3.0.2 – Enhancement Shaman, a short test run

I beat on a level 70 target dummy in Org for a bit on my shaman. Went 8/53/0, for Elemental Devastation and Ghost Wolves.

This has netted me an attack power increase but a critical strike chance decrease. I could probably make some headway by fitting in some more mail gear now that more of it is valuable to enhancement, but I’m thinking of specing elemental for the expansion to level alongside a destruction warlock anyway : )

Anyhow, here’s the deal. I am running oom before Shamanistic Rage’s cooldown is reset. I feel I can largely blame this on the lightning bolts I’m casting, but I really get down to about nothing with 25% of the cooldown still left to run. Perhaps this would be fixed with 5/5 Convection (10% cost reduction to most spells) instead of Concussion (5% increase to damage to same spells). But even with a mana totem and water shield both running (though I don’t have imp water shield or anything) I was out.

Perhaps this is a call to go out and get more intellect! With agi and intellect both providing attack power now, and 30% of a shaman’s attack power being converted to spellpower to empower shocks and lightning spells, it’s difficult for me to say what stat is best for shaman. I’ll wait and see what the folks at EJ find out.

/EDIT: Oh, and I suppose I should note…I didn’t have a dps meter running (for some reason, Afflicted was my only mod that stuck through the patch update), but it seemed pretty good. Spell dps is going to make up a much larger part of the enhancement shaman’s output percentages. I’m interested to see where that takes us.

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…

Leveling Specs for WLK, Part III – Shaman

Between the characters I’ve already considered (the warrior and the paladin), I only know that I will be getting the warrior to 80 first. So far as the rest of my characters go, I don’t think I will be setting an order. I’ll play whatever seems interesting to me at the time. (In that vein, we’ll see if I level the priest at all! In fairness, I did spec him holy and heal a Gruul’s run, but I don’t know if I’ll stick with it.)

So, next I’ve chosen the shaman. I don’t think there’s much to debate here; she’ll most assuredly stay enhancement. It was a fun spec to level, remains a fun spec to play…going to stick with it.

The one thing I’ll change up is going back from her current 0/47/14 over to a 15/46/0 and move up in enhancement from there. Except no!

I got a better look at the new shaman trees yesterday evening after starting this post. Holy crap is the enhancement tree pretty much, as it stands, just all kinds of insane. For Vaexxi at level 80, playing with Blizzard’s talent tree calculators, I ended up with an 11/60/0 spec.

What I’m currently worried about most is mana, and for two reasons:

1) First, I’ll be using Lightning Shield instead of Water Shield. Water Shield currently gives the shaman 50 mp5, assuming no damage is taken. Reason: I believe the talent is called Maelstrom Weapons, or maybe that’s the next one I’ll be discussing. Regardless, this one gives your regular melee attacks a 6% chance (at 3 points) to hit your target with one of your Lightning Shield orbs, and increases the number of orbs it has by 3 (also at 3 points). So, not only am I going without Water Shield, I’ll be refreshing Lightning Shield every once in a while.

2) If that last talent wasn’t called Maelstrom Weapons then this one was. When the shaman critically strikes, s/he gains a buff that decreases the cast time of his/her next Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, or Lava Burst spell by 20%. This can stack up to 5 times. ie, a 100% decreased cast time…instant-cast. Tossing lightning bolts around is going to increase mana expenditures by quite a bit.

My proposition here would be to give the first talent I mentioned (whatever it’s name happens to be) a chance to do have the same effect with Water Shield. This way the shaman could perhaps alternate between the two shields.

Now, offsetting the entire argument is the fact that there’s another talent, way way back in the tree (I think 3rd or 4th tier) that increases the shaman’s attack power by 100% of his/her intellect. This will increase the value of intellect fairly substantially, allowing for more of a base mana pool to work with.

(Currently, enhancement shaman do not have mana problems. Mana Shield is really the only good choice, and their shock costs are so reduced by their version of clearcasting that they go through very little mana, keeping dps flowing high for long periods of time.)

I suppose we’ll just have to use Shammervate more often. Right now I basically only use this ability if I’ve had to do a lot of self-healing or if I die mid-fight and am battle rez’d or reincarnate.

Speaking of dying, I have threat problems right now! If I’m going to be casting (non-threat reduced) lightning bolts every once in a while in addition to the damage I’m doing now, I’m going to end up severely threat capped. And unfortunately, from what I’ve read, the threat output of most tanks (except protadins) is being nerfed. Maybe they’ll compensate for that with this “we want tanks to feel their damage is meaningful” thing, but now that we don’t have Salvation (or Tranquil Air) it’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

Next, everyone remember how all of the crit/hit/haste stuff is getting combined? If you have an item with critical strike rating on it, it will, in the expansion, affect both your melee and spell attacks. I’m not sure if this applies to crit chance gained from agility (where I think a lot of my shaman’s melee crit currently comes from), but let’s say it did. She’s got a 29-30% melee crit chance as it currently stands. If that becomes spell crit chance as well…

See, there’s this talent in the Elemental tree called “Elemental Devastation.” Aside from sounding pretty awesome, it currently is not a valuable talent for either elemental or enhancement spec shaman. The talent increases your melee crit chance for a time after achieving a critical strike with a spell. It’s a pretty cool hybrid talent, but currently not useful to either spec:

1) An elemental shaman would prefer not to be in melee at all, and if s/he is, the small increase in melee crit this provides will not be doing much to increase the damage of his or her 40 dps caster weapon.

2) An enhancement shaman will have, in enhancement gear, about a 5%, maybe 6% chance to crit with spells. This results in a very poor amount of uptime for this talent, and the points are more wisely spent elsewhere. Also, the talent requires 15 points in elemental, which is more than most enhancement shaman care to spend there.

However, that second lack of viability will be rendered null if all crit chance is the same. And it has been buffed, both moved higher in the tree (now requiring 5 points instead of 15 (tier 2 instead of 4)) and increasing melee crit chance by 9% at 3 points (instead of the 3% it is currently, I believe).

This is going to produce some sick burst damage. Paladins just had theirs nerfed (10k+ judgements lawl (Art of War is now a completely different talent)), I expect them to come through and amend this insanity.

Leveling Specs for WLK, Part II – Paladin

Ah, Zerei. Everyone’s favorite healbot and AoE tank. How do we get you to 80?

To put it plainly, I don’t know yet!

I’d like to go Ret for leveling. I miss the ol’ face smash spec, and Divine Storm sounds pretty awesome. Similarly to Niemandra, however, I can only assume she’ll be called on to tank or heal from time to time. I might have to just bite the bullet and pay the respec costs all the time on this one.

So, for leveling, I’ll be taking the usual leap into Ret. Probably the same leap that many others will be taking, all the way down to Divine Storm. I’d like to save Badges of Justice for the 2-handed axe to use for this purpose, but if I don’t quite get that far I’ll just use the ol’ Gorehowl and upgrade it with some quest green XD

For the rest of the points, I’ll put some in Prot (not sure how far, but I know Divine Strength is being moved there) and most of the rest in Holy. Enough for some healing talents to limit downtime and increase the effectiveness of self-heals when I need to bubble. This is how I leveled to 67 in the first place, slowly crawling towards what would have been 17/0/44. Now it’ll probably be more like 10/8/53 or 13/5/53:

Holy:
5/5 Divine Intellect
5/5 Spiritual Focus (or whatever it’s called, 70% pushback resistance for heals)
(3/3 Healing Light)*

Prot:
5/5 Divine Strength
(3/3 Precision)*

Ret:
(the usual stuff, using the remainder of the 53 points)

* one or the other of these

I’ve looked at the paladin trees far less than I have the warrior ones, but I can say that I’m far more excited about what I’ll do at 80 with this character than I am with how I’ll level it.

Holy (namely, Beacon of Light) looks positively awesome. As fun as AoE tanking is sometimes, I might just have to go for this instead.

Leveling Specs for WLK, Part I – Warrior

It’s July, and pretty much the end of it.  I think we have 4 months to the day until the projected release date of Wrath.  I myself, having little else to do, have started thinking of how I’m going to level my toons to 80, and what specs they’ll use.

First, Niemandra.  She’ll be getting to 80 first.

I think what I’ll do here is go for a hybrid fury/prot build.  The protection points should help for all those times I know I’m going to have to tank.  I seem to remember some things about Defiance changing, perhaps the threat bonus being rolled into Defensive Stance by default, but I’m not sure.  At any rate, assuming Defiance remains as it is, I’d be going as deep as that, and probably no farther.  Tactical Mastery will be a must for the bonus threat to Bloodthirst, a talent I’ll get from Fury.

The protection contribution will be something like this:

2/2 Improved Bloodrage
3/3 Tactical Mastery
5/5 Toughness
3/3 Defiance

13 points total.  I will probably respec into this the day WLK hits the shelves, so to speak (it’s irrelevant to me what it hits, I’ll have it shipped to my house).

That leaves, at 70, 48 points for me to spend in Fury.

My main objective here is Titan’s Grip – allows me to dual-wield 2-handed weapons, compensated for by an attack speed penalty.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure of everything I’d be taking in this tree (I don’t really have any of the new talents memorized yet), but:

5/5 Cruelty
5/5 Unbridled Wrath
1/1 Piercing Howl
3/3 Blood Craze
1/5 Commanding Presence
5/5 Dual-Wield Specialization
5/5 Enrage
1/1 Sweeping Strikes
5/5 Flurry
3/3 Precision
1/1 Bloodthirst
5/5 Improved Berserker Stance
1/1 Rampage
1/5 (the +% stam / -% zerker stance threat talent)
4/5 Titan Grip

Alternatively, I could take one point out of Titan Grip and put that in Last Stand, over in prot, for the extra “aw crap” button.

Ideally, I’d tank dual-wielding, using Sunder Armor and Revenge (and Bloodthirst in lieu of Shield Slam) frequently to hold threat. I’ve reasoned that if I’ll kick out more threat per second at the expense of taking more damage (not using a shield), that’s better than not holding threat and letting mobs one-shot the mage. By my guess, having to use a shield in this build would probably decrease the incoming damage I take by about 5% while simultaneously decreasing my rage and threat generation by about 30% (and decrease my damage output by a similar percentage). I’m pretty sure that’s not worth it.

I’ve tanked all of SV in Berserker Stance, and tanked the end boss of that with Recklessness up. I should be able to take on introductory WLK instances in defensive stance, perhaps in PvP gear. Time will tell, though.

From this point in the spec, I think I would finish up Fury (filling Titan Grip), getting to…Shockwave? I think? That will be level 72. I’m not sure what this talent is for, really (pvp? doesn’t seem to be worth it, damage-wise) but I think it will help me hold aggro on multiple mobs alongside Thunderclap.

From there, I will end up making a decision between Improved Revenge and filling the talent I couldn’t remember the name of above. Level 76…4 points left. There is a talent, if I remember right, on the opposite side of Rampage from the above unnamed talent, that allows you to decrease the cast time of your next Slam by X amount of time when you crit with Bloodthirst. Would 4 points allow me to fill that (as well as Improved Slam)? Would that make it instant-cast? That sounds delectable.

If that’s not possible…I’d fill the +% stam / -% threat talent.

And then, at 70 80, back to Arms. Mortal Strike for PvP or Blood Frenzy for PvE.

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.