World of Warcraft

[TerraPrime]

Ini and Min:

Grats :)

Re: Mina

Are fire mages that suck this time around? Trying to google DPS class ranking in 4.0.6 but not much luck. Anyone got a linky?

[Mack Kilimaro]

Did you guys end up going with 2 or 3 healers for Cho'gall?

[Kalbear]

Are fire mages that suck this time around? Trying to google DPS class ranking in 4.0.6 but not much luck. Anyone got a linky?

Fire mages are pretty win. If you look at stateofdps you can see the breakdown, but fire mages are consistently very high. Even when just looking at 10 man normal mode they're way up there.

Fire mages are hard to play well though. There are lots of stupid things that cause issues. But they're the highest mage spec and one of the best DPS specs for both single target and multitarget encounters.

ETA: raidbot has similar numbers, in case you thought it was that one site.

[Minaku]

Mark, we went with 3 healers. No way we'd have it with 2 healers. It was a dps check, pure and simple.

Our highest dps is actually a fire mage. He consistently tops meters at about 15-17k dps. Me, on certain pulls I can hit top dps, and top by far. And then other times, there are crit deserts, something is happening to me, whatever. I keep going over my stats and my gear and I can't for the life of me figure out what the hell is going on. On trash mobs, great dps. No one gives a crap about trash. We move to bosses and it takes a nosedive. I'm at 17.06% hit so that shouldn't be an issue. This is a really frustrating situation for me to be in because there isn't anything wrong with my spec or rotation, and the only thing I'm doing different than the other mage is that I have glyph of living bomb instead of glyph of pyroblast.

I want to smash my head on the wall. My DPS pisses me off.

Last night I pulled anywhere from 9-11k dps on Cho'gall. I kicked myself out. Unacceptable.

[Minaku]

Double post, sorry

[Kalbear]

Minaku, the best way to figure out what's going wrong is log parses. Have you done that yet?

My gut feeling is that the other mage is significantly more responsive and you're letting key debuffs fall off, but without seeing said parses it's just shots in the dark and looking at armories to figure out why you're not doing well.

[Minaku]

It's possible. We do have a WoL from Sunday you could look at. I'll try to get the link later tonight. I don't know if it was run last night, the only thing I have is recount, which is unreliable anyway. I had 9k on mine, and three other people had 11k on theirs.

Edit: goddamn ipad

[Inigima]

Solmyr, I know the warlock set bonuses are weak, but EJ says tier shoulders are BIS. And the guy who won it was a warlock as well. Not a huge deal, I have the Atramedes ones.

I know Lauda didn't run WoL for Cho last night, but he did for Sunday, which includes every other fight. With Mina's okay, here's Sunday's parse. We both did pretty decently on Sunday, though, I think. I would love some warlock critiquing as well, I still feel like a scrub at destro. I'm Lenck, she's Kaedra. http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-1vacnt0v5ii64180/

[Kalbear]

Sure, I'd be happy to take a look.

Asking other mages in the community to take a look is a good thing too.

[Kalbear]

Ini (and whoever else), have you checked out comparebot? It's awesome. For example, here's you compared to the other lock on Magmaw 10

You can compare anyone to anyone else as long as you have a log parse. It's great for comparing to top parses on WoL and seeing where you did right and wrong given the same spec - or comparing to others in your raid and seeing what buffs/debuffs you had.

In particular the buffs/debuffs is telling - you used no pots, no activated trinkets or anything of the sort. There's a big difference, right there. (also, make sure that your tank moves in close to magmaw on the mangle and you move the hell away. I suspect that's why you got crit and munched.

[Inigima]

That is handy, thanks. I have no activateable trinkets, mine are all automatic -- H Sorrowsong and H Anhur's Hymnal. Nor does he, actually, though his trinkets are the Tol Barad one and the Darkmoon Card. I need to be better about using Demon Soul on cooldown, though. He does have nontrivial advantages over me in raw stats though.

[Kalbear]

Sure, but just looking at things like buffs you can get a good idea of why he did better than you on the same fight. If you can activate demon soul more often that's going to be an improvement. If you can use pots that'll be one too.

You can normalize via something like simcraft to determine what you and the other guy should be doing, but I find it's a lot better to actually look at what he IS doing that you're not and make it up from there. I didn't look at uptimes either for you vs him, but I bet his are going to be better overall.

Here's another example: Chimaeron. Things like armor, demon soul, healthstone use - that's all there.

[Solmyr]

Solmyr, I know the warlock set bonuses are weak, but EJ says tier shoulders are BIS. And the guy who won it was a warlock as well. Not a huge deal, I have the Atramedes ones.

Don't take everything EJ says for granted :). There are 2 differences between Mantle of Roaring Flames and Shadowflame mantle. Shadowflame mantle has hit&haste and roaring flames has crit&haste. Crit and haste are the best stats after hit cap and I presume you're already at the hit cap (so am I, for a long time). The only other difference is the socket colour. Roaring flames has blue, Shadowflame has red. Since the socket bonus is 10, you'll always socket 40 intellect anyway, resulting in a new loss of 10 secondary stat. So yes, Shadowflame is BiS, but it's such a small upgrade, warlocks should be the very last people who get it. Thats the reason I actually passed it twice after winning, because the alternative is just as good. Also, roaring flames has a kick-ass skin, especially when you put power torrent on your weapon - the glows sync extremely well ;).

[Mack Kilimaro]

A few weeks ago, a guildie and I decided to make a 2v2 arena team. Neither of us had done much arena-ing before. In my case, I think I'd played a total of about 11 matches ever. We built up with full starter blue PVP gear from honor, gemmed, enchanted, etc. And then we dove in. He is a BM hunter with a shale spider pet, and I am a holy paladin.

I expected that we would lose more games than we'd win, even at the beginning, but we've managed to go 15-10 over three weeks of playing, including 5-1 last night. Every week I go in thinking, okay, this is the week we'll start running into real players and lose all the time. It's more fun than I figured it would be. We seem to be at a pretty strong advantage against any double DPS team, but equally disadvantaged against healer-DPS teams, because they've been playing longer and have better gear than us. But it's tough for them to kill us too, so sometimes there are these 20 minute games where the healers are trying to kill one another. This is surprisingly fun, and really satisfying when we actually manage to kill the holy pally with 102k mana. (I have 86k with the spider's kings buff.)

How much crazier are the bigger arenas? Have we got any past gladiator title winners in the house?

[TerraPrime]

PUG'd on the alliance side last night as resto sham for BWD. Rather fail. Wiped like 10 times on Magmaw.

Anyone familiar with this strat? One tank takes the boss, and one take kite the adds. Instead of having DPS kill the adds, they keep the dps on the boss and just make the offtank kite them around. The healers and casters and melee are stacked up to the left of the boss tank, and we occasionally move out of position to avoid being slammed by a falling worm. The guild that's running it insisted that they one-shot magmaw for 2 months now using this strat. It was first time I saw it. As a healer, it seems more intensive than the regular strat that i'm used to. They had two hunters out there with the kiting tank, and they took a huge amount of damage. I was basically spot-healing tanks and dropping aoe heals, and then focusing on keeping 2 dps alive. We also have a problem of random dps getting one-shotted, because when the tank is in the mouth of magmaw there's no aggro, and when the tank is dropped out if there's a small gap in picking up aggro again, the boss just gimped a dps. We had a shadowpriest that died almost every time to this, during the fight. We've also lost a tree a few times to this.

At any rate, it was just a really annoying pug. We started with magmaw, couldn't down it in like 5 or 6 tries, then left to do baradin, came back and killed it in two more tries. Then we did omotrons in one shot, and then wiped 5 times on Maloriak. They had problems with interrupting too many of the add casts, and then, leaving the aoe one un-interrupted. I don't think the offtank was all there, mentally. Then people just got sick of wiping and the raid ended. It was an odd guild. I heard people say things like "oops, my bow was red the entire last fight" or "lol I was in pvp spec!" In retrospect I should have left earlier. But I don't get much face time on my alliance toon and the guild I am in is not a serious raiding guild. Oh well.

[Solmyr]

Never seen or heard of this Magmaw strategy, but I have considered it myself. Seems too complicated and you lose 1 dps in the face of the offtank right from the start. The only variable Magmaw strategy I've seen (and used) is the one where the entire raid hugs the boss and a single hunter (could be any ranged, but best is hunter) stays as far away as possible, while in range of heals. All the pillars are on him and the raid needs not move, just aoe them as they come to it.

Mack, arenas are fun with any setup until ~1500. At least for us it started getting really competitive then. You start losing a lot, often more than you would've won. And most people you meet are experienced and geared.

[Greywolf2375]

Yeah, it's a reasonable strat to use. We've always done Magmaw with just one player dealing with worms; either a dk or a hunter.

As for the dps getting meleed and killed, I've seen it happen once or twice, but not very often. Not sure whether that's something that the MT can remedy, having never tanked it myself.

We have our prot warrior take the worms with hunters MDing if needed - if he needs help for some reason we have a couple locks AoE. Been doing that for a while without problems. Doesn't get you the achievement, but I'm not concerned about that at this point.

Yes, the tank can make sure that someone else doesn't get creamed. When the vulnerable phase is ending the tank can stop targeting the head, step back into position to tank and taunt as soon as the body starts to move up. Still smart to have DPS step back since taunts can miss, but doing this has helped minimize the phase change deaths.

[Shryke]

PUG'd on the alliance side last night as resto sham for BWD. Rather fail. Wiped like 10 times on Magmaw.

Anyone familiar with this strat? One tank takes the boss, and one take kite the adds. Instead of having DPS kill the adds, they keep the dps on the boss and just make the offtank kite them around. The healers and casters and melee are stacked up to the left of the boss tank, and we occasionally move out of position to avoid being slammed by a falling worm. The guild that's running it insisted that they one-shot magmaw for 2 months now using this strat. It was first time I saw it. As a healer, it seems more intensive than the regular strat that i'm used to. They had two hunters out there with the kiting tank, and they took a huge amount of damage. I was basically spot-healing tanks and dropping aoe heals, and then focusing on keeping 2 dps alive. We also have a problem of random dps getting one-shotted, because when the tank is in the mouth of magmaw there's no aggro, and when the tank is dropped out if there's a small gap in picking up aggro again, the boss just gimped a dps. We had a shadowpriest that died almost every time to this, during the fight. We've also lost a tree a few times to this.

Sounds like a fucking stupid as shit strategy. What's the point? It makes the fight harder for a small unneeded increase in DPS on the boss. Magmaw goes down like a little bitch anyway as long as you don't fuck up the chains. Kill the adds, it's fast and easy as long as all the range switch and then you get back on the boss.

Also, for your melee getting one-shot thing, tell the retards to back the fuck up. It takes a sec for the new tank to grab aggro after chains phase so let him do that.

[Kalbear]

It's similar to the heroic magmaw strat (where you don't kill adds because of the DPS requirements and because they stop spawning after so many come out) but on normal it's hardly necessary.

[Kalbear]

@Minaku: while raidbots isn't comparalizing right now, I can do some looking and compare to folks in my guild. While I don't care about specific damage here since a lot of that is gear, here are some bits.

Looking at this parse of Omnotron 25 with Clov vs your Omnotron10:

- uptime is much worse. >90uptime on living bomb and ignite vs 70ish uptime for you.

- twice as many pyroblast!s with twice as much uptime

- he cast 13 more fireballs than you in 1 minute less time

- ignite tick count is higher, but that's likely due to crit rate

-many fewer scorches

- many more living bombs

- power generator time appears more consistent

I admit I don't know a ton about mages and their mechanics, but that's a good start. When raidbots pops up it'll be easier to tell, and if you have a parse that can compare you and the other mage that'd be better.

ETA: Ah, here we go: comparalized!