killed Cenarius, but he redeemed himself by helping Thrall defeat Mannoroth, thus ending the blood pact once and for all.

Battle of Mount Hyjal
Meanwhile, Tyrande had woken up Malfurion and set Illidan free, to help in the fight against the Legion. Together, the elves, the humans and orcs battled to reinforce the tree. Malfurion unleashed its power to defeat Archimonde.

Illidan had fled and eaten the skull of Gul'dan. However, he was contacted by Kil'jaeden and told to destroy the Lich King, which was growing too powerful. He called in some debts and with Lady Vashj's help, found the Tomb of Sargeras and the Eye of Sargeras. Then he went to Dalaran and started a huge spell which would destroy the Frozen Throne, but was interrupted by Tyrande and Malfurion. Knowing Kil'jaeden would be displeased, he fled to Outland, pursued by Maeiv.

Kael'thas, the last of the Sunstrider dynasty, had studied in Dalaran and was away when the Scourge laid waste to his home. He took his forces and rushed to fight the undead. Meeting up with Maeiv and Tyrande, who were looking for Illidan, he mentions that Illidan might be at Dalaran (which is how they found him), but their caravan was attacked by undead. Tyrande was swept away in the river. They met up with Malfurion and stopped Illidan, he was furious that Tyrande might be dead, and Kael mentions that no one saw her die. Both brothers left to find her, with Maeiv on their tail.

He then joins with the Alliance forces to fight the Scourge, but the Alliance use them as cannon fodder and reprimand them taking help from Lady Vashj. They actually arrest him for consorting with naga, but Vashj frees him and tells him that his people will be left magic starved in the wake of the Sunwell. He has no choice but to go to Outland with her, help break Illidan out of prison, and set themselves up as the new rulers of Outland. He renamed his people Blood Elves. Illidan knew he had to fight the Lich King again to appease Kil'jaeden.

Ner'zhul, knowing he needed help, called Arthas back to him. Sylvanas' renegade undead, renamed the Forsaken, had retaken Lordaeron and were waging war against Arthas's minions. Arthas leaves to get to Northrend, gets there before Illidan, shatters the throne, dons the armor and becomes the new Lich King, fused with Ner'zhul. He defeats Illidan, who goes back to Outland to hide out.

Thrall settles into Durotar with the Darkspear trolls and the tauren warriors under Cairne Bloodhoof. Jaina settles into Theramore. But when her father's fleet arrives (having fled Lordaeron before Arthas razed it, and looking for survivors), they vow to drive the orcs out. Jaina allies with the orcs to defeat her father, and the two sides hold a tenuous peace.

Burning Crusade
The draenei are actually eredar who did not want to be enslaved to the Legion and were helped by the Naaru. Led by Velen, they boarded the Dimensional Ship (named Osho'gun) and went to Draenor. It crash landed and all the Naaru inside it died, except for K'ure, who is still in there, almost dead. Tempest Keep is a Naaru fortress that was taken over by Blood Elves, and they captured Mu'ru and are channeling his magic to power the blood elves. Velen stole part of it, but the blood elves misconfigured it, so that it crashed into Azeroth.

Kael'thas is now operating for his own needs, and has made a pact with the Burning Legion. The Scryers has noted that his quest for power will doom their people, and has defected. This led to the defeat of the siege of Shattrath. Now, however, he wants to reinvigorate the Sunwell to summon Kil'jaeden and has stolen Mu'ru.

The essence of the Sunwell was put into a magical construct, a woman named Anveena Teague. She is now staying at Silvermoon under the reagent lord Lor'themar Theron of Silvermoon. But Kael'thas stole her and she is now in Sunwell Plateau helping him summon Kil'jaeden.