WoW - continued

[Relic]

my fully arcane buddy helped my guild out in Gruul's last night. 1,400 dps. Ridiculous. Think im gonna let him play my pally and ill take his mage for our drunken kara run later.

edited to add his armory profile -

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.x...nis&n=Legal

[Minaku]

Fez, all the suggestions are good. But I wanted to touch on fire dps, since fire is my preferred tree and I have been and always will be fire (despite my current arcane spec, which Schnee decided on because I let him play my mage).

I leveled as fire. I learned how to play mage as fire. The reason why I think fire is a good spec for leveling is because it has very little room for error. As a mage you need to take into account the following things every time you come up onto a pull with multiple mobs:

1. How close are these mobs, and are they social? Are they grouped together?

2. How many mobs can I handle at once without dropping below 85% health? What can I sheep, silence, ward out of?

3. What kind of terrain advantages are there?

4. Where is my exit? Where can I blink, and how far can I kite?

5. What is my ping time?

Frost mages tend to just run in and go. In my experience many frost mages are less careful about their surroundings because once they get the talents to do so, they can iceblock, they can ice barrier, they can cold snap and double frost nova. Not so with a fire mage. You learn very quickly what your limitations are as a fire mage, even if the frosties look like they're having more fun.

So I recommend trying fire for leveling. Fire is a great teacher for positioning, range, and aggro control. It also offers very nasty DPS once improved scorch is taken.

Another question that came up was the specifics about 10/48/3 that make it such good dps. I'll do my best to explain as much of that spec as I can.

As a fire mage specced 10/48/3 raid dps, your primary stats will be spell damage, spell hit, spell crit, intellect, stamina, spirit, in that order, with spirit absolutely positively dead last. Because your main nuke is fireball, you get 100% +spell damage because the base cast time is 3.5 seconds. On bosses a maxed out spell hit rating is critical to ensuring you are doing as much damage as possible while getting the least amount of resists possible. Spell crit equals damage and mana return - I'll touch upon that in a bit. I find as a raiding fire mage that I like to stay right at 9k mana, so that means I will sacrifice some crit or damage for intellect. You won't always have a shadow priest in the group and your raid leaders will appreciate the fact that you can sustain DPS for 10 minutes without needing a shaman, shadow priest, or paladin to help you out.

So what makes 10/47(+1)/3 so great? The talents in the fire tree are tailored to deal damage, period. Within itself, the fire tree is incredibly synergistic. There are only 2 talents that I would count as useless filler, which is less than I can say for the frost tree and the arcane tree. But we need a bit of help from arcane and frost first.

2 points in arcane subtlety gives -10 resist for all arcane spells, as well as -40% threat for all arcane spells. This is nice in a heroic when you need to sheep something and make sure it stays sheeped, all without pissing off the rest of the mob group. 3 points in arcane focus ensures that 95% of the time, your sheep will not be resisted. That gives us the five points we need to get to arcane concentration, which is absolutely essential to sustainable fire mage dps.

Arcane concentration gives us a 10% chance to enter a clearcasting state where any damage spell is free. This translates to roughly 10% free spells during any boss fight, which considering some of them are really long is quite handy. We won't always get to use the clearcast for things we want, like casting fireball, but it does indeed come in very handy in the end.

Next we come to the frost tree. Elemental precision gives a +3% hit rating, passively, so when gearing up a mage will only need to hit roughly 190 hit rating to get to 99% hit. Pretty nice, and it saves the mage some itemization slots.

But the real beauty of the 10/48/3 build is the way the fire and arcane trees work together to provide some very nice mana regen bonuses to the mage. The lynchpin of the build is the talent Master of Elements, which on a critical hit refunds you 10% of the base mana cost of any fire or frost spell. Now, the talent Pyromaniac decreases your fireball's mana cost by 3% when maxed out, so when Master of Elements procs it is technically more than 10% mana returned. On top of that, a fire mage's spell crit should be between 30-35%. The mana return is abundant. Between clearcast and master of elements, in addition to a high dps, low dpm spell (scorch!) a fire mage will be able to dps for a long time.

The fire tree adds a lot of spell critical bonuses (somewhere between 10-12%, nothing to laugh at) as well as overall damage to all fire nukes. Burning soul reduces threat by 10% and most importantly prevents spell pushback 70% of the time. This is huge. The frost tree does not have a similar talent, and the only arcane talent that is relevant is a talent that prevents pushback/interruption of arcane missiles - not a primary nuke without tier 5 gear. As a fire mage you can stand and cast, feeling relatively safe knowing that your spell will go off in the time it is supposed to go off.

Lastly, a good chunk of fire mage dps stems from the two talents improved scorch and ignite. Improved scorch is wonderful and when in a fight that will last a few minutes at least, you should always open up with 5 scorches to increase fire vulnerability by 10%. Now, because the fire mage spell crit chance is so high, ignite does plenty of work, as it is a dot that ticks twice for 40% of the critical strike received. Increase fire vulnerability by 10%. Now, add full spell hit rating, mana return on critical strike, decreased threat generation, a dot that procs upon critical strike, a clearcasting state that will proc 10% of the time, talents that increase damage while decreasing mana cost, and you see why the 10/48/3 build is so beautiful.

Hope that covers everything you'll ever need to know regarding that one build.

Edit: SHOOT, I forgot Molten Fury!

Molten Fury is simple. At 20% it kicks in and ensures that you will do 20% more damage with all spells for the last 20% of that mob/player's life. When it comes to boss fights that is a really good boost in dps. My fire mage has 900 +dmg with 30% spell crit. Normal fireballs will hit for about 2800 and crit for roughly 3500. With molten fury, imp scorch, and a trinket, my normal hits are in the 3000s. My crits are mid-4000s. If you're not used to seeing huge numbers like that the dps is, to quote Kalgan, "Jaw-dropping". I'm waiting for some more +dmg so that I can crit 5k without needing shadow weaving or any other debuffs but mine.

[Fez]

Well you've convinced me. Hot damn, thanks for all info.

I have heard though that a fair amount of late level raids (or maybe just late level in the 'old world', I don't remember) are very resistant to fire, so eventually i'll need to respec and learn arcane and/or frost instead, is that true?

[Minaku]

Well you've convinced me. Hot damn, thanks for all info.

I have heard though that a fair amount of late level raids (or maybe just late level in the 'old world', I don't remember) are very resistant to fire, so eventually i'll need to respec and learn arcane and/or frost instead, is that true?

Depends. If you're going into Blackwing Lair then frost is the better bet (or arcane now that it's somewhat viable). Otherwise, fire is viable for every single fight up until Tempest Keep, where it is advisable to use arcane for a while. (Thanks Blizz for making Al'ar immune to fire spells.) After that, with tier 5 gear, arcane is very nice, but the reversal of the damage tax in a few months will probably give fire the edge again and put it back in its rightful place as the DPS tree of choice.

The only area where fire is terrible is PvP. I miss the days of fire being good at that.

[Kalbear]

The reason why I think fire is a good spec for leveling is because it has very little room for error.

This sounds exactly like the reason not to spec fire for leveling a person's first character ever.

[Minaku]

This sounds exactly like the reason not to spec fire for leveling a person's first character ever.

Personally, I would rather learn it the hard way so that things become easier later on versus learning it the easy way and then graduating to progressively harder characters. The penalty for death isn't very stiff at all. Learn as much as you can, I say, and then it's easier from there. Honestly, fire is difficult but it's also fun as hell when you take on 4 mobs at the same time and win with no problem whatsoever. Not to mention that as fire you have so many moves in your arsenal it's not even funny. The only new offensive spell in frost is the water elemental. Meanwhile, in fire you get pyroblast, blastwave, and dragon's breath. You've got an instant (fireblast), a quick, low dpm spell (scorch), a longish nuke (fireball), and the longest damn nuke in the game (pyroblast). Then you receive two more options for instant cast, high damage spells. Frost gets... frostbolt..

I have the same philosophy when teaching piano. Teach the hard things first - intervals, note reading, rhythm, correct position. Understand what the directions are telling you. The faster it's ingrained the easier progression becomes. Better to know the notes and read them than to rely on hand positions for everything.

[Zadok]

Honestly there really isn't much of a difference for solo leveling between Fire and Frost. You spam the *bolt and Frost Nova if anything gets near you. Those Fire instas are good for Battlegrounds PvP or something but woefully mana inefficient for soloing.

[PhelanArcetus]

Scorch works fine for soloing too. Hell, if you can't keep your distance, Scorch is the best thing short of instants, since it's normally not pushed back due to the short cast time. I just wish a few more of the fire mages I know would realize that on a long fight, it's best to put up Scorch and then switch to (fully talented) Fireball (aside from refreshing the Scorch debuff). Instead, I have one mage who only uses Scorch, and another who only uses Fireball. The synergy is good, but if the scorch mage switched to fireball aside from laying the debuff, it'd be even better damage.

But I'm no mage. My mage is coming out of retirement long enough to hit one Zangar quest with a friend's druid, because doing so will net us 5 Scroll of Strength V. Which will let us craft some shoulders for myself, him, and another friend.

Tanked shadow lab to help get a friend up to revered with lower city, so now all three of her 70s are keyed for all heroics. And then she tanked Sethekk Halls for my paladin. The guy is now almost 67, and would be if I hadn't had to spend well over an hour skilling up polearms. I went from 1 to 208 or so on a 46 scorpid near Caverns of Time... in almost 10 minutes. I went from 240 or so to 290 or so fighting a clefthoof. It took 21 and a half minutes. Also got to run Auchenai Crypts on my rogue, heroic. I hadn't realized I didn't have Felsteel Gloves pattern until it dropped, so hey, one less pattern I don't know. And I picked up a new cloak as well. Just need to get it enchanted, and I'm up to 218 hit rating.

A paladin with 20k hp actually probably wouldn't be able to heal himself up to full before going out of mana. Max-rank, untalented, no +healing Flash of Light heals 475 on average for 180 mana. I'll go back to my friend, who I see is buffed on the armory up to a little over 14k. He has 268 healing (actually spell damage), which would bring his Flashes up to around 590. So that's roughly 25 casts to fill up his health bar. He has the mana for 32, from full. Ok, I expected that to turn out worse. But if he were to have 6k more health, he would almost assuredly not be getting more mana or healing.

[Stego]

And if he gets a heal from elsewhere, he also gets mana.

Look, it would unbalance the game.

[Minaku]

Scorch works fine for soloing too. Hell, if you can't keep your distance, Scorch is the best thing short of instants, since it's normally not pushed back due to the short cast time. I just wish a few more of the fire mages I know would realize that on a long fight, it's best to put up Scorch and then switch to (fully talented) Fireball (aside from refreshing the Scorch debuff). Instead, I have one mage who only uses Scorch, and another who only uses Fireball. The synergy is good, but if the scorch mage switched to fireball aside from laying the debuff, it'd be even better damage.

Well, no one ever said that mages were smart, just that they need a lot of intellect. To be quite honest I've seen my share of idiot mages, like the guy who said he only trained frost and so he couldn't give my priest an intellect buff... and then later buffed himself with a wis pot.

[PhelanArcetus]

And if he gets a heal from elsewhere, he also gets mana.

Look, it would unbalance the game.

Oh, a paladin with 20k hp won't be balanced until after warriors have a good deal more than 20k, but it wouldn't imbalance the game as much as I interpreted your statement to indicate.

Hell, my ability to heal myself (no tanking gear involved) allowed me to spend 21 minutes killing one mob. Had I been on my warrior, I would have reached 30% health, say, and decided to swap to a weapon I had trained to kill the thing, then heal up. Instead I did nothing but autoattack, refresh blessing of wisdom, and heal myself. If paladins could make 20k hp and have good healing throughput, that would be incredibly unbalanced, but having 20k hp and no healing throughput or damage output wouldn't actually be that big an issue. The guys who fit themselves in between the extremes, however, would be the real problem.

As far as mages... unfortunately, nothing requires the player of any class to be smart. I have people I raid with whose talent trees look like they found a button to pick random talents. For example, my favorite poster child for this sillyness is a priest, who is, for some reason, the main healer. Highlights of nonsensical talents:

- 1 point in Spirit Tap (if you get a killing blow you regen faster for a bit. 5 point talent. One point gives a 20% chance for the talent to proc.)

- One point in Inspiration (crit heals grant bonus armor to the target). Good talent, but one point?

- 1 point in Surge of Light (25% chance to get a free instant cast smite after a spell crit).

- 4/5 Spiritual Healing (5/5 without the talent above would have the same spec effect and, well, make more sense; 8% healing boost, but why not 10? What did you grab that's better?)

- 4/5 Mental Agility. Again, fill it out.

- 1/2 Improved Divine Spirit. Fill it out.

Aside from a bunch of messes, it's basically a semi-classic priest spec. 23/38 gives close to as much healing as full Holy, as well as Improved Divine Spirit (though the hardcore people put one priest like this and all other healing priests go at least 40 Holy). But with many choices that only make sense if she also PvPs regularly. And I don't think she does so seriously.

I've seen similar on other of her characters, for that matter.

I did think the "only trained one talent tree's corresponding spells" thing was mostly a shadow priest thing, but I'm not that surprised that it's elsewhere as well. Then again, the priest above used to not know Power Word: Shield was a priest spell. And used a mod (pre 2.0 killing such things) to heal for her; all she had to do was mash a button which then decided what spell to cast on what target. Because healing (at the 5-man level, not even heroics) was too stressful.

[GoN]

Has your priest at least worked on Aldor/Scyer reputation?

If s/he's not worked out that PWS is a priest spell, and having seen his/her spec, what do you think the odds of that are?

[Kalbear]

This weekend was so damn much fun. BRD was awesome. That was the first time I'd been able to play with GoN, and it rocked hard. I totally want to run BRD until I get to 60.

Thanks, GoN, Ezrie and Terra.

The penalty for death isn't very stiff at all. Learn as much as you can, I say, and then it's easier from there.

The penalty for death often is 'this game isn't fun and I hate this spec/class'. Depends on the person; some people enjoy really hard games and dying over and over again. A lot of people really don't like that and want to have a more relaxed game.

[Kalbear]

Also, Ro - you are the tank!

[PhelanArcetus]

That priest isn't me, of course. The mention of PW:S dates back to running AQ20. She commented that someone should shield the hunter going off to pull that first room, with the many fast-moving patrols. The reply was "well, you're in his group, go do it." Hilarity ensued.

Maybe it is not knowing how to respec (though she's not in a guild of idiots); she has similar weirdness on every character I know to be her.

I know there have been shadow priests who flat out refused to train non-shadow spells, or collect non-damage gear, so that they simply couldn't be forced to heal. And this predated the time when they were extremely sought-after because of Vampiric Touch.

[The Warlock of Qarth]

God, I hate druids in Arena. Come out and fight like a @#$%ing man...or bear....or cat....or mutated chicken! Me and my warlock buddy encountered the same warrior/druid team 3 times in a row and gods, did that little druid turd know how to exploit those pillars. Combined with the ridiculously overpowered druid HoT's we got spanked badly and we lost nearly 100 points of our rating. Maybe I should go PvE again. Heck, I even specced Frost to stand a chance in Arena, even though Fire is a 100 times more fun. Still, I finally got the Merciless Gladiator's Staff, which is why I started Arena in the first place, perhaps I should find myself a nice raiding community and do some nice, casual raiding. At least Illidan and co. have the decency not to spend 85% of their time running around a pillar.

[Intercept]

Maybe they need more Molten Core raids then.

But I think if Blizzard constructs things so that there's only the one choice that works, and nothing else is viable at all for a particularly important part of the content spectrum....their might be a problem.

There's a reason the various talent trees try to each have a mix of PVP/PVE relevant abilities, and it's to try to give folks something to try besides just doing X or else.

That's not the game I want.

NO.

The most idiotic thing implemented in WoW was when PvE gear > PvP gear for PvP, and on top of that, PvE gear was easier to get. The second most idiotic thing was when they would nerf entire trees of DPS, and require you to farm resist gear.

If they made two simple changes to Fire, they could make it viable for PvP, and I would respec and never ever look back. Frost is horribly boring but it's also the only Arena spec where you don't die in 2 seconds.

[Kalbear]

The most idiotic thing implemented in WoW was when PvE gear > PvP gear for PvP, and on top of that, PvE gear was easier to get.

And I guess the most idiotic thing now is that PvP gear > PvE gear, and is easier to get.

[Intercept]

Well you've convinced me. Hot damn, thanks for all info.

I have heard though that a fair amount of late level raids (or maybe just late level in the 'old world', I don't remember) are very resistant to fire, so eventually i'll need to respec and learn arcane and/or frost instead, is that true?

Guilds still go to MC and BWL?

Here's a better question: Why would they want to? Those places were terrible. I almost never raid anymore because every raid encounter is the same for DPS. It's always:

1. Spam your 1 button alot while standing completely inert.

2. Variations of spamming your 1 button alot, but popping your mana items so it's done as efficiently as possible.

Once in a while you'll have a fight where you actually do something as DPS. Blizzard might throw a bone and say, "You need a silence here" or "DPS has to move around until the boss stays still again", but it's all the same thing. That's why I'm to thankful for Arenas.

Fire is very viable for PvP. In fact I survive much longer in BG when I'm Fire than when I'm Frost. What it ISN'T viable for is Arena. You could sort of make it work if you were elementalist and you had atleast up to Iceblock, but otherwise you'd get focus fired and die within seconds. We don't have Blessed Resilience, PW: S or lame ass 40% damage mitigation with Soul Link, Siphon Life and Drain Life.

Without Iceblock you will die hopelessly in Arena from any time with a 1750+ rating. Deep Fire you could pull off in 2v2.

[Intercept]

And I guess the most idiotic thing now is that PvP gear > PvE gear, and is easier to get.

What's your Arena rating?