WoW - March to Gnomer

[Poobah]

There is no such thing as crit depression; that was the testers fucking up and forgetting that attacks from the front can be blocked. You're correct, but still trying to make sure that people don't go 'wtf is crit depression'.

As far as I am aware, from reading EJ crit depression is a real phenomenon which causes your crit value to be 4.8% less than it looks to be when swinging against a boss. At least threads such as these :

Link and Link

Suggest that in order to crit a boss 76% of the time, with 100% hit chance, one would need 80.8% crit on your char stat screen.

[Kalbear]

From the first link, from Aldriana (of the gloves fame):

Oh, I see what you're saying - it's not a parse bug, but a "there's more crap on the hit table" issue. Upon retesting from behind, I am in fact able to push all hits off the table and get nothing but crits, misses, dodges, and glances. Which confirms that the crit cap is again 4.8% higher than we've been recently thinking.

and the original tester:

I'm ashamed I completely forgot block. Recount even in the newest version (updated after 3.2) doesn't show blocks unless fully blocked. At the time of the tests I didn't have the gear to double check the depression from behind the target, however now that is more or less proved we can safely say the value you must obtain to cap crit is .76-misses - dodges + .048.

I don't know what that shaman is smoking, exactly; his test is totally insane and doesn't understand how the table works at all. The 4.8 is simply an artifact of the level difference of the target; it isn't crit depression at all.

[Kalbear]

Ah, nevermind, I see what you're saying and you're right. The 'crit depression' idea was that not only would you see that you needed 80.8% crit rating to have all crits, 4.8% of those would be hits no matter what. But it turns out that that was just block. You can indeed push all hits off the table entirely.

As you can see from this parse, that's where I'm at now:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/lew1qvaylmlkii91/details/6/?s=4387&e=4658

Though that's mostly because my hit is so low.

[Darkostar]

Heroic Ruby Sanctum AND the Echo Isles/Gnomer events are up on the PTR, for all interested.

[Weak With The Dawn]

As far as I am aware, from reading EJ crit depression is a real phenomenon which causes your crit value to be 4.8% less than it looks to be when swinging against a boss. At least threads such as these :

Link and Link

Suggest that in order to crit a boss 76% of the time, with 100% hit chance, one would need 80.8% crit on your char stat screen.

The rogue spreadsheet, or at least Aldrianas is designed with this in mind and will highlight your hit rating in red when you reach the danger zone.

[Inigima]

Downed BQL on my tree, first time on that fight. Holy shit how can people be so bad at such simple mechanics. Took 10 or 12 tries, no excuse for dying to the same shit over and over.

Highly unorthodox healing setup based on who we had on in guild, though. Three trees, me mainly on tanks, another mainly on raid -- and shitty at it -- and a third, better than me, switch hitting.

God, that was painful.

[Shryke]

Holy shit how can people be so bad at such simple mechanics.

Ahh, the battle-cry of the WoW raider.

[Lyanna Stark]

Downed BQL on my tree, first time on that fight. Holy shit how can people be so bad at such simple mechanics. Took 10 or 12 tries, no excuse for dying to the same shit over and over.

Highly unorthodox healing setup based on who we had on in guild, though. Three trees, me mainly on tanks, another mainly on raid -- and shitty at it -- and a third, better than me, switch hitting.

God, that was painful.

Druids pwn the phat one on Lanathel tho, with all that pulsing AoE damage. We normally run Disc/tree on that, altho we have brought a pala as well, but then the tree is moaning that he's twiddling his thumbs cos of my shields :P

But idd on people being bad at following simple mechanics :P There are what, three things to remember on that fight? We used to have a ret pally who took like 5 seconds to realise he had a HUGE BEAM coming out from him. Fair enough on 25 man if you get blinded by all the glowy graphic effects, but on ten man there isn't that much going on.

[Lyanna Stark]

Gulp. Melee stats are soo frightening sounding!

Hit 71 on the pally. About to queue to tank a random. Got the full set of cobalt stuff (excepting heirlooms of course). 11.3k Self buffed. Also now have Seal of Command. Quite exciting. Will edit to note how I do.

Hmm, why do you have Seal of Command at lvl 71 as prot? Are you missing some nice tanking talents?

Try this spec (or something very similar to it) if you're serious about tanking your way to 80. With all the terribad healers out there, count on some hairy moments. http://www.wowhead.com/talent#sZE0xA0uMGsIufdxo If you feel you often end up in "Oh shit" situations, I'd even start taking Divine Sac/Divine Guardian before the ret talents. The ret talents are really only for threat, and paladin threat is normally quite good anyway until the DPS well outgear you. In dungeons like Ahnkahet and Azjol Nerub, Glyph for Sense Undead and switch it on as tracking, and your threat will be even higher. Make sure to CC, stun or Holy Wrath the spellslingers in AhnKahet and be careful with the pulls in there. They hurt even a T10 geared tank if you overpull unless your healer is very good, and unfortunately most PUG healers range between average and dreadful, you will have to shield wall (i.e. Divine Protection) almost immidiately and hope that n00b healer can find his "HEAL" button.

The good news is paladin tanks are normally quite good in a lot of the WOTLK dungeons since there are lots of undeads. :)

Plus if there is a DPS that annoys you a lot, just cast Hand of Protection on him every CD. Especially when he's popped his DPS cooldowns (mage mirrowimage, for instance) it's fab to see them scream in frustration while you go on your merry way.

I'm thinking of taking my DK down the tank route as well, but it seems so shaky tanking with a DK in a bad group. No BoPs, no mass taunt, no emergency heals, no intervene. I dunno. What gives on DK tanking? And I thought Frost was the best n00b tank spec, but every single tanking DK I see these days are blood. And the DPSers are ofc frost dual wield.

[Inigima]

I agree Cerys, the healing wasn't even really a problem. Just not a traditional setup, is why I mentioned it. I actually almost lost a tank at the end -- I'm not really specced or glyphed to tank heal -- but the paladin popped DP at just the right time, allowing me to spam the shit out of the DK tank and they both stayed up.

I also agree that having Seal of Command at 71 as prot means you're likely to be missing some important stuff although I think I can see how you'd get there. I am specced into Seal of Command as prot at 80 for the sake of easy trash tanking, but that's at 80, and there are some things it meant I couldn't take.

Personally I don't take DSac as prot, although I do as holy. If you do take it, make sure to write a /cancelaura macro since most of the time you won't want to actually take the damage. I use it as holy on Festergut's Pungent Blight, but other than that most of the time I don't need it. There aren't that many times that you can predict heavy raidwide damage, and even fewer where you have time to use the GCDs on it while healing as a paladin.

[Arataniello]

Quick question that probably has a glaringly obvious answer. Got my lock geared to a point where I don't feel emabarassed going into a PuG raid - 4t9, t10 shoulders, Frost emblem cloak, +3000SP.

I am specced affliction, but played around with my toon in Rawr to see if Demo was going to do more DPS. Based on Rawr's model, it doesn't. However, I understood that Demo was the place to be for raiding locks.

The difference in modelled DPS is approximately 200DPS in favor of Affliction.

Am I right in thnking that the raid buff that deep Demo brings to the raid is why Demo is preferred as the raiding spec?

Pugged ICC25 anyway (been in there on all my other toons, first time on this toon) and did OK. At least none of the raid members in the PuG were whining about me not being Demo (we didn't have a shammy either, which made me think I would get some 'suggestions' about respeccing).

[TerraPrime]

Am I right in thnking that the raid buff that deep Demo brings to the raid is why Demo is preferred as the raiding spec?

Yes.

Demo specs always perform worse than either Afflic or Destro specs. However, 25 man raids prefer a Demo lock, because the buff you bring benefits all casters. In a typical ICC25, that's about 6 to 7 dps, plus the healers, who'd be benefitting from the buff. If you are told to raid as a demo lock, be ready to be the bottom 3 DPS output: that's what happened to me. Granted, I wasn't top DPS even in afflic, but at least I was top 10. Now... not so much. But, if you're raiding with a regular group who knows what you're bringing, it's not a big deal.

In a 10 man, unless your group really need that boost, I say go with damage output and go Afflic.

Oh, also, the EJ demo lock guide is not quite right. I've added 500 dps in demo after I used a different rotation. You can check out the WoWhead forum for lock for the guide that someone pointed out to me. Basically:

1. Curse of Doom for fights longer than 1 minute. Switch to Curse of Agony when fight is less than 1 min.*

2. Always refresh Corruption and Immolate

3. In your fillers, use shadowbolt, unless molten core procs. If your molten core is not up, spam sbolt. When it's up, cast the 3 Incinerates. This means that in boss fights where there are little add-ons, like in LK, I cast corruption on all of them to increase the proc time for molten core.

4. Use spellstone, not firestone.

5. Berserk your pet at every cd.

Re: LK

So... any trick to the phase 2 valkyr-defile transition? The DBM timer seems off a few times. The first round, it's clear that valks first, then defile. But the second round seems almost random on whether it's valks first or defile first. That causes a lot of havoc, because we use the strategy of grouping up everyone (except the locks) in the middle during valks, to maximize the DPS time we have. We have dedicated teams of stunners on each valk already, but half the time it's pure chaos because either the defile will come first, just before the valk, and that means a large freaking pool of defile, or it comes just after the valk lands, where we are just beginning to split into 3 groups to dps the valks. I don't think we will have enough DPS to kill the valks if we spread out to the edge.

We've only been able to transition to P3 twice so far.

[Kalbear]

There's no trick. You have to react and do the appropriate thing. What we usually do is preemptively group up but less tightly, and then spread out if we see defile. It's the hardest part of that phase. You just have to practice.

[Inigima]

Quick question that probably has a glaringly obvious answer. Got my lock geared to a point where I don't feel emabarassed going into a PuG raid - 4t9, t10 shoulders, Frost emblem cloak, +3000SP.

I am specced affliction, but played around with my toon in Rawr to see if Demo was going to do more DPS. Based on Rawr's model, it doesn't. However, I understood that Demo was the place to be for raiding locks.

The difference in modelled DPS is approximately 200DPS in favor of Affliction.

Am I right in thnking that the raid buff that deep Demo brings to the raid is why Demo is preferred as the raiding spec?

Pugged ICC25 anyway (been in there on all my other toons, first time on this toon) and did OK. At least none of the raid members in the PuG were whining about me not being Demo (we didn't have a shammy either, which made me think I would get some 'suggestions' about respeccing).

What Terra said; also, the lock specs are close enough in DPS that it isn't a huge deal for your personal DPS which you use, and if you are personally better at playing one spec or another, it may outperform the other specs based on that.

Also, I have no idea about the warlock module specifically and you may already know this, but if you aren't already aware, you should know that the class modules for Rawr are maintained by different people and vary greatly in quality, so Rawr's only worth using for certain classes.

[Migey]

I've never actually reached LK. Im bad with guilds, and the few ive been in have sucked so much that they cant down Sindy. One got to 3% though.

Problem is i cant get into one of the weekly pugs, because, while im easily good enough, im only 10/12 down ICC technically... so :S

Although 55k Inside ICC unbuffed is SWEET. 70K fully raidbuffed <3

[Poobah]

So... any trick to the phase 2 valkyr-defile transition? The DBM timer seems off a few times. The first round, it's clear that valks first, then defile. But the second round seems almost random on whether it's valks first or defile first. That causes a lot of havoc, because we use the strategy of grouping up everyone (except the locks) in the middle during valks, to maximize the DPS time we have. We have dedicated teams of stunners on each valk already, but half the time it's pure chaos because either the defile will come first, just before the valk, and that means a large freaking pool of defile, or it comes just after the valk lands, where we are just beginning to split into 3 groups to dps the valks. I don't think we will have enough DPS to kill the valks if we spread out to the edge.

We've only been able to transition to P3 twice so far.

Tell everyone to set the LK to focus and enlarge their focus frame. Use the thing that shows Target of Target and Focus Target. It's an option in the default blizzard UI, don't need any fancy UI stuff. Designate a direction to run in if you are being targeted by defile, tell everyone else to run the other way. You'll have to move the boss around a bit to make this work every time since if you have your defile target run left then you have a defile to your left so the second guy cant run left unless you move the boss. This seems to be the simplest and easiest way to make defile work well IMO. Works especially well if everyone moves their focus frame into someplace really obvious and uses a mod like Moveanything to make the focus target frame massive. Or if they have some fancy-smancy ui that has a focus/focus target frame.

Then people need only -

a) Be able to recognise their name or lackthereof in the focus target frame when a defile is coming up

B) Be able to tell the difference between left and right and remember which is the appropriate direction to go depending on a)

Once you get the defiles sorted then everything in P2 falls into place.

[Kymeera]

Downed BQL on my tree, first time on that fight. Holy shit how can people be so bad at such simple mechanics. Took 10 or 12 tries, no excuse for dying to the same shit over and over.

We had an app who thought Dark Pact meant run away from everyone else. It was both sad and funny to see the other two people either standing in the middle waiting for him while he's running laps, or trying to chase him down while he was desperately running away. It's even sadder when the raid leader is telling him over and over again to run to the middle, but he keeps running everywhere but the middle. I could understand if it was the first or second time on that fight, but he kept doing it. He even did it on his alt during an ICC10 run a couple of weeks later.

In other news, we downed heroic Lady D the other night. I'm not sure why, but as a boomkin I will devastate the raid if I get MCed. It's so bad that I'm on top priority to get CCed, right up there with the Shadowmourne ret pally. I guess it's because of starfire + lots of crit + 20% buff. The first time I didn't get CCed I killed 3 or 4 people. :blushing:

[Inigima]

We have a new thread due to this thread being over limit: