3.0.2 – Mage, Full Frost + Full Fire

Ugh, terrible week for arenas. 2-8. The worst part is, aside from not playing defensively enough one game, and not dragging a warrior away from his side-of-the-bridge pillar-standing priest healer in another, I can’t really point out anything specifically that we did wrong. Of the two games we won, we fought a Druid/Rogue where we barely pulled the win out (and Ferrus was out of mana at the end) and the other was a pair of frost mages who were a bit out of their league (I swear, the one ice blocked because I was looking at her angrily while she had me nova’d).

At least I got some nice pants out of it, but we dropped from 1679 to 1586.

Starting to get frustrated with the warrior, and I’m not sure the patch or the expansion is going to make that any better.

*****

I haven’t messed with Arcane yet, but I tried both the Frost and Fire specs out a bit on the PTR for 3.0.2. I’ll start with Frost.

The additions to Frost are basically “more of the same.” They don’t add a lot or make any significant changes to the existing playstyle. The one new spell, the new culmination of the tree, Deep Freeze, fits in well. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, it plays similarly to the current pre-WLK Frost Mage. The learning curve will not change directions nor get steeper.

The new passive abilities, Fingers of Frost and Brain Freeze, play out like many of the new passive talents in the other trees, allowing certain talent specs to make use of abilities they wouldn’t normally have in tBC due to cooldowns or inefficiency (or in the case of Frost, lack of ability to “freeze” many targets immune to the mechanic via Fingers of Frost).

As well, the new mana battery aspect of the Water Elemental is a nice bonus, and the talent Shattered Barrier (which procs what is basically an automatic Frost Nova when your Ice Barrier spell is beaten through by damage) will be awesome for PvP and soloing.

Winter’s Chill now affecting all schools of magic (and working exactly like the newest version of Improved Scorch) is a good thing as well which will let Frost Mages fit into raids much better than before.

As for Fire, well, yay Pyroblast? As with the Frost Mage and the two talents discussed above, you’ll get to use Pyroblast more thanks to a new talent called Hot Streak, which after critting twice causes your next Pyroblast to be instant-cast. As well, for the close-range AoE fans, any time you use Blast Wave or Dragon’s Breath, thanks to Firestarter, your next Flamestrike will be instant-cast as well.

The tree acquired some new PvP utility in the form of Firestarter (for burst damage on spells you’d probably be using anyway), Fiery Payback (which reduces the cast time of your Pyroblast based on your health percentage while adding a cooldown to it, not sure how that will play out), and a new talent called Burning Determination. This last one causes the mage to become immune to Silence and Interrupt effects for 10 seconds after becoming victim to one or the other. It is in the second tier of the tree as well, making it easily accessible to other specs.

I did not get to try out Living Bomb. I had it, but could not find a good test bed for it. Its latest incarnation is an instant-cast application, 12-second DoT on your target which explodes, knocking all nearby targets into the air either when the spell runs its course or when it is dispelled. I’m not sure if this is a similar knockback to Blast Wave and Thunderstorm or not, but I would guess it is.

On the subject of Blast Wave, yes, it by default has a knockback component now, much like Thunderstorm. However, the added benefit here is that it still comes with a slowing component, meaning that targets you’ve knocked away are now slow and will have a tougher time getting back to you. As well, with the added instant Flamestrike afterwards, will add up to some possibly significant burst damage. I half expect to see fire mage multibox teams make an appearance in the arena scene.

Anyway, that’s that. I’ll come back to Arcane, and still have to look at Holy paladin, and both Prot specs (warrior and paladin).

For a more complete listing of talents, check out QQ’s guides:

* Arcane
* Fire
* Frost
* Talent Builds

Spicytuna’s Posts on Spell Rotations in 3.0.2:

* Part 1, Pre-3.0.2 Rotations, for reference
* Part 2, Post-3.0.2 Rotations

3.0.2 – Shaman, Full Enhancement

Going to see if my shaman partner for 2v2 wants to see if we can push 1700 rating for more points and so I can work towards the Guardian’s boots (something to do) as well as, ideally, have enough points for S4 legs this week (to upgrade from my honor-obtained S2 version). In addition to all of this helping arena/bg play, I plan on using this high-stamina gear to tank with in WLK, so the more, the better.

Also, I wanted to do more Titan Grip testing on the PTR, but the talent is currently not working. It’s not letting you equip two 2-handers, and it reads as decreasing your chance to hit with attacks requiring a melee weapon by 0%. However, there is a new talent in the fury tree called “Armed to the Teeth,” which increases your strength by 1/2/3 for every 400 armor you have. At 10734 (or something similar) armor, that’s 80 more strength and 160 more attack power. I believe this talent was added to mimic a Death Knight talent that operates similarly, and will make for a good talent in any build.

***

Long story short, Enhancement is fun. As I predicted, though, it is easy to run out of mana if you end up casting a lot of instant Lightning/Healing spells with Lightning Shield up instead of Water. However, it seems so far like you can have Shamanistic Rage ready each time you run out of mana so long as you don’t need to recast Lightning Shield too often.

I spec’d 0/61/0 for my testing, so this is without Elemental Devastation from the Elemental Tree (whenever you crit with a spell, your melee crit chance goes up (by 9% I think?)). I tried one build with Spirit Wolves and one without.

The Wolves themselves are your pets, both controlled by a single pet bar (I forsee that possibly being buggy). They have a Dash ability, I think an instant attack, and their auto attack. As well, a percentage of the damage they deal is returned to you as health (though possibly also to your party/raid). The damage they do is not spectacular, but that is fine.

One change I noticed on the latest PTR build is that they reverted the Ghost-Wolf-goes-Travel-Form talent that allowed your Ghost Wolf to remove movement impairing effects (as well as making your Spirit pets immune to stun/fear effects). Instead, now, it causes your Earthbind Totem pulses to remove such effects from everyone in your party. This is a neat change, though it is of course still easy to just kill the totem. I’m not sure how balanced that will be for PvP; most shaman I encountered in the BGs were elemental on the PTR, and I’m not brave enough to go in there myself.

Also new to the tree is another one-point talent and instant-attack ability called…er…I forgot the name. (I do this a lot.) It is along the same chain in the enhancement tree as Spirit Weapons and Dual Wield, being the bottom of that chain and requiring 35 points in enhancement (and I think becoming the only one-point talent in any tree for any class to require a number of points not evenly divisible by 10). For those not following the patch note changes, it is an instant attack with your off-hand weapon that does 25% extra damage if your off-hand weapon is enchanted with Flametongue.

Hmmm.

I will leave it to the math folks to figure out if that’s a damage increase over Windfury in the off-hand, but I would bet that the spell damage offered by the new version Flametongue and the Enhancement Shaman’s casting of Lightning Bolts and Healing Waves will make spellpower pretty handy.

Mostly, I see the Enhancement tree becoming heavily crit-dependent. With Strength now granting only 1 attack power per point (instead of 2 in this current pre-3.0.2 patch) and Agility’s crit-%-per-Agility being nerfed, I’ve already gone through and re-gemmed my shaman for more critical strike rating in preparation. It’s been a noticeable dps loss in the interrim, but I’m interested in seeing what it does for me post-patch.

Update: Theorycraft on abilities and talents over at Elitistjerks

3.0.2 – Paladin, Full Retribution

As a sort of aside, rogue+mage is really hard to beat for warrior+shaman in 2v2. In our 10 games yesterday, we played against 5 rogue+mage teams, and lost every one. We won every other game. I really want to stay on the rogue, I’m pretty sure, because any attempt to stay on the mage seems to end in frostbite procs and immobility and then being sheeped. What I suppose needs to happen is better LoSing of the mage while I attack the rogue, as well as being quick on the spell reflects, when possible. A clutch polymorph reflect could spell possible doom for their team, though the mage does have significant out opportunities with trinket and ice block. Not to mention the ability to just stop casting polymorph, if he/she is paying attention.

Second, arms pvp in 3.0.2 is borked. I think everyone else is just doing too much damage, everything is too chaotic for me to figure out at this point. Arms is a much different tree in the coming patch. The inability to feel “remorse or fear” or whatever provided by Swordstorm could make things interesting, but you lose out on some important abilties in other trees when you only have 61 points to spend total.

Also, getting Thunderstorm’d off of LM by some shaman is funny…the first time it happens. Watch where you’re standing when fighting shaman in the coming patch. I see arena teams with Ele Shaman doing quite well, at least initially, in the Blade’s Edge Arena, knocking opponents off the bridge.

On to the main story: Ret in 3.0.2.

*****

HOLY HELL.

Ok. Not to add to the huge amount of QQing I’m sure is going on (which I could probably link to, but I’ll spare everyone), but I’m pretty sure that if Ret is not nerfed by the time 3.0.2 goes live that I am staying out of the battlegrounds and arenas until it does happen. Not sure what happened to Blizz’ policy about not letting certain classes destroy you during the duration of a stun effect, but they seem to have misplaced it. Ret paladins can and are killing people while they are under the effect of Hammer of Justice on the PTR, from full health to zero. (I hear rogues can do similar things on the PTR, but I think the cooldowns that allow it are much longer than that of just HoJ, which is all the Ret paladin needs to execute their version of the (made famous by the pre-BC video called World of Roguecraft) stunlock-to-death.)

“Get out of the stun,” you might say. Well, k. You’ve allowed yourself an out so you can fight back, and the inability of their Judgement to (automatically) crit (nevermind that it will have a huge chance to crit anyway, with the homogenization of melee and spell crit, 5% from Conviction (affects spells now!), and 15% 20% from Fanaticism…) and are still susceptible to huge burst damage from auto-attacks, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm, as well as the now-instant-cast also-high-crit-chance Hammer of Wrath (which now scales with attack power). I’m sorry, paladins, but I don’t think this is ok.

Anyway, I tried it out (though not in pvp) against some mobs, and was basically…well, it was like finding that WoW godmode cheat you see in Google ads (“$19.99 for 10,000 damage per hit! Click here!”). Ending every fight with full health/mana, crazy damage…

That said, an extra instant melee attack for Ret paladins is a good thing. Frankly, I’m not sure just how it is that such an addition is causing paladins to do so much extra damage. It might be Judgements…perhaps if all of the judgements and Divine Storm shared a cooldown the whole thing would not be so bad…maybe have the use of Judgement reduce the damage of your next DS by a %. I don’t know…from what I’ve heard on the beta, Ret at 80 isn’t as powerful, but that doesn’t change that it’s going to affect game/class balance until then.

But I guess that’s what the PTR is for!

Update: Q&A with CM Ghostcrawler about incoming Ret nerfs
Update #2: Followup to the above from GC

3.0.2 – Warrior, Full Fury Spec

…or is it 3.0.2? (/EDIT: yes, yes it is…) I think I remember that it was getting released as 3.0.2, but are we testing 3.0.1? Whatever. After looking at Arms on my first day of the PTR, I realized I didn’t have an extra 2-handed weapon lying around anywhere…not even a random vanity item in the bank. Thankfully, I was reminded that the Shattered Sun Offensive sells a 2-handed axe at revered rep (who I am exalted with on Niemandra). Of issue here was mostly the fact that I had apparently not ever done much with two-handed axes…the skill sat at a measly 210 when I bought the new one for the purpose of using it with Titan Grip.

So, testing the ability was not as good as it could have been, but at least I know I need to get that second two-handed sword picked up before the patch hits. I will try to avoid how clumsy the build felt as a result of my off-hand having far less weapon skill than my main-hand.

***

Ah, fury. My long-time favorite build. I’ve been prot before and have been running around spamming Mortal Strike for I think two months now, but that is due to how difficult it is to get a run together for a fury warrior and how innefective a fury warrior can be in pvp.

Come 3.0, though, this could change. Well, the pvp half of it anyway…

The build felt a lot like it does right now. It’s auto-attacks with Bloodthirst and Whirlwind weaved in. Now, though, you might actually be using Slam! As well, you’ll see more mobility from Heroic Leap.

It would be difficult to say how this will play out, especially with the 15% increased miss rate tacked on to Titan’s Grip, making the miss rate for your version of dual-wielding jump from 24% up to 39%. However, this is extra 15% is apparently only for abilities that require a melee weapon to be equipped…Bloodthirst, unless they’re changing it, does not require one. We’ll see if that sticks around.

Now, Slam? Requiring one point in Bloodthirst is a new talent which, upon getting a critical strike with Bloodthirst, makes your next Slam instant-cast at I think 3 points. In addition to Flurry and the new-and-improved Rampage, critical strike rating might completely replace Strength as the most important stat for DPS warriors (I say DPS instead of Fury, as Arms warriors could be looking at it too, for the Execute-at-any-% talent and Wrecking Crew, both based on critting). I know it had started to get some popularity, but that should come to the forefront with the new talents.

Let me just say that it is a quick-killing spec from what I have seen so far, based largely on the prowess of Titan Grip. I am hoping they change the 15% miss chance to something less gimicky…I was ok with the swing speed decrease, personally.

Oh! Bloodthirst! Now that it returns a percentage of your health instead of a set (and really stupid low) amount, running about killing mobs is an endless chain slowed only by the time it takes to get from one mob to the next, which can be shortened with Intercept or Heroic Leap (or Charge, even). At 12.2k health (pvp gear), it was returning about 139 health per hit, ie 834 in total (it’s 6 charges, right? not 5? man it’s hard to remember this stuff). 834 health every 6 seconds is powerful, and might see a nerf…however, with the self-healing abilities you see on other classes, it might be here to stay. I personally am yet further excited about tanking with this sort of build in the expansion.

Also, Rampage, as I mentioned, is much-improved. Behaving much like an enhancement shaman’s Unleashed Rage, it now is an ability which becomes a group buff providing a 5% chance to critically strike (probably only with melee/ranged and not spells, though) when the warrior crits with something for 12 seconds. This is much better than it was before, and I sincerely hope that is here to stay. Yay buffs from warriors!

Lastly, Flurry is no longer tied to Enrage. (/EDIT: However, Enrage has been changed to a chance when being hit rather than automatically after being crit.) No longer are we tied to a mostly-useless talent (at least so far as PvE is concerned) in order to get to one of our best. As well, Impale is now the prerequisite for Deep Wounds, rather than vice versa. Something akin to 20/51/0 will be pretty standard for Fury DPS at 80, I am pretty sure, picking up Two-Handed Weapon spec for 5% increased damage from both of your two-handed weapons, as well as the bonus to crit damage from Impale.

Exciting times for warriors, to be sure. I will look at Prot spec after checking out Enhancement for Shaman and Ret for Paladins. Although, after a brief taste at pvp in WSG where it was 7 ret paladins on the alliance side completely destroying everyone I’m not sure I’m ok with the tree as-is.

3.0.2 – Warrior, Full Arms spec

So! I still can’t get my shaman to copy over to the PTR, but my mage, paladin, and warrior are there. I took the warrior out for a spin first.

I felt a bit overwhelmed, to be honest, by the new Arms tree. Most of the original stuff is there to be sure, and I guess maybe I should have anticipated this, but there’s really a lot of new stuff as well. I suppose I spent too much time spent pondering the fury changes I suppose…

***

The new arms tree seems pretty solid. Two talents stick out, aside from Swordstorm and Wrecking Crew. I don’t recall their names right now, but here’s what they do:

The first allows the use of your Overpower ability sometimes when your Rend ability deals damage. At a +50% critical strike chance from talents along with a 30+% base chance, that’s nearly a guaranteed crit.

The other, on a 30% chance (at full points in the talent) after dealing a critical strike, allows the use of your Execute ability regardless of your target’s health percentage. The most notable thing about this ability is that it is a buff on the warrior rather than a debuff on the target…so, if you finish off your target and this ability procs, you can now run over to your next target and Execute+Victory Rush (provided the previous target would have given experience or honor) right off the bat. It’s pretty crazy.

One thing to note is that with all these uses of Overpower, the Arms warrior is rather tied to Battle Stance, perhaps switching over to Berserker for the occasional Whirlwind. There was another talent in the Arms tree that reduced the cooldown of Overpower to I think 1 second with two points. Look out, Evasion-using rogues…be sure to gouge those not-in-Berserker-Stance-Warriors…they can’t use Berserker Rage in Battle!

I’m not positive, but I think Arms PvE dps, while perhaps not as spectacular as Fury, will still hold its own, if still only for Blood Frenzy. Swordstorm is a lot of fun, though I don’t know just how great it is. The ability rotation for Arms in PvE will probably be a lot more active, given that Overpower will be useable far more often, and since Improved Slam is in the Arms tree which, along with Wrecking Crew, will untie Arms PvE from Flurry to more easily get deeper into Arms.

I am however curious about how this will play out as a PvP tree…with Fury getting a healing debuff based on autoattacks and the burst it could provide, as well as Heroic Leap providing more mobility and an attached stun (though it is difficult to aim, since it doesn’t seem to land you close enough to stun the target sometimes), it will be interesting to see how they match up. I forsee a lot of hybrid builds being tested out…

Drain Life vs. Shadowbolt

Hi, again, warlocks!

Checking to make sure I was correct, I ran some numbers.

Base, before Spell Damage and Talents:
Drain Life Rank 8 – Channeled, 5 seconds, 540 damage total:  108 dps.
Shadowbolt Rank 11 – 3 sec cast time, 572 damage average: 191 dps.

So, Shadowbolt clearly wins so far. However, let’s look at talents. The major contenders here are Soul Siphon (2 ranks, 2% increased Drain Life damage per affliction debuff on the target per rank) and Bane (5 ranks. reduces the cast time of Shadowbolt by .1 seconds per rank). Affecting both in an affliction build are Shadow Mastery (+10% to all shadow damage), Improved Shadow Bolt (+20% to all shadow damage after a shadow bolt crit), and Malediction-improved Curse of Shadows (+13% to all shadow damage).

Assuming a fully-debuffed target, and that you’re the only affliction warlock in the raid, that should be 5 affliction debuffs (Curse, UA, Corr, SL, Shadow’s Embrace). 20% increased Drain Life damage.

With 5 points in Bane, that’s a 2.5 sec cast time on Shadowbolt instead of 3.

With all that scaling then, if I did my math right (which I’ve been known not to at times), Drain Life should do 176.04 dps while Shadowbolt will do 327.18 dps.

If I missed anything let me know, but it would seem that SB is the clear winner…it would take a lot for Drain Life to catch up. I suppose that Spell Damage would scale differently with each…and I’m frankly unsure as to how Spell Damage interacts with Drain Life (which deals damage and heals the caster), so maybe that’s a larger factor than it would seem.

Also, nevermind that in order to be getting the benefits of Improved Shadowbolt in a raid, someone with that talent must be casting Shadowbolts!

Image credited to “flowso01″ at photobucket.

Alt Planning – Revamp

Waaaaay back here, I had laid out my plans for all my alts and my proposed roles for them.  I admit I was a bit naive, and for one thing still believed that hybrids could be decently effective.  Blizzard continues, however, to pigeonhole the specs into their roles yet further, if the alpha leaks are any indication.

So, I’ve done some more thinking since then, and have decided to try and optimize a bit differently.  Since that aforementioned post, I have decided not to (at least not any time soon) level a druid or a hunter.  I’ve gotten bored with them too quickly in trying, and I don’t see our druid/hunter raid attendance dropping.

And so, here we are.  The plans.

• Niemandra, Warrior.  Blood Frenzy/Imp Slam raid dps utility spec.
• Vaexxi, Shaman.  Enhancement, as she is now.
• Zerei, Paladin.  Unless they make some sort of raid-viable holy dps spec, I don’t see us losing our current raiding Retribution Paladin, so this character will probably remain a tank or a healer.
• Haezyl, Mage.  I can’t recall if the alpha leaks included any new utility for mages beyond Int Buffs, Polymorphs, and Water Vending, but really all I can say with confidence for this character is “ranged dps.”
• Ahzethul, Priest.  Shadow spec, for Misery and Shadow Weaving.
• Luthehza, Death Knight.  I’m unsure of what I want to do with this character yet, I don’t really know enough about the class to make an informed decision.

These last two are also indefinite depending on whether or not I actually level them up.

• Valefique, Warlock.  Affliction utility spec for Shadow’s Embrace and Malediction.
• Thaea, Rogue.  I’m thinking a Hemo build would be nice, but the Subtlety tree most likely still won’t be for raiding.  I’m wondering though, since the tree includes +10% AP and +15% agility that with some different gearing than what rogues are used to (ie, favoring +hit because of SnD) if it couldn’t be viable now.

And that’s that, really.  If I was going to level a hunter it would be Survival for that Expose Weakness debuff our raids never get.  Any druid I rolled I’d want for it to be a Balance/Resto hybrid, one o’ dem fangled “Dreamstate” healers, also with Improved Faerie Fire and Insect Swarm if I could manage it.

See the common theme here is utility.  I see a lot of things we could have in our raids that we end up without, those largely being included above.  Of course, I can’t do them all at once, but here’s the condensed reasoning list:

• Blood Frenzy – Increases all physical damage the target receives by 4% while your warrior’s Deep Wounds or Rend abilities are active.  All of our warriors are Protection or Fury.
• Expose Weakness – Increases the attack power of all attackers by 50% of the hunter’s agility.  All of our hunters are Marksman or Beast Mastery.
• Hemorrhage – Increases physical damage by X with 10 charges or something like that.  All of our rogues are Assassination…do we have any combat rogues?  I don’t think we do.
• Shadow’s Embrace – Decreases all physical damage the target causes by 5%.  I think we have some Affliction warlocks, but I’m pretty sure they don’t take this, or maybe only put one or two points in it to increase their Life Drain lawldamage.
• Unleashed Rage – Increases the attack power of your party members by 10%.  We largely have Elemental and Restoration shaman.

These are the debuffs our raids are most often lacking.  In 10-mans it’s not such a big deal, the group make-up gets splintered by the lack of people you can bring, but in 25-mans these would seem to be most helpful.

So, Affliction Warlocks…

There seems to be this great misconception out there for warlocks that putting all your dots on a mob and then spamming Life Drain is good dps.  Allow me to set things straight here.  By which of course I mean “flail quietly over in my corner of the internet.”

You need to use Shadowbolt!  And no, not just when Nightfall procs!

My warlock may only be level 64, but she’s nigh-capable of doing more damage than some of our 70s at this point, with like 300 spell damage.  Because I use shadowbolt inbetween my DoTs.

I believe Nibuca over at Mystic Chicanery has some more info on spell rotations and whatnot, but seriously! Shadowbolt~!

/flail

Possible Seal Mechanic Rework?

For anyone not following the WotLK alpha leak buzz, new information was released for the Shaman class. Their weapon buffs are getting some significant revamps to make them for useful, allowing them to have uses other than simple additional damage on melee attacks. (Note the usual disclaimer of “the game is in alpha and for all we know they’ll just scrap every one of those items we’ve read in the leak just to spite us.”)

I don’t recall the name of it, but there’s going to be a nature-based weapon buff that adds to healing and has a chance to proc a HoT on your heal targets. Presumably, Flametongue will add some buff to your spell damage as well.

What I’m thinking this means is we’ll see something similar happen with the Paladins. We’ll have seals that do more than “chance on hit”-type stuff. A seal that adds to healing, for instance, could be in the works. Paladins have not yet had anything major pop up in the leaks, so there’s a definite possibility.

The FoL+HS Burst

I’ll say it again, Holy Shock is pretty nice now. The mana efficiency may not have changed, but its HPS sure did.

Warm up your Flash of Light and hit Holy Shock right when it’s done. At ~2k +healing that’s about 3.3k healing in total, up to almost 5k if they both crit. It eats up two global cooldowns, but if someone ends up taking some unexpected damage and you’re partway through a Flash of Light already, it’ll tack a nice bonus onto the end of the Flash of Light so you’re not immediately left playing catchup.

In PvP, as I think I’ve mentioned before, it’s now so helpful that I can’t think of a reason not to use it save for its high mana cost. And if you have your 4-piece pvp gear set bonus (+30% healing from HS), it’s pretty amazing. That beast can crit heal a Mut rogue or Fel-armored warlock for 4k by itself at 1.6k +healing.