Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘dps’

I have recently been contemplating a switch from social 10-man raiding to a more hardcore 25-man raiding.

The difference (for me) between social and hardcore is a difference of focus. It is not a difference of skill, of time, of knowledge, I see it simply as a difference of focus.

A social raid focus on bringing the humans behind the toons, and may end up with for example two warriors tanking, two paladins healing, three mages dps’ing but no priest and no shaman.

A hardcore raid focus on bringing the toons, on the on-line world, and making sure that the raid is balanced class-wise to get as many possible abilities and buffs at hand to maximise the chances of being able to handle all kinds of situations, to maximise the chances of success.

A social raid chooses the players first, and the toons they play tag along. The goal is of course to see content, to down bosses and perhaps even to do achievements and hard modes, but their focus is on having a good night out with friends, and if the raid halter a bit because one or more of the players are not exactly up to speed, the raid works around that somehow.

A hardcore raid chooses the encounters first and the toons they need to beat these encounters, and the players who control them tag along. Their goal is the same as the social raids, and this goal is also their focus. Content, bosses, achievements and hard modes, and if a player is not up to speed she must learn to be so or she will not raid again.

One way is not more right than the other, it is simply two different ways of playing the game. One is bringing a bunch of friends and see how far you get, the other is deciding how far you want to go and seeing which friends you need to bring to get there.

However, as I was doing this contemplating, I’ve come to realise that the difference is larger than I initially though. It is not just a difference in which players or classes you bring, which goals you set up or how you deal with players who can’t meet the requirements of the encounters.

It is also a difference in how you treat your own toon.

I’ve come to realise that I will have to look over my gear and possibly probably certainly need to do some regemming and re-enchanting and even altering my selection criteria for what I pick to wear.

In a social raid, you are never quite sure what kinds of buffs and abilities you will get. Even though many buffs overlap nowadays, you can never be 100% certain you will have Replenishment, Blessing of Wisdom or Mana Spring totem, Spirit or Intellect buffs, just to name a few healery-related buffs. Or if you dps you can never be 100% certain you will run with a draenei in the group for that nice 1% extra hit chance.

Most likely you will have these buffs available, but you can never be certain and this uncertainty makes you gear your toon to be self-sufficient.

You don’t want to end up out of mana half way through the bossfight because all your replenishing friends were out of town that night. You don’t want to see your heavy hitting spells miss the boss because without that pretty draenei shaman in your group you are not hit-capped.

But it is different in a hardcore setting, and especially so in a 25-man setting. You know you will have Replenishment, you know you will have Intellect and Spirit and mana regenerating buffs. You know you will run with a draenei.

It frees you up to increase your spellpower, haste and crit and lower your mp5. It frees you up to replace those hit rating gems and enchants with something else.

If I ever get the opportunity to go down the way to the 25mans hardcore raiding I will have to stop being so damned self-sufficient and start relying on other people to be there.

It is kind of scary actually, like standing on a top of a high bridge with a bungee cord tied around your feet, contemplating the jump, knowing it will be a wonderful thrilling exhilarating experience, but still dreadfully afraid that you just will go splat at the bottom instead of bouncing back up.

Remember how I talked about the painfulness of being at the low end of the dps meter?

I modified Paynne’s spec a bit to a variety of the Felguard/Emberstorm spec, put Incinerate on that easy-to-reach key where I used to have Shadow Bolt, and dove head first into the world of raiding again. And it payed off!

Paynne is at the top of the DPS chart!!

Admittedly, this is on one fight only, and one that is very good if you are an aoe’ing dps class, but look at the stats from the last time Paynne was there:

In these 2 weeks since that first Gluth fight she has almost doubled her total dps output and went from a measly 2300 dps to more than 3900.

Granted, she has had a few gear upgrades, but mostly her boosted dps is a result of me sitting down and actually looking around for a spec that would suit me for both raiding and solo play. This spec is allegedly not putting out as much hurt as an affliction one, but it is also allegedly a lot easier to play since you don’t have to keep track of a lot of different dots ticking down.

This is how I play it:

Trash packs

Dot a mob up with Curse of Agony and Corruption and send the Felguard in with his Cleave enabled, empowering him whenever it comes off cooldown. The shadow damage ticks from the dots will proc Molten Core, and you rain fire down on the mobs’ heads. See all the pretty yellow numbers pop up on your screen!

Bosses or single-target trash mobs

Dot dot dot (no, I am not referring to Mamma Mia) the big ugly mofo with Curse of Agony,  Corruption and Immolate and start spamming him with Incinerate. Send the Felguard and empower him as often as you can. Like before, the dots will trigger Molten Core, and take care to always keep a fresh Immolate up for the damage increase to Incinerate.

See, not very difficult! :-)

So, the raiding is going ok with this spec, but how about the solo play and questing?

Well, since this spec leaves Paynne with only rank 1 in Mana Feed and completely devoid of the Fel Synergy and the Demonic Resilience, her Felguard is a bit more fragile when he is taking on the mobs as a tank instead of a dps, and she needs to Life Tap and  feed him up a lot more often than before. It’s not a huge difference in questing speed, and the increased raid damage makes her more than willing to live with it :-)

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Feral(Cat)

And what are the preferred stats for the kitty-cat? You didn’t think it would be the same as for the cuddly bear, now would you? Well, there is one stat both the cat and bear want – Agility, but generally if you are dressing for cat you take your bear gear and shove it down your bags.

A druid in cat form is a lean mean killing machine, a sleek and furry bullet aimed straight at the enemy and your goal is to make sure they don’t know what hit them before they are dead.

The key to hit the mobs hard is to stack up on Attack Power (AP). The more AP you have, the more pain you deal to the mobs.

Attack Power is a stat of its own and many items sports something like “Equip: Increases attack power by “some number here”.

A druid in cat form also gets AP from Agility and Strength. One point of Agility gives one AP but one point of Strength gives two AP. Would seem that Strength is better then? Well, that is a tricky question, because it so happens that one point of Agility also increases the Crit chance, and thus the total dps of your cat.

So Strength or Agility? Well, for a lvl 70 cat druid there seems to be an equilibrium point at around 225 dps accordning to wowwiki.com if you have the talents Heart of the Wild and the Predatory Instincts.Check you character’s melee tab and the Damage info to see how much your dps is.

Until you reach that number it is more beneficial to your AP to stack up on Strength, after that the increased Crit chance from the Agility will give more total dps.

Another nice talent for the cat to have is the Naturalist talent from the second tier in the Resto tree – not unattainable for a feral druid, especially since you most likely want the Omen of Clarity, which requires at least 10 Resto points.

However, what is the use of having a paw like a sledgehammer if you miss your target and drives that sledge deep down into the flag stones instead? Ouch, that would be painful for you, not the mob! Let’s make sure you hit that mob next time, ok?

A single-wield (or maybe I should say single-paw) white damage attack or special attack (your Mangle, Claw and all those others energy-costing attacks you do) has a base chance to miss a lvl 73 mob of 9 % (yes, we are talking raid bosses again). You can decrease this by increasing your Hit rating and when you have 142 Hit rating you will have done all that is in your powers to do to eliminate the chance that you may miss the mob.

A new stat introduced in patch 2.3 is Expertise, and it affects the chance that your target will dodge or parry your attacks. As a true feral sneaky cat, however, you are not really planning on attacking something up front are you? Attacks from behind can’t be dodged or parried, so this is not a stat you have to worry that much about ;P

So to conclude this short stats speech, a kitty-cat brimming with AP, Strength, Agility and Hit rating is a kitty-cat you don’t wanna mess with.

Stay tuned, next episode of this Feral Druid’s Illustrated Primer will deal with Feral(Healer).

Until then!

News Flash: Jools is insanely happy! After having killed about 200 ogre geomancers and about three times that amount of skirmishers in Blade’s Edge over a period of two months or so, it finally dropped! The recipe for [Enchant Bracer: Spellpower]!

Only thing not so fun was the mats required for the enchant…6 large prismatic shards, 6 primal fires and 6 primal waters…with those mats you would have expected the enchant to give 150 spellpower instead of 15…ah well, I got the recipe and gotta start looking for somethinhg else to farm for when I have a moment to spare :-)

Back to the usual stuff:

As you probably know already, I respecced Jools to holy recently and immediately ran into trouble gear-wise. What is she supposed to wear? How can she improve her healing bonus to the max?

Every holy priest dress list mentions the Primal Moonclothe set as the absolutely best for a holy priest. Well, I am not gonna drop my 375 enchanting or my 375 jewelcrafting to pick up tailoring, so what else is there?

Not much actually. Well, now I tell a lie again, there is pretty much, but not much that is achievable for me, casual player with too many girls to take care of (damned be that alt-itis of mine!). Drops from Kara, heroics, ZA, pvp vendors or BoE stuff from the Trade Channel or the AH is what I have to dress Jools in.

Btw, and this I didn’t realise until recently, have you noticed how aptly named Jools is for a 375 JC? Hihi…

There is a chest that drops from Nalorakk in ZA, and there is a chest that drops from Julianne in Kara. Both are pretty nice and both are pretty hard to get.

There is the hallowed set ofc, which requires a lot of instance going and good luck in drops (= really not an option for me then, which all of you avid readers probably know by know….

…optional reading regarding my luck in drops:
The day I specced Jools holy I went for a Kara run. Huntsman, Moroes, Maiden, Opera, Curator, Chess and Aran went down that night. These bosses dropped in total
- 0 (zero) healing gear that Jools could wear.
- many (a lot!) of other stuff
(Well I am not complaining that bad, I got 4 new shinies that night for my spell damage gear, including the one and only Staff of Infinite Mysteries that Paynne have been longing for so long =( well it aint that bad for a priest either)

It seems that the times I roll goood rolls, like more than 80 or so, are the times when noone else is interested in rolling so I will get the bling-bling whatever I roll, and it feels Fate is just teasing me with this, cause next time when I roll against someone its that customary 10 or lower….oh cruel fate!

…optional reading off)

So I decided to do like everyone else these days, I will go get some honor and buy some sweet shiny epix for my priests healing gear – yeye I know I said I didn’t want to do a lot of bg’s but hey! A girl can change her mind can’t she?

So I go AV for the honor (which goes fast and is fun) and I go AB for the marks (which is slow and pretty painful and have to be spread out through the day to avoid death by acute irritation at your fellow alliance (a guildie of mine called alliance in AB for headless chickens, and I see his point. Very clearly. Too clearly, in fact. Ah well, no pain, no gain…I try to look at it as en exercise in patience and keeping your calm no matter what the world throws at you…))

Anyways, as I went to Alterac Valley I noticed that there usually is enough healing going around on the boss fights, Galv and Drek, so I switched and started nuking instead. This made me curious – is it possible for a holy priest to actually put out some serious spell damage? I am not talking about topping the raid charts, but maybe just a chance to survive out there in the hostile world? And how is the survivability of the holy priest when she goes offensive?

Let’s try to examine this a little.

Jools has about 860 + spell damage unbuffed and a crit chance of 15 % for her Holy spells and about 10 % crit chance for other spells.

How many offensive spells does a Holy NE priest have? Two Holy spells with a cast time, three shadow spells, one dot, one cast spell and one instacast, and one arcane dot.

I am not counting spells like Drain Mana or Holy Nova because they are very situational to use, and I don’t think I have ever used Shadow Word: Death, not even back in the old shady days.

Smite
Now here is a spell with a cool name, smite, smite, smite…mmm just taste the name, not just any other everyday blast-things-away spell but very Old Testament-like, smelling strongly of the crusadery killing of unbelieving infidels, smite-the-mobs-with-the furious wrath-of my-pure-and righteous-faith-kinda spell.

Smite has a 2 sec cast time and does about 1300 Holy damage in her current gear. It crits for about 2000 but not as often as you’d wish (guess 15% is about right).

Holy Fire
Dunno what’s so holy about this one but it looks cool, probably one of the coolest spell animations in the game, with that pillar of white fire blasting the target away…it has a 3 sec cast and hits for about 1100 and with another 450 damage over 10 sec. Isn’t that the most pathetic dot-part ever?

Good thing though about the two holy spells is that they have no cd, so u can keep casting them on and on and on…

Mind Blast
As a Holy priest, MB has a 1,5 sec cast time, an 8 sec cd and does about 1100 Shadow damage.

Shadow Word: Pain
A staple for any priest, regardless of spec. Insta-cast, 2200 Shadow damage ticking over 18 seconds.

Starshards
A Night Elf racial priest skill, an arcane dot that with a 30 sec cd that costs no mana and ticks for abot 1650 over 15 seconds.

So off she went to Shadowmoon to finish those Scryer quests and get a little closer to the coveted shoulder enchant…

And to my surprise and delight it went real well! The mobs went down like snowmen in June and even the occasional add or two was really no problem to handle. Tried it on the warriors, shamans and elekk handlers of Baari and the slayers and chosen of the orc stronghold with the same result.

Usual spell rotation was Shield, Holy Fire, SW:Pain, Starshards and as the mob came running a Smite or two and then wand to death. Reapply Shield if needed.

Psychic Scream and Elune’s Grace helped in the could-be tricky situations of additional mobs turning up, and she took a beating or two, but all in all she did real well and only died a couple of times (and one of those times was when she swam into a group of hordes while doing a quest).

It was a happy holy priest who almost reached revered with the Scryers that day :-)