I'm assuming you've looked at the generally accepted 'BIS' (best in slot lists) posted on Elitist Jerks (if not, check them out here - Frost and Unholy).
So, now you know what to bid on, right?
Actually, it's not that simple.
While the systems vary, almost any loot rules in any raiding guild are built around one primary principle; fairly distribute loot. DUH! Which means, you won't get every single melee/plate dps item that drops. DUH, again! Which means, you'll have to pick and choose what to bid on, prioritizing how best to improve your overall performance as a dps DK. DUH, thrice!
Still, let's think about this for a moment.
What should you do when that lovely shiny purp drops from Magmaw? Bid? Or not?
And how should I spend my Valor Points?
Where does all the other stuff (rep, professions, boe etc) fit in?
I'll share a few ideas, but I'm sure there will be as many different approaches to gear decisions as there are raiding DKs. I DO have a few principles/guidelines that I hope are fairly clear and will make my own (if nobody else's) bidding decisions easier and more efficient/effective.
1. Melee/Plate DPS gear of the same tier is more similar than it is different due to the wonders of reforging. While some pieces are clearly better than others, even the presence of a 'bad' stat isn't as bad as it seems, since you can often reforge much of it away. Example: I bought the Hyjal exalted tank cloak, but reforged dodge to hit. It was a big upgrade over my 333 blue cloak.
2. Think long term. When you have the luxury, pick items that will last you longer.
3. Above all, UPGRADE FIRST, then go for BIS.
Example time:
Last night on Throne of the Four Winds (or, as we call it, ...Of the Monkey Raid) a plate belt dropped. The mystery stats were haste and crit - actually pretty good! My fellow dps DK bid on it, but I did not.
Why not? It would have been a very good item, almost BIS. I didn't bid on it, though, because I already have the Hyjal exalted belt. If I were to have bid on it, and won, I would have lost points, or priority, or my list position, or whatever it is that my guild uses to determine who gets the next epic. And if a nice set of bracers dropped next, I wouldn't be able to get them, even though my 346 blues aren't looking so impressive any more.
Bottom line is; don't bid on a 359 upgrade when you already have a 359 item, yet. Once you have full or nearly-full 359, feel free to bid on BIS items. But for now, while we're gearing up, take items that upgrade blue or green items first.
What about valor?
You can grab the cheaper items first, but they won't give you as much raw stat jumps as a more expensive item does (e.g., the gloves would be a 22 str upgrade while the chest would be a 42 str upgrade). Also, according to #2 above, if I buy a cloak or boots or some such, I could very well be upgrading them soon, while other items (the ring and relic) may last you well into hard modes or beyond. It's actually a fairly tough decision. For me, though, while I find the chest and helm intruiging, I'll probably go with the following.
So here's my plan:
1. Bid only on upgrades from blue 346 gear to epic 359 gear, saving points for bigger upgrades
2. Get all the rep/crafting gear I can. I have the Ramkahen neck which should last until hard modes. I have the Hyjal belt AND back (I reforged the dodge to hit - it will be replaced but is a decent filler for now), and so on. I won't bid on upgrades for my rep/crafted epics until the other slots are upgraded. Sure, Ill hope for a Scirrocco or Zin'roc from archeology, but I'm not holding my breath. I WILL bid on weapon upgrades.
3. Valor: buy a) relic first b) ring second since they both last deep into Tier 11 content. Next, buy the gloves because they're cheap and allow me to get 2-piece Tier bonus sooner rather than later. Dps DK set bonuses are tasty. Next, spend valor on non-set pieces that I don't have an epic in that slot, and then finally on any set pieces I don't have yet.
Well, I've probably gone on long enough about this, but it IS a fairly important process, after all.
Happy Gearing!
Showing posts with label PVE dps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PVE dps. Show all posts
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
Cataclysm Heroics III: DPS DKs
Time for another heroic!
Which one shall it be this time, Mmmm? :P
In the absence of requests, I'll go with Stonecore, which I've found to be quite melee unfriendly. There are a few fight mechanics to perfect, but once accomplished, this heroic should go as smoothly as the others.
Since I've commented on this in my other posts, yes, my guild has started 25-man raiding, so while we're not up there with Paragon just yet, we're working through raiding. Expect raid DK guides to start in a couple of weeks.
Stonecore (sometimes abbreviated as SC) is an unforgiving 5-man for melee in sub-359 gear. I think it's also a little easier than Grim Batol, but still more difficult than VP (Vortex Pinnacle). You get four different types of bosses (gyreworm, drake, elemental, witch), but as the name obviously implies, it's a rocky instance and has the obligatory mineable elementals in it.
The instance is linear and none of the bosses are skippable.
I don't normally talk about trash, but the trash in here just love to eat melee.
The first pull can be a challenge. I believe it's the earth elementals (correct me if I'm wrong) that do a spinning aoe that can wreck the group quickly. A stun will stop them, and as we DKs don't have a stun, we're useless, right? Actually, you can back away a bit, and death grip them, which stops the spin, although a warrior or non-DK tank, a rogue or anyone else with a stun should use it here.
Rock flayers can kill you quickly as well, if your tank isn't aware. The tank needs to face them all in one direction, and then you can get behind them and dps. but when they do their frenzy attack, if you can't get behind them all, run away! I've died a few times to these buggers.
Finally, the big rock elementals (can't remember their names at the moment); they do a big stomp that hurts and can be hard to see when you're on their butt. If you can, watch for the stomp that's bigger and slower than the others, and jump shortly after their foot starts down, and you'll avoid the damage.
Corborus:
The first boss is an elemental gyreworm who shouldn't cause you too many problems. As a dps DK, you obviously need to stay out of crystal barrage, which can kill you fairly quickly on heroic. Similarly, when Corborus submerges, you need to watch when he's about to come back up (indicated by a dust cloud on the ground); if not avoided it's likely to one-shot you. Finally, it will be much much easier if a ranged focuses on aoeing down the adds. You can kill them, but if they get close, they'll explode and more than one or two of these is likely to be deadly.
Otherwise, just dps the boss. Probably the best time to pop cds is right at pull - as usual, save your frenzy (if UH) if a member uses a heroism buff, otherwise pop it along with the rest. Focus on the boss. If you have a ranged killing adds, don't worry about them. If they need help, you can drop a D&D on them or turn and HB, but otherwise you really don't want to spend time on adds.
Slabhide:
This drake is honestly fairly forgettable. The mechanics are similar to normal mode, just a little more unforgiving. As with most drakes, stay out from in front as has a conal attack (Sand Blast). As far as I can tell, there's no tail swipe so off to the side or back will work. You'll need the room, because you obviously have to stay out of eruption (magma circles), avoid dropping stalagtites, and line of sight when Slabhide lands and starts Crystal Storm. Stay too long in any of these effects and you'll spend the fight on the floor. Pop cds at the beginning, even though some of them will be wasted to Slab's flight phase - there's really no good time to burn them otherwise.
Ozruk is the most unpleasant fellow in the instance. He's also the author of the last time I actually abandoned a pug after repeated failure after failure. He's not terribly difficult, but for some reason I've found pugs - especially tanks and melee - have a hard time with it. Basically, you'll be taking bleed damage from spike shield throughout the fight, and strangely, this is your friend. Why? Because he casts paralyze which will incapacitate you while he winds up for his Shatter. Fortunately, because you have the bleed on you, this will break the paralyze and you can run out. You'll need to watch for the emote, because sometimes you won't notice the paralyze - you'll take a tick of damage so close to paralyze you won't notice it. Obviously, you need to run away from the boss or Shatter WILL kill you on heroic. And - fun ain't it? -you'll need to be very careful while running back in, because he'll start his conal ground siege shortly after shatter and the tank may not have a chance to face him away. So you'll need to be ready to run to the side that isn't getting the ground siege before running back in. This cycle repeats itself several times. As I said, not difficult, but you don't have a ton of time to run out so you'll need to do it quickly. Frost DK will have more trouble with this due to being in frost presence, so be ready to hit unholy presence, or even use darkflight or rocket boots as necessary.
As for dps, just pop the cds at the start and on cooldown as needed.
High Priestess Azil: the end boss of the instance. Not too different from normal mode besides the typical increased mob health and damage, with one exception. This time, instead of a mechanic that can kill you, the mechanic we're concerned about can kill the tank. Force Grip - nicely stolen from Star Wars - lifts the tank in the air and does massive damage to the tank. If not interrupted, it will probably kill the tank, so make sure to save some rp for interrupts. I also love to try to sucker a mess of adds to chase me, then run under one of her rock targets, killing the adds for you. Of course you can kite them through Dark Portals as well.
In this case, I actually save my cds for the first add phase, the better to burn them down, and then army during the second add phase. Remember that your army will taunt the boss, so use it only in emergencies. However, if you summon it when all the adds are coming, it actually will keep them off your healer and help kill the adds faster. Not too bad of a fight, though.
And, that's another heroic down! Let me know if there's another heroic you want some DK notes on before I move on to raids, and enjoy. :)
Which one shall it be this time, Mmmm? :P
In the absence of requests, I'll go with Stonecore, which I've found to be quite melee unfriendly. There are a few fight mechanics to perfect, but once accomplished, this heroic should go as smoothly as the others.
Since I've commented on this in my other posts, yes, my guild has started 25-man raiding, so while we're not up there with Paragon just yet, we're working through raiding. Expect raid DK guides to start in a couple of weeks.
Stonecore (sometimes abbreviated as SC) is an unforgiving 5-man for melee in sub-359 gear. I think it's also a little easier than Grim Batol, but still more difficult than VP (Vortex Pinnacle). You get four different types of bosses (gyreworm, drake, elemental, witch), but as the name obviously implies, it's a rocky instance and has the obligatory mineable elementals in it.
The instance is linear and none of the bosses are skippable.
I don't normally talk about trash, but the trash in here just love to eat melee.
The first pull can be a challenge. I believe it's the earth elementals (correct me if I'm wrong) that do a spinning aoe that can wreck the group quickly. A stun will stop them, and as we DKs don't have a stun, we're useless, right? Actually, you can back away a bit, and death grip them, which stops the spin, although a warrior or non-DK tank, a rogue or anyone else with a stun should use it here.
Rock flayers can kill you quickly as well, if your tank isn't aware. The tank needs to face them all in one direction, and then you can get behind them and dps. but when they do their frenzy attack, if you can't get behind them all, run away! I've died a few times to these buggers.
Finally, the big rock elementals (can't remember their names at the moment); they do a big stomp that hurts and can be hard to see when you're on their butt. If you can, watch for the stomp that's bigger and slower than the others, and jump shortly after their foot starts down, and you'll avoid the damage.
Corborus:
The first boss is an elemental gyreworm who shouldn't cause you too many problems. As a dps DK, you obviously need to stay out of crystal barrage, which can kill you fairly quickly on heroic. Similarly, when Corborus submerges, you need to watch when he's about to come back up (indicated by a dust cloud on the ground); if not avoided it's likely to one-shot you. Finally, it will be much much easier if a ranged focuses on aoeing down the adds. You can kill them, but if they get close, they'll explode and more than one or two of these is likely to be deadly.
Otherwise, just dps the boss. Probably the best time to pop cds is right at pull - as usual, save your frenzy (if UH) if a member uses a heroism buff, otherwise pop it along with the rest. Focus on the boss. If you have a ranged killing adds, don't worry about them. If they need help, you can drop a D&D on them or turn and HB, but otherwise you really don't want to spend time on adds.
Slabhide:
This drake is honestly fairly forgettable. The mechanics are similar to normal mode, just a little more unforgiving. As with most drakes, stay out from in front as has a conal attack (Sand Blast). As far as I can tell, there's no tail swipe so off to the side or back will work. You'll need the room, because you obviously have to stay out of eruption (magma circles), avoid dropping stalagtites, and line of sight when Slabhide lands and starts Crystal Storm. Stay too long in any of these effects and you'll spend the fight on the floor. Pop cds at the beginning, even though some of them will be wasted to Slab's flight phase - there's really no good time to burn them otherwise.
Ozruk is the most unpleasant fellow in the instance. He's also the author of the last time I actually abandoned a pug after repeated failure after failure. He's not terribly difficult, but for some reason I've found pugs - especially tanks and melee - have a hard time with it. Basically, you'll be taking bleed damage from spike shield throughout the fight, and strangely, this is your friend. Why? Because he casts paralyze which will incapacitate you while he winds up for his Shatter. Fortunately, because you have the bleed on you, this will break the paralyze and you can run out. You'll need to watch for the emote, because sometimes you won't notice the paralyze - you'll take a tick of damage so close to paralyze you won't notice it. Obviously, you need to run away from the boss or Shatter WILL kill you on heroic. And - fun ain't it? -you'll need to be very careful while running back in, because he'll start his conal ground siege shortly after shatter and the tank may not have a chance to face him away. So you'll need to be ready to run to the side that isn't getting the ground siege before running back in. This cycle repeats itself several times. As I said, not difficult, but you don't have a ton of time to run out so you'll need to do it quickly. Frost DK will have more trouble with this due to being in frost presence, so be ready to hit unholy presence, or even use darkflight or rocket boots as necessary.
As for dps, just pop the cds at the start and on cooldown as needed.
High Priestess Azil: the end boss of the instance. Not too different from normal mode besides the typical increased mob health and damage, with one exception. This time, instead of a mechanic that can kill you, the mechanic we're concerned about can kill the tank. Force Grip - nicely stolen from Star Wars - lifts the tank in the air and does massive damage to the tank. If not interrupted, it will probably kill the tank, so make sure to save some rp for interrupts. I also love to try to sucker a mess of adds to chase me, then run under one of her rock targets, killing the adds for you. Of course you can kite them through Dark Portals as well.
In this case, I actually save my cds for the first add phase, the better to burn them down, and then army during the second add phase. Remember that your army will taunt the boss, so use it only in emergencies. However, if you summon it when all the adds are coming, it actually will keep them off your healer and help kill the adds faster. Not too bad of a fight, though.
And, that's another heroic down! Let me know if there's another heroic you want some DK notes on before I move on to raids, and enjoy. :)
Monday, December 27, 2010
Heroic Halls of Origination: a DPS DK Perspective
Time for another heroic!
Like I said on the last one, I probably won't get through all of the heroics, but I'll review a few of the ones that seem to give people trouble and make some suggestions on optimizing your DK play in heroics while gearing up. If you have a particular instance you want me to review or suggestions, let me know!
With many guilds starting 'regular' raids soon (my guild has downed 5 bosses so far in 10 man, starts 25 man raids this week), I may start reviewing raid bosses as well once I have a feel for them.
Halls of Origination (HOO) is a long and fairly challenging 5-man in sub-359 gear. I think it's a little easier than Grim Batol, but still more difficult than VP (Vortex Pinnacle). It's an Egyptian-themed instance carrying on the desert motif of Uldum. Nice artwork, fun layout. In general, a fun instance, but again, fairly long.
Instead of a separate article for each boss, I'll just put in a few comments for each boss from a DPS DK perspective. In this instance, you can pick the order of most of the bosses, and one boss is optional. I'll also not review the four gatekeepers since they're better referred to as minibosses and essentially have only one elemental attack. I've died on most/all of them at some point, but for the most part just stay out of bad and kill them. I'll focus here on the 'actual' bosses of HOO.
Temple Guardian Anhuur:
This boss unlocks the instance and lets you find Brann. He's a Tol'vir who stands on a platform in the middle of his room. A review of his abilities made me scratch my head (oh, so that's what he does? hmm). Even on heroic, as a dps you just need to stay out of obvious 'bad stuff' when dpsing him and you'll be fine. No mechanics that will wipe you, really. The key to this fight is that after a while he'll put up a Shield of Light which makes him invulnerable. I've usually done this on heroic by having the whole group jump down to the left switch first. As a plate-wearer, I usually Death & Decay and blood boil to keep the switch person from being hit and then start running for the right side switch. Those snakes' damage can add up, so try to stay in line of sight for your healer. Hungering Cold is win here. Other than that, though, no real tricks to it. I burn my cd's right after we interrupt Anhuur's cast, but each phase is fairly short so there's no way to avoid 'wasting' some of your cooldowns.
Earthrager Ptah:
Ptah is the optional boss that's 'outside' in a courtyard. He's a Bone Wraith (looks a lot like Marrowgar) that summons adds. Things that will kill you: inattentiveness. The Earth Spike hits pretty hard on heroic. It won't one-shot you, but if your health is down a bit, it will kill you. As usual with this sort of thing, the spike has a crumbly, dusty spot on the ground shortly before erupting. If you get hit with it, not only will your nether regious hurt like the dickens, you'll be launched in the air and take fall damage upon return to earth. As usual, stay out of bad. To maximize dps, fight from behind the boss but be ready to adjust to either side for spikes. When the adds come, give the tank a moment to collect them, then spread diseases and full aoe rotation. I like to pop my cds here, but you certainly can burn them at the beginning of the fight as well.
After dancing with the roving packs of troggs and killing the elemental mini-bosses, Anraphet comes out and finishes off the troggs. The Big Meanie (aka Titanic Watcher) does two things which can kill you quickly as dps. First, the Alpha Beams. They target a random player, and channel nasty circle of death. Move fast, naturally. The second occurs during his Omega Stance. This aoe can hurt, but I usually use either AMS or IBF to help. A guildie said that moving or jumping helps reduce damage. I can't find anything written about this and can't prove it (comments, anyone?), but I've found myself jumping like a bean during this phase anyway. :) Generally, pop cd's at pull and use them when they're back up. Nothing special, although he hits hard and the aoe can hurt, so try to kill him quickly, save some defensive abilities for Omega Stance, and then try to have some for the last 30 sec when his Alpha Beams start to cover the floor.
Seats of the Keepers:
The next four bosses can be killed in any order.
Isiset is the construct of magic; like all four keepers she is a Titanic Watcher. As with most heroic bosses, there's a lot of aoe that can drop your health so you'll want to keep an eye out, but no big fight mechanics that can one- or two-shot you. Pop cd's at pull. Since you can do this for all four keepers, my current sequence looks like this:
Hit on use str trinket (JC boar figurine for example) while running in. Before you reach her, outbreak your diseases on her. Unholy Frenzy. Even with no preserved runic power, once you Scourge Strike, Festering Strike, SS, FS, you'll have the rp to summon your gargoyle. Use any Sudden Doom procs in between. Blood Tap. SS and FS and now use any remaining rp to try to get Dark Transformation up quickly. I can usually get my transformed ghoul up before UF wears off. Frost can be similar - although wait to use POF at least until the first melee hit so you don't waste it. Then normal priorities from there.
At any rate, when Isiset does her supernova, you can spin around or just step through her - both work fine. When her little starry adds pop out, I usually just pestilence to them, but if your group wants you to, pestilence, then switch to them and kill them, and then back to boss. Sometimes I also put my pet on the adds and stay on the boss myself. For Frost, your HB should do the trick nicely to aoe the adds. We kill the Astral Familiar first, but I don't think it matters much. Overall, a fairly simple fight for DKs.
Ammunae: the construct of life. Pop cds at pull as above. The big key to this fight besides not getting yourself killed, is killing the seedling pods quickly. Just kill them asap. You can pestilence to them, but they tend to die pretty fast, so you can just OB/SS them quickly down, and return in time to keep diseases up on Ammunae. As the pods proliferate, send a pet to kill stray ones as well. As with Isiset, no insta-kill mechanics, just a lot of attrition for your healer to keep up.
Rajh: the construct of radiance. Rajh does a lot of targetting a player or area and attacking. Just like in martial arts, the key is not being there when the attack arrives. Interrupt Summon Sun Orb. With how many interrupts are needed in heroics, endless winter is a nice talent in here. In any case, try to prevent an orb from being summoned, run away otherwise. Save AMS for Blessing of the Sun, while he's aoeing. Even in blues/greens, this barely tickles with AMS up. Obviously, pop cds at pull, avoid bad, win.
Setesh can be a bit of a challenge. Probably the most difficult boss. He's the construct of chaos and he tries to overwhelm you with void Wurms, Void Seekers, and Void Sentinels. As I'm sure you know, Setesh can't be tanked so the tank's job is to tank the Sentinels. Most tanks I've run with can kill the wurms pretty well and need only a little help on Seekers (we usually assign a ranged to this). Your job is to #1: kill Portals! (Yes, Jaraxxus-style) Portals need to die fast. In between, dps the boss. This is a race against time in current gear, with the soft enrage being some time around the 6th portal (tank/healer will be overwhelmed and die).
Ask your team if they have a heroism/bloodlust; if they do, they'll probably use it at pull. If so, use your str or on-use trinkets and summon gargoyle, but don't use unholy frenzy yet. This is becuase you'll waste a lot of the UF effect due to being overcapped for haste. Save the UF until heroism is down and you have a ghoul ready to DT. Obviously, frost can use POF and all cds with heroism.
So there you go! Oveall, less raid-like mechanics in here than in Grim Batol, but still a visually pleasing instance, and some fun fights.
Like I said on the last one, I probably won't get through all of the heroics, but I'll review a few of the ones that seem to give people trouble and make some suggestions on optimizing your DK play in heroics while gearing up. If you have a particular instance you want me to review or suggestions, let me know!
With many guilds starting 'regular' raids soon (my guild has downed 5 bosses so far in 10 man, starts 25 man raids this week), I may start reviewing raid bosses as well once I have a feel for them.
Halls of Origination (HOO) is a long and fairly challenging 5-man in sub-359 gear. I think it's a little easier than Grim Batol, but still more difficult than VP (Vortex Pinnacle). It's an Egyptian-themed instance carrying on the desert motif of Uldum. Nice artwork, fun layout. In general, a fun instance, but again, fairly long.
Instead of a separate article for each boss, I'll just put in a few comments for each boss from a DPS DK perspective. In this instance, you can pick the order of most of the bosses, and one boss is optional. I'll also not review the four gatekeepers since they're better referred to as minibosses and essentially have only one elemental attack. I've died on most/all of them at some point, but for the most part just stay out of bad and kill them. I'll focus here on the 'actual' bosses of HOO.
Temple Guardian Anhuur:
This boss unlocks the instance and lets you find Brann. He's a Tol'vir who stands on a platform in the middle of his room. A review of his abilities made me scratch my head (oh, so that's what he does? hmm). Even on heroic, as a dps you just need to stay out of obvious 'bad stuff' when dpsing him and you'll be fine. No mechanics that will wipe you, really. The key to this fight is that after a while he'll put up a Shield of Light which makes him invulnerable. I've usually done this on heroic by having the whole group jump down to the left switch first. As a plate-wearer, I usually Death & Decay and blood boil to keep the switch person from being hit and then start running for the right side switch. Those snakes' damage can add up, so try to stay in line of sight for your healer. Hungering Cold is win here. Other than that, though, no real tricks to it. I burn my cd's right after we interrupt Anhuur's cast, but each phase is fairly short so there's no way to avoid 'wasting' some of your cooldowns.
Earthrager Ptah:
Ptah is the optional boss that's 'outside' in a courtyard. He's a Bone Wraith (looks a lot like Marrowgar) that summons adds. Things that will kill you: inattentiveness. The Earth Spike hits pretty hard on heroic. It won't one-shot you, but if your health is down a bit, it will kill you. As usual with this sort of thing, the spike has a crumbly, dusty spot on the ground shortly before erupting. If you get hit with it, not only will your nether regious hurt like the dickens, you'll be launched in the air and take fall damage upon return to earth. As usual, stay out of bad. To maximize dps, fight from behind the boss but be ready to adjust to either side for spikes. When the adds come, give the tank a moment to collect them, then spread diseases and full aoe rotation. I like to pop my cds here, but you certainly can burn them at the beginning of the fight as well.
After dancing with the roving packs of troggs and killing the elemental mini-bosses, Anraphet comes out and finishes off the troggs. The Big Meanie (aka Titanic Watcher) does two things which can kill you quickly as dps. First, the Alpha Beams. They target a random player, and channel nasty circle of death. Move fast, naturally. The second occurs during his Omega Stance. This aoe can hurt, but I usually use either AMS or IBF to help. A guildie said that moving or jumping helps reduce damage. I can't find anything written about this and can't prove it (comments, anyone?), but I've found myself jumping like a bean during this phase anyway. :) Generally, pop cd's at pull and use them when they're back up. Nothing special, although he hits hard and the aoe can hurt, so try to kill him quickly, save some defensive abilities for Omega Stance, and then try to have some for the last 30 sec when his Alpha Beams start to cover the floor.
Seats of the Keepers:
The next four bosses can be killed in any order.
Isiset is the construct of magic; like all four keepers she is a Titanic Watcher. As with most heroic bosses, there's a lot of aoe that can drop your health so you'll want to keep an eye out, but no big fight mechanics that can one- or two-shot you. Pop cd's at pull. Since you can do this for all four keepers, my current sequence looks like this:
Hit on use str trinket (JC boar figurine for example) while running in. Before you reach her, outbreak your diseases on her. Unholy Frenzy. Even with no preserved runic power, once you Scourge Strike, Festering Strike, SS, FS, you'll have the rp to summon your gargoyle. Use any Sudden Doom procs in between. Blood Tap. SS and FS and now use any remaining rp to try to get Dark Transformation up quickly. I can usually get my transformed ghoul up before UF wears off. Frost can be similar - although wait to use POF at least until the first melee hit so you don't waste it. Then normal priorities from there.
At any rate, when Isiset does her supernova, you can spin around or just step through her - both work fine. When her little starry adds pop out, I usually just pestilence to them, but if your group wants you to, pestilence, then switch to them and kill them, and then back to boss. Sometimes I also put my pet on the adds and stay on the boss myself. For Frost, your HB should do the trick nicely to aoe the adds. We kill the Astral Familiar first, but I don't think it matters much. Overall, a fairly simple fight for DKs.
Ammunae: the construct of life. Pop cds at pull as above. The big key to this fight besides not getting yourself killed, is killing the seedling pods quickly. Just kill them asap. You can pestilence to them, but they tend to die pretty fast, so you can just OB/SS them quickly down, and return in time to keep diseases up on Ammunae. As the pods proliferate, send a pet to kill stray ones as well. As with Isiset, no insta-kill mechanics, just a lot of attrition for your healer to keep up.
Rajh: the construct of radiance. Rajh does a lot of targetting a player or area and attacking. Just like in martial arts, the key is not being there when the attack arrives. Interrupt Summon Sun Orb. With how many interrupts are needed in heroics, endless winter is a nice talent in here. In any case, try to prevent an orb from being summoned, run away otherwise. Save AMS for Blessing of the Sun, while he's aoeing. Even in blues/greens, this barely tickles with AMS up. Obviously, pop cds at pull, avoid bad, win.
Setesh can be a bit of a challenge. Probably the most difficult boss. He's the construct of chaos and he tries to overwhelm you with void Wurms, Void Seekers, and Void Sentinels. As I'm sure you know, Setesh can't be tanked so the tank's job is to tank the Sentinels. Most tanks I've run with can kill the wurms pretty well and need only a little help on Seekers (we usually assign a ranged to this). Your job is to #1: kill Portals! (Yes, Jaraxxus-style) Portals need to die fast. In between, dps the boss. This is a race against time in current gear, with the soft enrage being some time around the 6th portal (tank/healer will be overwhelmed and die).
Ask your team if they have a heroism/bloodlust; if they do, they'll probably use it at pull. If so, use your str or on-use trinkets and summon gargoyle, but don't use unholy frenzy yet. This is becuase you'll waste a lot of the UF effect due to being overcapped for haste. Save the UF until heroism is down and you have a ghoul ready to DT. Obviously, frost can use POF and all cds with heroism.
So there you go! Oveall, less raid-like mechanics in here than in Grim Batol, but still a visually pleasing instance, and some fun fights.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Heroic Grim Batol: a DPS DK Perspective
Similar to my raid posts looking at the role of the DPS DK in in ICC, I'll do some reviews of the heroics that most people are gearing up in for Cataclysm.
I know, some folks have moved on to raids, but I know the majority of players are still leveling and facing the challenge of heroics in their leveling blues and greens.
So, while it won't be long before epic-geared players are rofl-stomping the heroics for their random daily valor points, until then there are a few things that undergeared players need to know. I don't know if I'll do this for all the 5-mans, but I thought it might be helpful to talk about a few of them at least.
Grim Batol is a challenging 5-man in sub-359 gear. It's definitely doable, but each boss fight has several elements that make it more like a regular raid than past 5-man instances. Make a mistake, and it's easy to go from 100% to 0% very fast! Given the tuning and the raid-like mechanics, I have to say I really like this instance! In difficulty I'd put it about in the middle, somewhere between Stonecore (very DK/melee unfriendly) and Vortex Pinnacle, in which the boss fights seem quite easy (at least to me).
Instead of a separate article for each boss, I'll just put in a few comments for each boss from a DPS DK perspective.
General Umbriss:
The first boss you'll face in the instance, he can be a tricky one for inexperienced/undergeared groups. Like all of the bosses in here, there are several things that will cause damage to you, but unless they're specifically a 'death mechanic' (they'll kill you instantly if you screw up) I won't say too much about them. Umbriss is a black dragonkin. He does two things that can kill you quickly. The first is Ground Siege which does a lot of damage in a frontal area - just move behind him when he starts casting it and you'll be fine. The second is Blitz - he'll target a group member and start to cast Blitz. As long as you move to one side about 10 yards you won't get hit. The third major element to this fight is when he summons a group of troggs. (Why did it have to be Troggs?) Most of the troggs can essentially be ignored - if they get on you, merely kite them to the tank and let splash damage kill them (feel free to pestilence/death & decay). But one of the troggs will be bigger and have a purple haze around him - a Malignant Trogg. These MUST be killed away from the boss because if they die close to Umbriss they'll frenzy the boss. In addition, they do a nasty aoe blast when they die. Be careful; if your AMS is up, use it. If not, hit them with chains of ice and move away before they die. There's no reason any ranged couldn't take care of the Malignant Troggs, but it seems I've always been asked to kill them.
If you avoid the two main attacks that will kill you, and control the Troggs, this fight will go much easier.
Dragha Shadowburner:
The fight opens with a fairly quick burn on Dragha. Don't waste cds on this part, as it's pretty quick and of very little danger. The only thing to be aware of is the Invoked Fire Spirits that Dragha summons. There will be a fire patch that spawns the Spirits. The tank should kite the boss away from the patches and you should stay away until the Spirit appears. When it does, if it targets you (by a fiery line attached to you), run away! If not, hit it with a chains of ice, then run to it and kill it quickly. If it reaches it's target, people die.
After Dragha is dps'd down a bit, he calls his dragon, Valiona. When Valiona lands is a good time to pop your cooldowns. He hops on her and you'll need to continue dealing with Invoked Fire Spirits, as well as avoiding bad stuff on the ground, and staying out from in front of Valiona who does a conal flame attack to the front that can wipe you. Once Valiona is down, Dragha returns and is fairly quickly killed.
The main things to remember are quick target switches from killing the boss to the Spirits, and staying out of the fire/pools/cleave.
Forgemaster Throngus:
Throngus is a giant ettin pathing past several smaller chained ettins. Be careful clearing the trash as he can pat to your group and fighting him and his trash simultaneously is often lethal.
Open with your cds and dps away. For the first 20 sec or so it's just a tank and spank. Then Throngus will emote that he is picking a weapon. Mostly, the tanks and healers will want to be wary of what he's doing, but as a dps you'll just want to be aware of what could kill you.
If he picks a mace, the tank needs to kite him slowly around the ledge. If you pull aggro here, you'll die as his mace hits hard. Also watch the fire patches on the ground. If he picks a shield, there will be aoe damage to the group, but not too scary. If he picks two swords, the damage to the tank will be high, but it won't affect the dps too much. Be on the lookout for falling rocks/ceiling throughout the fight as the damage can add up. In a pinch, you can pop army of the dead towards the end to keep him occupied. I finished a fight from 15% after the tank died by popping army and the shammies popped earth elementals and we survived barely. As a side note, be aware that while AotD doesn't taunt raid bosses, they DO taunt every 5-man boss in Cataclysm I've used it on.
Erudax:
The final boss of GB is a Faceless One. Start in the middle of the room (doesn't really matter too much where), with normal dps. He does some aoe, but nothing big. When he drops a Shadow Gale focus in the room (looks like a dark whirlpool), the whole group stacks IN it to avoid dying to his Shadow Gale. As soon as the Gale is done, Erudax summons two Faceless Corrupters. They'll come from the hall you entered from. One each will head for the eggs. They need to be slowed and dps'd hard. If they're not dead when they get to the eggs, they'll start casting Umbral Mending. Try to interrupt it and/or finish them off quickly. If you don't, they'll heal the boss to full fairly fast. If your dps on the adds is fast enough, you can pop your cooldowns on the pull, otherwise save them for add phases. You should be able to kill Erudax within 2-3 Shadow Gale/add phases, but it can be done in more phases as long as you kill the Corrupters each time.
I hope that helps, and I hope you enjoy Grim Batol as much as I have!
I know, some folks have moved on to raids, but I know the majority of players are still leveling and facing the challenge of heroics in their leveling blues and greens.
So, while it won't be long before epic-geared players are rofl-stomping the heroics for their random daily valor points, until then there are a few things that undergeared players need to know. I don't know if I'll do this for all the 5-mans, but I thought it might be helpful to talk about a few of them at least.
Grim Batol is a challenging 5-man in sub-359 gear. It's definitely doable, but each boss fight has several elements that make it more like a regular raid than past 5-man instances. Make a mistake, and it's easy to go from 100% to 0% very fast! Given the tuning and the raid-like mechanics, I have to say I really like this instance! In difficulty I'd put it about in the middle, somewhere between Stonecore (very DK/melee unfriendly) and Vortex Pinnacle, in which the boss fights seem quite easy (at least to me).
Instead of a separate article for each boss, I'll just put in a few comments for each boss from a DPS DK perspective.
General Umbriss:
The first boss you'll face in the instance, he can be a tricky one for inexperienced/undergeared groups. Like all of the bosses in here, there are several things that will cause damage to you, but unless they're specifically a 'death mechanic' (they'll kill you instantly if you screw up) I won't say too much about them. Umbriss is a black dragonkin. He does two things that can kill you quickly. The first is Ground Siege which does a lot of damage in a frontal area - just move behind him when he starts casting it and you'll be fine. The second is Blitz - he'll target a group member and start to cast Blitz. As long as you move to one side about 10 yards you won't get hit. The third major element to this fight is when he summons a group of troggs. (Why did it have to be Troggs?) Most of the troggs can essentially be ignored - if they get on you, merely kite them to the tank and let splash damage kill them (feel free to pestilence/death & decay). But one of the troggs will be bigger and have a purple haze around him - a Malignant Trogg. These MUST be killed away from the boss because if they die close to Umbriss they'll frenzy the boss. In addition, they do a nasty aoe blast when they die. Be careful; if your AMS is up, use it. If not, hit them with chains of ice and move away before they die. There's no reason any ranged couldn't take care of the Malignant Troggs, but it seems I've always been asked to kill them.
If you avoid the two main attacks that will kill you, and control the Troggs, this fight will go much easier.
Dragha Shadowburner:
The fight opens with a fairly quick burn on Dragha. Don't waste cds on this part, as it's pretty quick and of very little danger. The only thing to be aware of is the Invoked Fire Spirits that Dragha summons. There will be a fire patch that spawns the Spirits. The tank should kite the boss away from the patches and you should stay away until the Spirit appears. When it does, if it targets you (by a fiery line attached to you), run away! If not, hit it with a chains of ice, then run to it and kill it quickly. If it reaches it's target, people die.
After Dragha is dps'd down a bit, he calls his dragon, Valiona. When Valiona lands is a good time to pop your cooldowns. He hops on her and you'll need to continue dealing with Invoked Fire Spirits, as well as avoiding bad stuff on the ground, and staying out from in front of Valiona who does a conal flame attack to the front that can wipe you. Once Valiona is down, Dragha returns and is fairly quickly killed.
The main things to remember are quick target switches from killing the boss to the Spirits, and staying out of the fire/pools/cleave.
Forgemaster Throngus:
Throngus is a giant ettin pathing past several smaller chained ettins. Be careful clearing the trash as he can pat to your group and fighting him and his trash simultaneously is often lethal.
Open with your cds and dps away. For the first 20 sec or so it's just a tank and spank. Then Throngus will emote that he is picking a weapon. Mostly, the tanks and healers will want to be wary of what he's doing, but as a dps you'll just want to be aware of what could kill you.
If he picks a mace, the tank needs to kite him slowly around the ledge. If you pull aggro here, you'll die as his mace hits hard. Also watch the fire patches on the ground. If he picks a shield, there will be aoe damage to the group, but not too scary. If he picks two swords, the damage to the tank will be high, but it won't affect the dps too much. Be on the lookout for falling rocks/ceiling throughout the fight as the damage can add up. In a pinch, you can pop army of the dead towards the end to keep him occupied. I finished a fight from 15% after the tank died by popping army and the shammies popped earth elementals and we survived barely. As a side note, be aware that while AotD doesn't taunt raid bosses, they DO taunt every 5-man boss in Cataclysm I've used it on.
Erudax:
The final boss of GB is a Faceless One. Start in the middle of the room (doesn't really matter too much where), with normal dps. He does some aoe, but nothing big. When he drops a Shadow Gale focus in the room (looks like a dark whirlpool), the whole group stacks IN it to avoid dying to his Shadow Gale. As soon as the Gale is done, Erudax summons two Faceless Corrupters. They'll come from the hall you entered from. One each will head for the eggs. They need to be slowed and dps'd hard. If they're not dead when they get to the eggs, they'll start casting Umbral Mending. Try to interrupt it and/or finish them off quickly. If you don't, they'll heal the boss to full fairly fast. If your dps on the adds is fast enough, you can pop your cooldowns on the pull, otherwise save them for add phases. You should be able to kill Erudax within 2-3 Shadow Gale/add phases, but it can be done in more phases as long as you kill the Corrupters each time.
I hope that helps, and I hope you enjoy Grim Batol as much as I have!
Monday, August 30, 2010
Halion: a DPS DK Perspective
It's been a while since I had one of these posts, and yes, I know, most of you have killed Halion quite a few times by now. This is the type of fight that the mechanics are fairly straightforward, but there are a few tricks I can mention that might be helpful for maximizing dps nonetheless.
This is likely to be my final Boss review for DPS DKs prior to Cataclysm. I don't plan to discuss the three mini-bosses preceeding Halion, as they were puggable on day 1, and although you can still get ranked on World of Logs (I've been ranked on General Z a number of times), these fights aren't true boss fights.
Halion is is a fairly simple portal-type fight, in which your dps team is split in half for much of the fight. For most groups dps is not the primary concern - especially on normal difficulty - so your priorities on this fight actually are: 1) Don't die, 2) Balance dps in both realms, and 3) Do as much dps as you can given 1) and 2).
So, here we go!
Pull/Phase One: Tank runs in from just outside the circle, often perpendicular to the raid for optimal boss positioning.
As usual, it's helpful if your tank gives a decent count before the pull so you can summon your army. As most of you know I like to summon just in time to pop haste potion just before entering combat. Then, of course, run in and start hitting the boss.
It doesn't matter whether you're unholy or frost for this fight. For the most part there are no range issues to consider, and for heroic both specs do well on adds.
So, for phase one, you should simply dps your merry heart out. Depending on when your raid does heroism/bloodlust, you might want to save your pet cooldown. My raid heroes at start of P2, so some prefer to save their gargoyle/ghoul cd. Even with heroism in P2, however, I use my gargoyle at pull, because the cd is usually up again in P3 if I use it early. Two gargoyles without heroism > 1 gargoyle with heroism. I usually pop my second haste potion during P2 heroism.
During Phase 1 you'll be standing to one side of Halion hitting him with everything you can, and the only thing to watch out for is the Mark of Combustion; obviously, if you get it run to the edge of the circle until you are cleansed, then run back in. The flame trails after Meteor strike are actually very small and you can stand almost on top of them without taking damage. If you happen to have a few empty cooldowns, pop anti magic shield, stand on a flame, and death coil or frost strike away. Just make sure to stay in melee range when doing so.
Phase Two: Take the portal and start dpsing Halion in the shadow realm, but be sure to let the tank get agro first. We pop heroism here because we want to get through the phase as quickly as possible. The main ability to watch out for is the Twilight Cutter. On normal, you can survive getting hit with it, particularly with AMS up. On heroic, you'll usually die. Obviously, keep an eye on the orbs so you know where it will come from. There are two ways to do this effectively. One is to have the tank constantly turning the boss with the orbs, and the other is to have the tank stay still between Cutters, and only move when a cutter is about to start. On heroic, to be safe we just move the boss constantly. In any case, what I like to do is move as far to Halion's front left shoulder as possible without getting cleaved, stop, and dps. We can dps on the run fairly well, but, still we are at our best standing still. I stay in that spot doing dps until Halion has turned far enough that I'm on his back left hindquarter, just before I'm in tail swipe range. Then, I strafe to his front left and start over.
Strafe - DPS - Strafe - DPS.
During cutters, I try to stay pretty much in the middle of the cutters just to be safe (on normal there is more room to continue the strafe-dps-strafe-dps strategy if you want).
Drop Soul Consumption as far to the front left as you can, so you minimize running out time while still doing some dps.
Phase Three: Actually, DKs should almost always stay in the shadow realm, since melee are much less affected by the movement than ranged. If your raid is very melee heavy, you may be asked to move back to the physical realm. But for the most part, you'll be in shadow, where you'll continue the same mechanics as P2. The only wrinkle of course is you may need to slow dps is the physical realm falls behind. No additional tricks for more dps here, I'm afraid. If you popped your gargy early, however, you should have another chance to use it in P3.
DPS for DKs should be solid on this fight. There aren't any major dps buffs, but for the most part you should be able to stay in melee range and keep hitting the boss.
This is likely to be my final Boss review for DPS DKs prior to Cataclysm. I don't plan to discuss the three mini-bosses preceeding Halion, as they were puggable on day 1, and although you can still get ranked on World of Logs (I've been ranked on General Z a number of times), these fights aren't true boss fights.
Halion is is a fairly simple portal-type fight, in which your dps team is split in half for much of the fight. For most groups dps is not the primary concern - especially on normal difficulty - so your priorities on this fight actually are: 1) Don't die, 2) Balance dps in both realms, and 3) Do as much dps as you can given 1) and 2).
So, here we go!
Pull/Phase One: Tank runs in from just outside the circle, often perpendicular to the raid for optimal boss positioning.
As usual, it's helpful if your tank gives a decent count before the pull so you can summon your army. As most of you know I like to summon just in time to pop haste potion just before entering combat. Then, of course, run in and start hitting the boss.
It doesn't matter whether you're unholy or frost for this fight. For the most part there are no range issues to consider, and for heroic both specs do well on adds.
So, for phase one, you should simply dps your merry heart out. Depending on when your raid does heroism/bloodlust, you might want to save your pet cooldown. My raid heroes at start of P2, so some prefer to save their gargoyle/ghoul cd. Even with heroism in P2, however, I use my gargoyle at pull, because the cd is usually up again in P3 if I use it early. Two gargoyles without heroism > 1 gargoyle with heroism. I usually pop my second haste potion during P2 heroism.
During Phase 1 you'll be standing to one side of Halion hitting him with everything you can, and the only thing to watch out for is the Mark of Combustion; obviously, if you get it run to the edge of the circle until you are cleansed, then run back in. The flame trails after Meteor strike are actually very small and you can stand almost on top of them without taking damage. If you happen to have a few empty cooldowns, pop anti magic shield, stand on a flame, and death coil or frost strike away. Just make sure to stay in melee range when doing so.
Phase Two: Take the portal and start dpsing Halion in the shadow realm, but be sure to let the tank get agro first. We pop heroism here because we want to get through the phase as quickly as possible. The main ability to watch out for is the Twilight Cutter. On normal, you can survive getting hit with it, particularly with AMS up. On heroic, you'll usually die. Obviously, keep an eye on the orbs so you know where it will come from. There are two ways to do this effectively. One is to have the tank constantly turning the boss with the orbs, and the other is to have the tank stay still between Cutters, and only move when a cutter is about to start. On heroic, to be safe we just move the boss constantly. In any case, what I like to do is move as far to Halion's front left shoulder as possible without getting cleaved, stop, and dps. We can dps on the run fairly well, but, still we are at our best standing still. I stay in that spot doing dps until Halion has turned far enough that I'm on his back left hindquarter, just before I'm in tail swipe range. Then, I strafe to his front left and start over.
Strafe - DPS - Strafe - DPS.
During cutters, I try to stay pretty much in the middle of the cutters just to be safe (on normal there is more room to continue the strafe-dps-strafe-dps strategy if you want).
Drop Soul Consumption as far to the front left as you can, so you minimize running out time while still doing some dps.
Phase Three: Actually, DKs should almost always stay in the shadow realm, since melee are much less affected by the movement than ranged. If your raid is very melee heavy, you may be asked to move back to the physical realm. But for the most part, you'll be in shadow, where you'll continue the same mechanics as P2. The only wrinkle of course is you may need to slow dps is the physical realm falls behind. No additional tricks for more dps here, I'm afraid. If you popped your gargy early, however, you should have another chance to use it in P3.
DPS for DKs should be solid on this fight. There aren't any major dps buffs, but for the most part you should be able to stay in melee range and keep hitting the boss.
Monday, August 9, 2010
The 'Little Things'
Given that this expansion is winding down, I suppose the paucity of posts on my favorite topic, DK dps, is no surprise.
The mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses of the class are well known.
DKs aren't going to see any changes prior to Cataclysm.
So, I'll probably write here and there about my DK, but otherwise, my blog will remain.... just a blog. :)
Well, unless I get into beta and then I'll have something to write about again.
In any case, I still have folks dropping in on my server to ask about their DK and how to improve their play, so I thought I'd write a short reply here.
As usual, I'll point to Elitist Jerks (see my links) for a plethora of information on Death Knights. Whether you're a frost or unholy DK, EJ is a one stop shop on how to play. Of course, there's Tankspot which has some decent forums and threads as well. In any case, I don't try to reinvent the wheel when they do it so much better than I ever could.
The interesting thing is, the last several people stopping by Baelgun to say hello looking for help have pretty much known all their basics. They know gearing choices, rotations (priorities!), and so on. And yet, they're looking to improve even more.
Good for you guys!
What to say, though?
I don't really have a lot to add for the experienced DK, but I'll make just a couple of comments.
1) Do the 'Little Things' that maximize dps.
Example: on a fight like Saurfang, summon your army ~8 seconds before the start of the fight. This allows your runes to refresh just as the fight starts. Haste pot 1-2 seconds before the fight starts. Then you can haste potion again when your gargoyle is off cooldown. Don't be lazy. Don't worry about cost. Do every little thing possible to get every last little bit of dps out of your toon. It all adds up.
Sometimes, you have to sacrifice dps to ensure you successfully complete a fight. Sometimes you can go nuts. This week, just like last week, we found our raid still not full, so we cleared VOA again. As I mentioned, this time I decided to try to maximize dps and 'cheese' the Emalon encounter. Despite missing several of our best dps (which shortens the fight and increases personal dps ratings), we beat Emalon shortly after the first big add. I didn't switch to the add. I DnD'd. Even though I'm sure I could have done better, I finished with a #6 rated parse on World of Logs. Who cares, you ask? It's just Emalon - old news. And yes, it is old news! I just wanted to have fun and see what I could do. Two messages here. Do every thing possible to maximize dps, but also stay within the parameters of raid success. My raid didn't need me to switch to adds, so I didn't - but other times, personal dps loss is secondary to raid success, and you know which comes first!
2) Think at least 1-2 rotations ahead. The thing about PVE as opposed to PVP is that encounters are scripted and well known. Most likely you already know a lot about the fight before you ever attempt it. Once you see it the first or second time in person, you know what it's all about. It's not changing. You need to take each fight, and think ahead. Putricide phase change coming soon? Hold your gargoyle until the adds are out, so you can burst the oozes down faster. Valkyr coming soon? Drop DnD where they will be, and save a blood rune for a second so you can pestilence to them as soon as they come down (breaking the normal rule of spread diseases first, then DnD. Why? because you have free runes and DnD will last long enough, and you want all your runes free when the Valks have landed). Think about each move and anticipate. Watch your runes. Death Coil when you have a free gcd, rather than waiting to the 'end' of the rotation.
It's very difficult for me to come up with concrete suggestions to veteran players that already know the class well. Still, what separates the top players from the many good players out there?
Doing the little things, and thinking thinking thinking.
Good luck out there, guys!
The mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses of the class are well known.
DKs aren't going to see any changes prior to Cataclysm.
So, I'll probably write here and there about my DK, but otherwise, my blog will remain.... just a blog. :)
Well, unless I get into beta and then I'll have something to write about again.
In any case, I still have folks dropping in on my server to ask about their DK and how to improve their play, so I thought I'd write a short reply here.
As usual, I'll point to Elitist Jerks (see my links) for a plethora of information on Death Knights. Whether you're a frost or unholy DK, EJ is a one stop shop on how to play. Of course, there's Tankspot which has some decent forums and threads as well. In any case, I don't try to reinvent the wheel when they do it so much better than I ever could.
The interesting thing is, the last several people stopping by Baelgun to say hello looking for help have pretty much known all their basics. They know gearing choices, rotations (priorities!), and so on. And yet, they're looking to improve even more.
Good for you guys!
What to say, though?
I don't really have a lot to add for the experienced DK, but I'll make just a couple of comments.
1) Do the 'Little Things' that maximize dps.
Example: on a fight like Saurfang, summon your army ~8 seconds before the start of the fight. This allows your runes to refresh just as the fight starts. Haste pot 1-2 seconds before the fight starts. Then you can haste potion again when your gargoyle is off cooldown. Don't be lazy. Don't worry about cost. Do every little thing possible to get every last little bit of dps out of your toon. It all adds up.
Sometimes, you have to sacrifice dps to ensure you successfully complete a fight. Sometimes you can go nuts. This week, just like last week, we found our raid still not full, so we cleared VOA again. As I mentioned, this time I decided to try to maximize dps and 'cheese' the Emalon encounter. Despite missing several of our best dps (which shortens the fight and increases personal dps ratings), we beat Emalon shortly after the first big add. I didn't switch to the add. I DnD'd. Even though I'm sure I could have done better, I finished with a #6 rated parse on World of Logs. Who cares, you ask? It's just Emalon - old news. And yes, it is old news! I just wanted to have fun and see what I could do. Two messages here. Do every thing possible to maximize dps, but also stay within the parameters of raid success. My raid didn't need me to switch to adds, so I didn't - but other times, personal dps loss is secondary to raid success, and you know which comes first!
2) Think at least 1-2 rotations ahead. The thing about PVE as opposed to PVP is that encounters are scripted and well known. Most likely you already know a lot about the fight before you ever attempt it. Once you see it the first or second time in person, you know what it's all about. It's not changing. You need to take each fight, and think ahead. Putricide phase change coming soon? Hold your gargoyle until the adds are out, so you can burst the oozes down faster. Valkyr coming soon? Drop DnD where they will be, and save a blood rune for a second so you can pestilence to them as soon as they come down (breaking the normal rule of spread diseases first, then DnD. Why? because you have free runes and DnD will last long enough, and you want all your runes free when the Valks have landed). Think about each move and anticipate. Watch your runes. Death Coil when you have a free gcd, rather than waiting to the 'end' of the rotation.
It's very difficult for me to come up with concrete suggestions to veteran players that already know the class well. Still, what separates the top players from the many good players out there?
Doing the little things, and thinking thinking thinking.
Good luck out there, guys!
Friday, July 30, 2010
But, the Meters!
If you want to get silly and see what currently-geared raiders can do if they don't worry about fight mechanics at all, try running your 277-geared raid through some old content.
We started the night 3 short of a full group, and with Lich King and Halion left, we were left to call the raid early, or do alternate stuff. We did the weekly raid (Patchwerk) and silly melee pulled some hatefuls and died. Still, with live streaming of our parses, several of us were in the top100 on that fight.
Raid still not full. We went to do Toravon, and a good number of us cracked the top50 for our respective classes.
Raid still not full. What the heck, let's clear VOA. So, we hit Archavon, then Koralon, then Emalon. By the time we got to Emalon, we were simply having fun. We grouped the adds on the boss and I saw cleaves, fan of knives, and volleys going off. I kept myself to 'merely' pestilence, and yet the boss died before I could say 'boo.'
After the carnage and boss body parts settled to the ground, we examined the meters.
It was a good laugh on an off night.
We had three raiders finish as the top dps in the world on WOL for their class on the Emalon fight, with Massakur the furious warrior #1 for any class by over 7,000 dps (he was over 31k for the fight). I was merely around 23rd for unholy DKs. Laughing, I said I'd have to Death & Decay and we should come back next week for the fun of it and flask.
On the night, I was ranked in the top 50 for 4 of the fights, and pretty much every raider cracked the top 200 for their spec, worldwide.
Want to have some fun? Convince your raid lead to take you through some old content and run a log. :)
Fortunately, our raid did fill and we did one of the Lich King achievements. (Hopefully a drake awaits in the near future).
Have a good weekend!
We started the night 3 short of a full group, and with Lich King and Halion left, we were left to call the raid early, or do alternate stuff. We did the weekly raid (Patchwerk) and silly melee pulled some hatefuls and died. Still, with live streaming of our parses, several of us were in the top100 on that fight.
Raid still not full. We went to do Toravon, and a good number of us cracked the top50 for our respective classes.
Raid still not full. What the heck, let's clear VOA. So, we hit Archavon, then Koralon, then Emalon. By the time we got to Emalon, we were simply having fun. We grouped the adds on the boss and I saw cleaves, fan of knives, and volleys going off. I kept myself to 'merely' pestilence, and yet the boss died before I could say 'boo.'
After the carnage and boss body parts settled to the ground, we examined the meters.
It was a good laugh on an off night.
We had three raiders finish as the top dps in the world on WOL for their class on the Emalon fight, with Massakur the furious warrior #1 for any class by over 7,000 dps (he was over 31k for the fight). I was merely around 23rd for unholy DKs. Laughing, I said I'd have to Death & Decay and we should come back next week for the fun of it and flask.
On the night, I was ranked in the top 50 for 4 of the fights, and pretty much every raider cracked the top 200 for their spec, worldwide.
Want to have some fun? Convince your raid lead to take you through some old content and run a log. :)
Fortunately, our raid did fill and we did one of the Lich King achievements. (Hopefully a drake awaits in the near future).
Have a good weekend!
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
DPS Scaling in ICC: Another Angle
Curiosity struck again as I was wandering around in World of Logs, so I thought I'd do another post on dps scaling. My previous posts on the subject can be found here, here, and here.
One of the comments (among many good ones) was that looking at only the top 10 of a class didn't get at what was the 'typical' dps in a raid situation. To which I replied: I don't care about 'typical' dps, I'm interested in what can be accomplished under ideal conditions. I'm still not interested in 'typical' dps. I want to know what is the best dps each spec can do and how each class/spec has fared in regards to max potential as we gear up in Icecrown Citadel.
Another angle at the top end of dps performance is to look not at the average dps of the top 10 of each class, but to simply look at the top 100 dps overall, and see what the class composition for each boss fight in ICC is. If 50 of the top 100 dps on a particular fight are, say, arcane mages, then that suggests a couple things: 1) arcane mages do good dps on that boss (relative to other specs), and 2) that particular fight is very arcane mage friendly. If arcane mages are very well-represented in the top 100 for all the bossfights, that suggests that mages do very well overall compared to other specs, and that they have scaled well in current content.
My numbers aren't perfect, because there were a few scattered arms warriors that hit the top 100 here and there, and a couple of survival hunters or destruction warlocks on a fight or two. There were maybe a total of 7-8 of these specs combined, so when one of them was in the top 100, I just moved to the next dps below them to include in the chart.
Something else I glossed over last time was the sample size. In general, this 'sample' is fairly small - only 100 players for each boss, for a total of 1100 players on each difficulty. However, the number of potential players ranked - that is, how many rogues/shaman/druids/etc are parsed on WOL - is in the tens of thousands. There are typically 125 pages (40 each page) of ranked players for each bossfight. So, while my sample is not representative of what each spec 'typically' does, I think it's fairly safe to say my sample is representative of the 'best' each spec has to offer.
The number crunching for this post was, thankfully, far easier than for the last one. All I did was count how many of each dps spec was in the top 100 dps for each bossfight. The results are below:
As one would expect from this slightly different take on the same question, most of the same basic conclusions of my previous scaling examination remain the same. Still, take a look and see what your thoughts might be with this variation on the theme.
Looking at the 25 man normal difficulty, a few things jump out at me.
First, of course, is that fire and fury are just as dominant as the previous post suggested. 43% of the top 100 dps over all of the ICC bossfights was one of these two specs.
Combat rogues, in third place, didn't even make up 10% of top dps, and it went downhill from there.
Two specs, 43% of the top dps. The other 14 'viable' dps specs? 57%. Ouch.
And that's only on normal difficulty. Let's take a look at the heroic chart, where scaling really starts to take hold.
1) Fury is back on top by an incredible 2-to-1 margin over its nearest competitor.
2) Fury and fire now account for almost 67% of top dps for all of Icecrown, leaving a mere 33% for the remaining 14 specs. Um, something is not balanced in the State of Denmark.
3) On heroic Marrowgar, a whopping 79 fury warriors were in the top 100 dps. 11 specs didn't have a single player ranked. That means that the 79th-best warrior did more dps than the best hunter, warlock, DK, shammy, priest, .... well, you get the picture.
4) Overall, fury has more players in the top 100 than all 14 non-fire specs, combined!
5) Interestingly, it appears that unholy DKs and shadow priests did fairly well - as opposed to their showing on the previous examination. It's clear, though, that this is entirely due to the fact that both specs have 'specialty fights' - fights where they seem uniquely suited to a good performance (spriests on Valithria, DKs on Sindragosa and LK). Take away their specialty fights, and they combine for about 3% of top scores.
6) Six specs couldn't even manage an average of one score in the top 100, and poor enhancement shammies didn't have a single top-100 score in all of ICC.
EW. Dead horse. Beaten.
I'll continue to do the best I can in my role as a dpser, and focus on competing with my spec peers, rather than bashing my head against the wall of superior warrior scaling.
That's all the have nots - everyone but fury and fire, really - can do.
And keep our fingers crossed for Cataclysm.
One of the comments (among many good ones) was that looking at only the top 10 of a class didn't get at what was the 'typical' dps in a raid situation. To which I replied: I don't care about 'typical' dps, I'm interested in what can be accomplished under ideal conditions. I'm still not interested in 'typical' dps. I want to know what is the best dps each spec can do and how each class/spec has fared in regards to max potential as we gear up in Icecrown Citadel.
Another angle at the top end of dps performance is to look not at the average dps of the top 10 of each class, but to simply look at the top 100 dps overall, and see what the class composition for each boss fight in ICC is. If 50 of the top 100 dps on a particular fight are, say, arcane mages, then that suggests a couple things: 1) arcane mages do good dps on that boss (relative to other specs), and 2) that particular fight is very arcane mage friendly. If arcane mages are very well-represented in the top 100 for all the bossfights, that suggests that mages do very well overall compared to other specs, and that they have scaled well in current content.
My numbers aren't perfect, because there were a few scattered arms warriors that hit the top 100 here and there, and a couple of survival hunters or destruction warlocks on a fight or two. There were maybe a total of 7-8 of these specs combined, so when one of them was in the top 100, I just moved to the next dps below them to include in the chart.
Something else I glossed over last time was the sample size. In general, this 'sample' is fairly small - only 100 players for each boss, for a total of 1100 players on each difficulty. However, the number of potential players ranked - that is, how many rogues/shaman/druids/etc are parsed on WOL - is in the tens of thousands. There are typically 125 pages (40 each page) of ranked players for each bossfight. So, while my sample is not representative of what each spec 'typically' does, I think it's fairly safe to say my sample is representative of the 'best' each spec has to offer.
The number crunching for this post was, thankfully, far easier than for the last one. All I did was count how many of each dps spec was in the top 100 dps for each bossfight. The results are below:
Looking at the 25 man normal difficulty, a few things jump out at me.
First, of course, is that fire and fury are just as dominant as the previous post suggested. 43% of the top 100 dps over all of the ICC bossfights was one of these two specs.
Combat rogues, in third place, didn't even make up 10% of top dps, and it went downhill from there.
Two specs, 43% of the top dps. The other 14 'viable' dps specs? 57%. Ouch.
And that's only on normal difficulty. Let's take a look at the heroic chart, where scaling really starts to take hold.
1) Fury is back on top by an incredible 2-to-1 margin over its nearest competitor.
2) Fury and fire now account for almost 67% of top dps for all of Icecrown, leaving a mere 33% for the remaining 14 specs. Um, something is not balanced in the State of Denmark.
3) On heroic Marrowgar, a whopping 79 fury warriors were in the top 100 dps. 11 specs didn't have a single player ranked. That means that the 79th-best warrior did more dps than the best hunter, warlock, DK, shammy, priest, .... well, you get the picture.
4) Overall, fury has more players in the top 100 than all 14 non-fire specs, combined!
5) Interestingly, it appears that unholy DKs and shadow priests did fairly well - as opposed to their showing on the previous examination. It's clear, though, that this is entirely due to the fact that both specs have 'specialty fights' - fights where they seem uniquely suited to a good performance (spriests on Valithria, DKs on Sindragosa and LK). Take away their specialty fights, and they combine for about 3% of top scores.
6) Six specs couldn't even manage an average of one score in the top 100, and poor enhancement shammies didn't have a single top-100 score in all of ICC.
EW. Dead horse. Beaten.
I'll continue to do the best I can in my role as a dpser, and focus on competing with my spec peers, rather than bashing my head against the wall of superior warrior scaling.
That's all the have nots - everyone but fury and fire, really - can do.
And keep our fingers crossed for Cataclysm.
Monday, May 24, 2010
DPS Scaling in ICC: The Numbers Are In
And it's not pretty!
I've crunched the numbers, and my primary question - how have DPS DKs scaled in relation to other classes - has been resoundingly answered. In addition, loads of additional findings and questions have been raised by my trip into Dataland.
THE METHOD:
I took the top ten dps of each class/spec for each boss fight on normal ICC25. I obtained an average dps for each spec on each fight. You can easily examine each boss to see which fights are 'melee-friendly,' 'ranged friendly,' and which classes do well on specific fights. While certain strange events occur and can skew the data, like Dusk's crazy speed kill of Lady Deathwhisper, there is enough data here to smooth out any bumps. Regarding the above, two marksmen hunters for the LDW fight did very well - doing more than 5k better than any other hunters. This made hunters look better overall, but averaged across all 120 data points (10 hunters for each of the 12 fights), hunters still were found to be about the 5th best dps class overall.
In the end, I hand-entered 4,200 points of data, giving a very good sample size from which to draw conclusions about how each class/spec is scaling as guilds continue to progress and gear up in ICC.
Remember, I chose the top ten dps because I'm interested in what the maximum dps potential is - so even if it's not realistic for every class to get power infusion, or tricks/hysteria all the time, or to have the luxury of staying on the boss the whole time, we're looking at what CAN be done under the right circumstances.
Destruction warlocks, survival hunters, and blood DKs did so poorly on examination of normal modes, that I saved myself the effort and didn't calculate their scores in heroic modes.
THE RESULTS:
EDIT:
I just noticed my Sindragosa data for heroic got pasted over the Lich King info. I'll check this and repost if anything changes. As far as DKs go, though, this will only hurt. Their best fight in ICC relatively speaking was Sindragosa.
1. DKs are in a sorry state. Unfortunately, my hunch was borne out, conclusively. On examination of Normal modes, DKs started in the middle of the pack through Festergut's tank n spank, and faded fast to the end. By the end of the 12 fights, the BEST DK spec, unholy, was beaten out by at least one spec from EVERY class except poor, poor shammies. Unholy came in as the 11th-best dps spec in the game, and frost was 14th. The by-now-abandoned blood spec came in dead last - 19th - of the specs I looked at.
By the way, I did eyeball beast mastery, arms, and subtlety, but as expected they were so poor I didn't even put in the effort to add them to the chart. (well, arms did ok on some fights, but fury is so vastly superior that it wasn't worth it).
In any case, the expansion-long public perception that Death Knight are overpwered can be conclusively rejected at this point. THEY ARE THE SECOND-WORST (OR THIRD, MAYBE) DPS CLASS IN THE GAME right now.
Heroic modes wasn't much better. All of the 'Shadowmourne classes' (Warriors, Pallies, DKs) did see some improvement in heroic modes, but DKs once again scaled the poorest, by far. In fact, they still ended up the third-worst dps class in the game, barely passing priests, despite the fact that if you don't have a Shadowmourne, you can't even get on these charts. I didn't look at every fight, but on every one I did look at (Saurfang, Festergut, Sindragosa), EVERY Warrior, Paladin, and DK on the charts had the legendary. Do you scale an entire class around the assumption that they have the (very rare) weapon? Even so, DKs come out smelling putrescent.
2. The rich get richer. It's been well-known from vanilla and through two expansions that warriors scale well with gear. The proof is here. Blizzard has stated their goal for all dps classes to be as close as possible - within about 1-2% of each other, with the 'pure dps classes' on top.
The 'pures' didn't do too badly with the four classes filling the 2nd through 5th spots on the class charts, with the exception of warriors. Warriors finished 2% better than the second-best class (spanning the stated goal for all classes from their nearest competitor) and more than 17% better than the poor enhancement shammies. On heroic modes, they got even richer, finishing a full 6% better than second-best, and over 25% better than enhance shammies. As a hybrid class, that's hardly in line with Blizz' goals, and hardly fair to other classes. I'm not QQing here - just presenting the information. I like warriors, but clearly their dps is out of line with 'balance' in the game.
In heroic modes, Retribution used their Shadowmournes to leapfrog several 'pure' classes to finish in the third spot. Unholy did benefit from the legendary, but just not nearly as much as the other two classes.
And as has already been stated, the dps for shammies was much worse than any other class. Obviously, Blizz' announcement that there will be other heroism classes paves the way for shaman to get a big boost - and rightfully so.
3. Other observations: (some of this I'm sure many of you knew already; I'm no expert on every class):
-I was surprised fire mages did so much better than arcane, particularly in better gear. They were convincingly the second best spec in the game. Arcane did quite poorly in heroic modes, dropping six spots.
-Overall, the melee vs ranged divide was well-balanced. There was a fairly consistent split between ranged and melee overall, and there are several fights in ICC which favored one or the other. Decent balance.
-Rogues can't complain too much overall. I've seen lots of concerns with how they've scaled. Obviously, combat is doing fine, so one can't complain too much. Of course, if one is referring to mutilate, then yes, rogues have a point, but at least they have ONE spec that is doing well.
-Balance isn't scaling well. Balance druids did fairly well in normal modes, but hardly saw any increase in dps in heroic modes, and saw their relative position on the charts drop significantly.
-Shadow priests aren't as bad as their reputation. But, they could do better. They still ended up as the second or third worst class/spec, down there with DKs on the junk pile.
-Demonology warlocks aren't doing too badly. Yes, affliction is the 'best' spec in most cases, but Demo is actually viable, and proved itself to be better than destro. Destruction - once the 'only' spec for raiding locks, has fallen on hard times.
-Blizzard needs to allow pets to benefit from buffs. Fights like Blood Queen Lana'thel really hurt when your pet doesn't get any help from the buff you get.
DISCUSSION:
I'm not going to try to cover nearly everything here.
In fact, I'm only going to talk briefly about DK scaling, so for additional discussion, please leave a comment, or link this post in a forum somewhere :)
Why are DKs scaling so poorly?
1. Pets scale poorly. As a pet class, we may benefit from increased crit or other buffs, but the pets don't.
2. Knee-jerk nerfs. I've written about this previously. Early in beta and to some extent in Tier 7 content, DKs were certifiably overpowered. Since then, throughout the expansion there has been a perception that DKs are too strong, and that doing good dps is 'facerolling.' More recently, two abilities that needed adjusting - Tier 9 set bonus, and Scourge Strike - gave the impression again of being overpowered, but were nerfed to the point that the class has fallen behind. Frost DW was nerfed during Tier 8 content and still hasn't recovered even with some 3.3 buffs.
3. Other melee classes get more benefit from gear. Because DKs are a hybrid melee and spell based class, improvements in gear do less for them than the other melee classes. There are several ways to potentially fix this, from buffing talents that increase spell damage more from attack power, to adjusting the percentage of physical damage on abilities like Scourge Strike even more. Increasing the coefficient on obliterate etc is also an option.
4. In any case, Blizzard has made a commitment to continue balancing the classes. I hope they're monitoring the data that's readily available, and can give a little help to the poor classes (which right now are shaman, DK, spriest, and balance druids) and bring warriors back in line with other hybrids. I know they're focused on Cataclysm at this point, but there's lots of time to improve the raiding experience in this expansion still, and I hope they don't abandon us to our plight.
Enjoy the data, all you nerds out there! :)
I've crunched the numbers, and my primary question - how have DPS DKs scaled in relation to other classes - has been resoundingly answered. In addition, loads of additional findings and questions have been raised by my trip into Dataland.
THE METHOD:
I took the top ten dps of each class/spec for each boss fight on normal ICC25. I obtained an average dps for each spec on each fight. You can easily examine each boss to see which fights are 'melee-friendly,' 'ranged friendly,' and which classes do well on specific fights. While certain strange events occur and can skew the data, like Dusk's crazy speed kill of Lady Deathwhisper, there is enough data here to smooth out any bumps. Regarding the above, two marksmen hunters for the LDW fight did very well - doing more than 5k better than any other hunters. This made hunters look better overall, but averaged across all 120 data points (10 hunters for each of the 12 fights), hunters still were found to be about the 5th best dps class overall.
In the end, I hand-entered 4,200 points of data, giving a very good sample size from which to draw conclusions about how each class/spec is scaling as guilds continue to progress and gear up in ICC.
Remember, I chose the top ten dps because I'm interested in what the maximum dps potential is - so even if it's not realistic for every class to get power infusion, or tricks/hysteria all the time, or to have the luxury of staying on the boss the whole time, we're looking at what CAN be done under the right circumstances.
Destruction warlocks, survival hunters, and blood DKs did so poorly on examination of normal modes, that I saved myself the effort and didn't calculate their scores in heroic modes.
THE RESULTS:
I just noticed my Sindragosa data for heroic got pasted over the Lich King info. I'll check this and repost if anything changes. As far as DKs go, though, this will only hurt. Their best fight in ICC relatively speaking was Sindragosa.
1. DKs are in a sorry state. Unfortunately, my hunch was borne out, conclusively. On examination of Normal modes, DKs started in the middle of the pack through Festergut's tank n spank, and faded fast to the end. By the end of the 12 fights, the BEST DK spec, unholy, was beaten out by at least one spec from EVERY class except poor, poor shammies. Unholy came in as the 11th-best dps spec in the game, and frost was 14th. The by-now-abandoned blood spec came in dead last - 19th - of the specs I looked at.
By the way, I did eyeball beast mastery, arms, and subtlety, but as expected they were so poor I didn't even put in the effort to add them to the chart. (well, arms did ok on some fights, but fury is so vastly superior that it wasn't worth it).
In any case, the expansion-long public perception that Death Knight are overpwered can be conclusively rejected at this point. THEY ARE THE SECOND-WORST (OR THIRD, MAYBE) DPS CLASS IN THE GAME right now.
Heroic modes wasn't much better. All of the 'Shadowmourne classes' (Warriors, Pallies, DKs) did see some improvement in heroic modes, but DKs once again scaled the poorest, by far. In fact, they still ended up the third-worst dps class in the game, barely passing priests, despite the fact that if you don't have a Shadowmourne, you can't even get on these charts. I didn't look at every fight, but on every one I did look at (Saurfang, Festergut, Sindragosa), EVERY Warrior, Paladin, and DK on the charts had the legendary. Do you scale an entire class around the assumption that they have the (very rare) weapon? Even so, DKs come out smelling putrescent.
2. The rich get richer. It's been well-known from vanilla and through two expansions that warriors scale well with gear. The proof is here. Blizzard has stated their goal for all dps classes to be as close as possible - within about 1-2% of each other, with the 'pure dps classes' on top.
The 'pures' didn't do too badly with the four classes filling the 2nd through 5th spots on the class charts, with the exception of warriors. Warriors finished 2% better than the second-best class (spanning the stated goal for all classes from their nearest competitor) and more than 17% better than the poor enhancement shammies. On heroic modes, they got even richer, finishing a full 6% better than second-best, and over 25% better than enhance shammies. As a hybrid class, that's hardly in line with Blizz' goals, and hardly fair to other classes. I'm not QQing here - just presenting the information. I like warriors, but clearly their dps is out of line with 'balance' in the game.
In heroic modes, Retribution used their Shadowmournes to leapfrog several 'pure' classes to finish in the third spot. Unholy did benefit from the legendary, but just not nearly as much as the other two classes.
And as has already been stated, the dps for shammies was much worse than any other class. Obviously, Blizz' announcement that there will be other heroism classes paves the way for shaman to get a big boost - and rightfully so.
3. Other observations: (some of this I'm sure many of you knew already; I'm no expert on every class):
-I was surprised fire mages did so much better than arcane, particularly in better gear. They were convincingly the second best spec in the game. Arcane did quite poorly in heroic modes, dropping six spots.
-Overall, the melee vs ranged divide was well-balanced. There was a fairly consistent split between ranged and melee overall, and there are several fights in ICC which favored one or the other. Decent balance.
-Rogues can't complain too much overall. I've seen lots of concerns with how they've scaled. Obviously, combat is doing fine, so one can't complain too much. Of course, if one is referring to mutilate, then yes, rogues have a point, but at least they have ONE spec that is doing well.
-Balance isn't scaling well. Balance druids did fairly well in normal modes, but hardly saw any increase in dps in heroic modes, and saw their relative position on the charts drop significantly.
-Shadow priests aren't as bad as their reputation. But, they could do better. They still ended up as the second or third worst class/spec, down there with DKs on the junk pile.
-Demonology warlocks aren't doing too badly. Yes, affliction is the 'best' spec in most cases, but Demo is actually viable, and proved itself to be better than destro. Destruction - once the 'only' spec for raiding locks, has fallen on hard times.
-Blizzard needs to allow pets to benefit from buffs. Fights like Blood Queen Lana'thel really hurt when your pet doesn't get any help from the buff you get.
DISCUSSION:
I'm not going to try to cover nearly everything here.
In fact, I'm only going to talk briefly about DK scaling, so for additional discussion, please leave a comment, or link this post in a forum somewhere :)
Why are DKs scaling so poorly?
1. Pets scale poorly. As a pet class, we may benefit from increased crit or other buffs, but the pets don't.
2. Knee-jerk nerfs. I've written about this previously. Early in beta and to some extent in Tier 7 content, DKs were certifiably overpowered. Since then, throughout the expansion there has been a perception that DKs are too strong, and that doing good dps is 'facerolling.' More recently, two abilities that needed adjusting - Tier 9 set bonus, and Scourge Strike - gave the impression again of being overpowered, but were nerfed to the point that the class has fallen behind. Frost DW was nerfed during Tier 8 content and still hasn't recovered even with some 3.3 buffs.
3. Other melee classes get more benefit from gear. Because DKs are a hybrid melee and spell based class, improvements in gear do less for them than the other melee classes. There are several ways to potentially fix this, from buffing talents that increase spell damage more from attack power, to adjusting the percentage of physical damage on abilities like Scourge Strike even more. Increasing the coefficient on obliterate etc is also an option.
4. In any case, Blizzard has made a commitment to continue balancing the classes. I hope they're monitoring the data that's readily available, and can give a little help to the poor classes (which right now are shaman, DK, spriest, and balance druids) and bring warriors back in line with other hybrids. I know they're focused on Cataclysm at this point, but there's lots of time to improve the raiding experience in this expansion still, and I hope they don't abandon us to our plight.
Enjoy the data, all you nerds out there! :)
Friday, May 21, 2010
DPS Scaling in Icecrown Citadel: Intro
Some changes to DKs have been obvious.
The T9 four piece bonus was vastly overpowered and needed to be nerfed. Even after the changes, many DKs (including myself) had a hard time letting T9 go. Even after I had 4-piece T10, I still used T9 in aoe situations for a while. In other words, early T10 gear was underwhelming and DKs didn't get much better in it.
Other changes have been more subtle.
Over the past couple of months, my guild has progressed past normal Lich King kills deep into heroic modes. Our raiders are sporting many shiny new pieces of gear. My gear is solid; enough that not only does normal ICC10 hold nothing of interest gearwise, normal ICC25 has no upgrades, and HICC10 has only a couple of side grades. And yet, I've watched my perch on the dps charts slide from 1-2 for most full night's runs to 3-4 and it's to the point now that a 5th or 6th place finish isn't unusual. A guaranteed top-3 spot on tank and spank fights has turned into frequent forays onto page two (below 7th) on my recount.
Has my guildie's gear changed enough to cause this? No. Our gearscores have remained fairly similar for the past several months. Itemization? No, ICC is itemized quite well for DKs. Skill? Did I just start sucking, or my guildies get dramatically better? Doubtful.
So, with the slide of my spot on the charts, I've started wondering if this is consistently the case.
A while ago I briefly mentioned that a fellow DK had looked at melee and argued that mutilate rogues, fury warriors, and combat rogues were comfortably ahead on the Saurfang and Festergut fights, while kitties and ret paladins edged out unholy/blood DKs, followed by enhancement shammies and distantly by frost DKs. Skill/gear aside, shortly pre-3.3, I was happy with DKs being relatively close to other melee classes. Warriors were probably a bit high, and enhance a little low given that all but rogues are hybrids, but still in general with most raiders in 264 gear, the gap wasn't too bad. It was still possible for a good DK to keep up with most of the other classes.
Has it really changed that much since then?
So, I decided to take a look.
Information is readily available out there, and I chose World of Logs because it's the parser that my guild uses, and looking at different classes for each fight is very easy to do. Of course, not all guilds put their parses on the site, and not all guilds choose to make their parses public, but the sample is large enough to be considered fairly well-representative of the whole in my opinion.
I'll take ALL of the 'viable' dps specs this time including ranged as well as melee. I'm going to include EVERY boss fight in ICC25 (except gunship). I'm looking at BOTH normal and heroic, because the fight dynamics change from normal to heroic (just as one example, many melee classes can stay in and dps duing bone storm on normal but can't on heroic). I'll take the top 10 dps for each class/spec, and obtain an average. Would a larger number be 'better'? Perhaps. Here, I'm only interested in the upper range of what a spec 'can' do - so 10 seems sufficient.
________________
Since I wrote this part of the post, I've laboriously been crunching the numbers. So far I've looked at normal ICC25 Marrowgar through Putricide. And the results are interesting! Some, I expected, and others, I did not.
I'm going to keep crunching the numbers for now, and post them as soon as I can!
I'm afraid there's so much fodder for discussion that I'll probably have to break up my response to the data into more than one post.
For now, stand by.
More to follow!
The T9 four piece bonus was vastly overpowered and needed to be nerfed. Even after the changes, many DKs (including myself) had a hard time letting T9 go. Even after I had 4-piece T10, I still used T9 in aoe situations for a while. In other words, early T10 gear was underwhelming and DKs didn't get much better in it.
Other changes have been more subtle.
Over the past couple of months, my guild has progressed past normal Lich King kills deep into heroic modes. Our raiders are sporting many shiny new pieces of gear. My gear is solid; enough that not only does normal ICC10 hold nothing of interest gearwise, normal ICC25 has no upgrades, and HICC10 has only a couple of side grades. And yet, I've watched my perch on the dps charts slide from 1-2 for most full night's runs to 3-4 and it's to the point now that a 5th or 6th place finish isn't unusual. A guaranteed top-3 spot on tank and spank fights has turned into frequent forays onto page two (below 7th) on my recount.
Has my guildie's gear changed enough to cause this? No. Our gearscores have remained fairly similar for the past several months. Itemization? No, ICC is itemized quite well for DKs. Skill? Did I just start sucking, or my guildies get dramatically better? Doubtful.
So, with the slide of my spot on the charts, I've started wondering if this is consistently the case.
A while ago I briefly mentioned that a fellow DK had looked at melee and argued that mutilate rogues, fury warriors, and combat rogues were comfortably ahead on the Saurfang and Festergut fights, while kitties and ret paladins edged out unholy/blood DKs, followed by enhancement shammies and distantly by frost DKs. Skill/gear aside, shortly pre-3.3, I was happy with DKs being relatively close to other melee classes. Warriors were probably a bit high, and enhance a little low given that all but rogues are hybrids, but still in general with most raiders in 264 gear, the gap wasn't too bad. It was still possible for a good DK to keep up with most of the other classes.
Has it really changed that much since then?
So, I decided to take a look.
Information is readily available out there, and I chose World of Logs because it's the parser that my guild uses, and looking at different classes for each fight is very easy to do. Of course, not all guilds put their parses on the site, and not all guilds choose to make their parses public, but the sample is large enough to be considered fairly well-representative of the whole in my opinion.
I'll take ALL of the 'viable' dps specs this time including ranged as well as melee. I'm going to include EVERY boss fight in ICC25 (except gunship). I'm looking at BOTH normal and heroic, because the fight dynamics change from normal to heroic (just as one example, many melee classes can stay in and dps duing bone storm on normal but can't on heroic). I'll take the top 10 dps for each class/spec, and obtain an average. Would a larger number be 'better'? Perhaps. Here, I'm only interested in the upper range of what a spec 'can' do - so 10 seems sufficient.
________________
Since I wrote this part of the post, I've laboriously been crunching the numbers. So far I've looked at normal ICC25 Marrowgar through Putricide. And the results are interesting! Some, I expected, and others, I did not.
I'm going to keep crunching the numbers for now, and post them as soon as I can!
I'm afraid there's so much fodder for discussion that I'll probably have to break up my response to the data into more than one post.
For now, stand by.
More to follow!
Thursday, May 20, 2010
DPS DK optimization: Heroic Mode review
Disclaimer: My guild has not yet cleared ICC-25 on heroic modes yet. We are 9/12 and thus have not attempted Lich King on heroic yet. However, I've dps'd all of the fights (with the exception of LK of course) and feel I can speak to how to optimize your play as dps DK even on Putri and Sindragosa who haven't fallen over for us yet.
I'll also just do this one post for all of them, since most of the suggestions for each fight are still valid.
Marrowgar: Actually, if you weren't doing it before, on normal mode with a full 264-geared group, you can stay in for Bone Storm, using IBF as needed. The damage isn't that bad, and healers can easily keep you up through it.
For heroic, however, I doubt you'll be able to stay in even in full 277 gear. It hits HARD. So, stay out. Mostly, stay alive. Second, dps the people in bone spikes since those continue during bone storm. Third, IF and ONLY if you have both health and no one needs to be broken out of spikes, you may Icy Touch/Death Coil Marrowgar. More importantly, know when the storm is going to end and start cheating back towards him so you can jump on him as soon as he stops.
Lady Deathwhisper: we found this a little challenging. Of course, the mind controls and adds continue throughout the fight.
In P1 we pull all the adds on top of the boss for aoe to get them down fast. You may be asked to help death grip or control adherents. I actually have an assigned adherent that I DG to the stage. Positioning can be a bit tricky with the pillars - the LOS can work both for and against you. Once I get them on stage I usually mind freeze the next cast and then drag them to the perfect spot if they weren't already. If you're on add duty, you'll be gaining aggro frequently, so make liberal use of interrupts and ams to ensure you don't die. You can aoe, but be careful to not kill your mind controlled fellows. Interesting finding: when you're on add duty, you don't seem to ever be picked for mind control. I've done dozens of LDW attempts/kills on heroic now, and never been picked once.
In P2 if you're on the boss/add duty I recommend speccing deep enough into frost for free mind freezes regardless of main spec because you DON'T want to miss and interrupt. I stay on add duty, so I continue to control adherents and keep them in the 'cleave team' for maximizing kill time. Pestilence is definitely your friend throughout the fight, but death and decay rarely is, since you don't want to kill mind-controlled fellows and there are rarely enough adds standing in one place to make use of it. As unholy, I usually leave my ghoul on the boss, but if we're falling behind on adds, I'll pull him off for a little extra oomf.
By the way, a simple /petattack macro is your friend. I don't believe I've mentioned it before, but on fights like this where you're switching targets often, it's really nice to just have a keybind to send your pet to your target.
Gunship. Really? Just kill stuff.
Saurfang: I don't do anything different on this fight. If you're unholy, be sure to pestilence the adds asap - they need to go down fast and giving your ranged more dps on the beasts really helps. If your raid leader says not to - they're wrong.
Rotface: Just be careful when running around to avoid people with vile gas. DBM is ok for some things, but AVR/AVRE really shines on this encounter, showing you the danger zone for those that are vile and also where the ooze explosion is going to land. However, dps optimization is the same as before.
Festergut: Just make sure to avoid getting goo. If you do, the haste debuff will KILL your dps. In a pinch, you can still easily survive a pungent blight without getting all three inoculations with IBF/AMS, but try to ensure you get all 3 anyway - save your healer's heart, and mana.
Putricide: A wonderfully challenging fight! If you enjoyed the fight in T9 gear, the heroic version is a nice challenge in 264 gear, too! A few differences here. I pop my army at pull but not my gargoyle. Why? Because the crucial part of the fight is the phase transitions where you get both a green and an orange ooze. You'll need your burst to get your assigned ooze/gas cloud down quickly (and yes, I know the encounter assigns it for you). Other than that, it may take some ingenuity on your part to ensure you don't die because there's damage flying around all over the place.
Blood Prince Council: Blizz laid the hate on for melee on this fight, heh. You'll get a DBM warning when you get to 6 stacks of shadow prison, but it won't be very dangerous until around 10. On last night's kill, I got to 19 and survived. AMS is your friend here. If you must run, do so under cover of your shield. If you don't have a shield, don't run. The only exception to this is empowered vortex. Even if it kills you, don't blow up a healer. Run, and die. :) But really, it's fairly easy to get the stacks to fall off when you're on a boss, and so when you switch targets you can run all the way across the room safely.
Incidentally, my fellow DK is a big advocate of run speed enchants on boots. I'm not. I'm 32 attack power all the way, but he swears by it. This fight and Marrowgar are two where I can see the point.
Blood Queen Lana'thel: Nothing really different here. Just moar dots (dps). During her air phase, it's even more important that you don't blow up squishies, and you might as well save your ams to ensure you don't die.
Valithria: same ol same ol. Seriously, on our kill last night someone commented at the end: "that was heroic?" Once your healers know how to travel as a pack in the portal, the fight goes very quickly. I don't care about dps on this fight at all, and just focus on doing things like keeping the mages from casting their frostbolt volley.
Sindragosa: There is zero room for error on tombs. Without AMS, you will be killed by the frost bombs. I initially was worried about running out after her 'death grip,' but I found AMS still adequately protects you. I still don't wear any frost resistance armor. Honestly, the fight requires clean execution from every person in the raid, but it otherwise doesn't seem to bad to me.
And then there was one. He'll have to wait for later. :)
I'll also just do this one post for all of them, since most of the suggestions for each fight are still valid.
Marrowgar: Actually, if you weren't doing it before, on normal mode with a full 264-geared group, you can stay in for Bone Storm, using IBF as needed. The damage isn't that bad, and healers can easily keep you up through it.
For heroic, however, I doubt you'll be able to stay in even in full 277 gear. It hits HARD. So, stay out. Mostly, stay alive. Second, dps the people in bone spikes since those continue during bone storm. Third, IF and ONLY if you have both health and no one needs to be broken out of spikes, you may Icy Touch/Death Coil Marrowgar. More importantly, know when the storm is going to end and start cheating back towards him so you can jump on him as soon as he stops.
Lady Deathwhisper: we found this a little challenging. Of course, the mind controls and adds continue throughout the fight.
In P1 we pull all the adds on top of the boss for aoe to get them down fast. You may be asked to help death grip or control adherents. I actually have an assigned adherent that I DG to the stage. Positioning can be a bit tricky with the pillars - the LOS can work both for and against you. Once I get them on stage I usually mind freeze the next cast and then drag them to the perfect spot if they weren't already. If you're on add duty, you'll be gaining aggro frequently, so make liberal use of interrupts and ams to ensure you don't die. You can aoe, but be careful to not kill your mind controlled fellows. Interesting finding: when you're on add duty, you don't seem to ever be picked for mind control. I've done dozens of LDW attempts/kills on heroic now, and never been picked once.
In P2 if you're on the boss/add duty I recommend speccing deep enough into frost for free mind freezes regardless of main spec because you DON'T want to miss and interrupt. I stay on add duty, so I continue to control adherents and keep them in the 'cleave team' for maximizing kill time. Pestilence is definitely your friend throughout the fight, but death and decay rarely is, since you don't want to kill mind-controlled fellows and there are rarely enough adds standing in one place to make use of it. As unholy, I usually leave my ghoul on the boss, but if we're falling behind on adds, I'll pull him off for a little extra oomf.
By the way, a simple /petattack macro is your friend. I don't believe I've mentioned it before, but on fights like this where you're switching targets often, it's really nice to just have a keybind to send your pet to your target.
Gunship. Really? Just kill stuff.
Saurfang: I don't do anything different on this fight. If you're unholy, be sure to pestilence the adds asap - they need to go down fast and giving your ranged more dps on the beasts really helps. If your raid leader says not to - they're wrong.
Rotface: Just be careful when running around to avoid people with vile gas. DBM is ok for some things, but AVR/AVRE really shines on this encounter, showing you the danger zone for those that are vile and also where the ooze explosion is going to land. However, dps optimization is the same as before.
Festergut: Just make sure to avoid getting goo. If you do, the haste debuff will KILL your dps. In a pinch, you can still easily survive a pungent blight without getting all three inoculations with IBF/AMS, but try to ensure you get all 3 anyway - save your healer's heart, and mana.
Putricide: A wonderfully challenging fight! If you enjoyed the fight in T9 gear, the heroic version is a nice challenge in 264 gear, too! A few differences here. I pop my army at pull but not my gargoyle. Why? Because the crucial part of the fight is the phase transitions where you get both a green and an orange ooze. You'll need your burst to get your assigned ooze/gas cloud down quickly (and yes, I know the encounter assigns it for you). Other than that, it may take some ingenuity on your part to ensure you don't die because there's damage flying around all over the place.
Blood Prince Council: Blizz laid the hate on for melee on this fight, heh. You'll get a DBM warning when you get to 6 stacks of shadow prison, but it won't be very dangerous until around 10. On last night's kill, I got to 19 and survived. AMS is your friend here. If you must run, do so under cover of your shield. If you don't have a shield, don't run. The only exception to this is empowered vortex. Even if it kills you, don't blow up a healer. Run, and die. :) But really, it's fairly easy to get the stacks to fall off when you're on a boss, and so when you switch targets you can run all the way across the room safely.
Incidentally, my fellow DK is a big advocate of run speed enchants on boots. I'm not. I'm 32 attack power all the way, but he swears by it. This fight and Marrowgar are two where I can see the point.
Blood Queen Lana'thel: Nothing really different here. Just moar dots (dps). During her air phase, it's even more important that you don't blow up squishies, and you might as well save your ams to ensure you don't die.
Valithria: same ol same ol. Seriously, on our kill last night someone commented at the end: "that was heroic?" Once your healers know how to travel as a pack in the portal, the fight goes very quickly. I don't care about dps on this fight at all, and just focus on doing things like keeping the mages from casting their frostbolt volley.
Sindragosa: There is zero room for error on tombs. Without AMS, you will be killed by the frost bombs. I initially was worried about running out after her 'death grip,' but I found AMS still adequately protects you. I still don't wear any frost resistance armor. Honestly, the fight requires clean execution from every person in the raid, but it otherwise doesn't seem to bad to me.
And then there was one. He'll have to wait for later. :)
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Yes, the title of this post is shamelessly stolen both from David Bowie and Jim Butcher's latest Dresden Files installment. Butcher, by the way, is my favorite current fiction author, and he must be doing something right as his last several books have all topped the NYT bestseller list upon release.
However, the Changes referred to here, of course, are all about the the Cataclysm looming on our Wow horizon.
If you haven't seen some of the changes planned for the next expasion, start at MMO-Champion.com. For class-specific info, there's quite a bit at Elitist Jerks, as usual. Consider's unholy thread at EJ has links to his alpha involvement and the Cata EJ discussion threads.
What to think, what to think?
First, the obvious.
1) Rune changes. As I understand it, the primary difference is that it will allow us to 'pool' resources a bit more. As we all know, in the current system if you don't use a rune within 2 seconds of it being available, it's 'wasted' and a dps loss. In theory at least, we can use resources as soon as they're available, but not using them to a point may not hurt too much.
I've let this change marinate for a bit and I've decided I like it. It may keep us from being quite as gcd-bound as we have been (although some people disagree). It should allow us to better time combinations of moves for best effect (as a long-time combat rogue, I remember pooling energy as slice & dice ticks down, then reapplying it and going to town with several Sinister Strikes - especially when paired with adrenaline rush and blade flurry).
What remains to be seen is exactly how the mechanic will work - especially on live. Still, if it goes forward, it will dramtically change the way we play our class.
2) AOE is getting nerfed. Hard. For DKs, diseases spread by pestilence are doing half damage. Wandering plague has been halved. Of course, it looks like every other class is getting the same treatment as well.
I guess this is okay in theory. People often complain that as one overgears content in particular everything will devolve into aoe-fests.
Make no mistake, we'll still see heroics - and some raids - being pulled en masse and aoe'd down, but Blizz' move of nerfing aoe may slow that approach somewhat. The idea, of course, is to force us to use strategy and cc to get past trash and boss encounters. I get it, and I think it's a good thing. Still, I'll miss some of those eye-popping numbers like we saw on Onyxia's or Sindragosa's whelps *sigh* :)
3) Coefficient changes. This one you may not be as well aware of, but most abilities are getting a significant overhaul. So far on alpha we see:
Wandering Plague has had its damage halved.
Diseases spread from Pestilence deal half damage.
Scourge Strike has a base 140% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 70%.
Heart Strike has a base 100% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 50%.
Frost Strike has a base 110% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 55%.
Blood Strike has a base 80% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 40%.
Plague Strike has a base 100% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 50%.
Icy Touch has had its damage doubled.
Howling Blast only costs a Frost rune, has had its damage doubled, and now deals triple damage against targets affected by Hungering Cold.
Death Coil has had its damage doubled.
Frost Fever and Blood Plague have a base duration of 30 seconds, up from the current 15.
Ghoul Frenzy now last for 1 minute and heals your pet for 120% of its health over the duration of the buff, up from the current duration of 30 seconds and the current heal of 60%.
Rune Strike is now instant.
Ebon Plague now increases magical damage by 8%, down from 13%.
Death and Decay now costs a Blood Rune, down from a Blood, Unholy, and Frost rune.
Corpse Explosion now costs an Unholy Rune, changed from runic power.
Besides the aoe ramifications, one may think "whoa, DKs are getting hugely buffed!" Most of the single target abilities are seeing their damage doubled.
The short version is: no, we're not getting buffed. Sorry. The rune system changes - if interepreted correctly - mean that the coefficient increases will equate to roughly 'equal' sustained damage.
The difference is, we should see much improved burst. I can live with that. In fact, I rather like the idea.
Obviously, with all of this in development, I'm sure we'll see tons of tweaks in the numbers before live. In fact, it's fairly likely that one or more of these major changes will themselves see a major overhaul.
As opposed to my rather 'meh' response to the reported 'new' abilities, I'm positive about our mechanics changes and look forward to seeing them in action.
One thing is certain.
Everything changes. But that's another song. ;)
However, the Changes referred to here, of course, are all about the the Cataclysm looming on our Wow horizon.
If you haven't seen some of the changes planned for the next expasion, start at MMO-Champion.com. For class-specific info, there's quite a bit at Elitist Jerks, as usual. Consider's unholy thread at EJ has links to his alpha involvement and the Cata EJ discussion threads.
What to think, what to think?
First, the obvious.
1) Rune changes. As I understand it, the primary difference is that it will allow us to 'pool' resources a bit more. As we all know, in the current system if you don't use a rune within 2 seconds of it being available, it's 'wasted' and a dps loss. In theory at least, we can use resources as soon as they're available, but not using them to a point may not hurt too much.
I've let this change marinate for a bit and I've decided I like it. It may keep us from being quite as gcd-bound as we have been (although some people disagree). It should allow us to better time combinations of moves for best effect (as a long-time combat rogue, I remember pooling energy as slice & dice ticks down, then reapplying it and going to town with several Sinister Strikes - especially when paired with adrenaline rush and blade flurry).
What remains to be seen is exactly how the mechanic will work - especially on live. Still, if it goes forward, it will dramtically change the way we play our class.
2) AOE is getting nerfed. Hard. For DKs, diseases spread by pestilence are doing half damage. Wandering plague has been halved. Of course, it looks like every other class is getting the same treatment as well.
I guess this is okay in theory. People often complain that as one overgears content in particular everything will devolve into aoe-fests.
Make no mistake, we'll still see heroics - and some raids - being pulled en masse and aoe'd down, but Blizz' move of nerfing aoe may slow that approach somewhat. The idea, of course, is to force us to use strategy and cc to get past trash and boss encounters. I get it, and I think it's a good thing. Still, I'll miss some of those eye-popping numbers like we saw on Onyxia's or Sindragosa's whelps *sigh* :)
3) Coefficient changes. This one you may not be as well aware of, but most abilities are getting a significant overhaul. So far on alpha we see:
Wandering Plague has had its damage halved.
Diseases spread from Pestilence deal half damage.
Scourge Strike has a base 140% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 70%.
Heart Strike has a base 100% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 50%.
Frost Strike has a base 110% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 55%.
Blood Strike has a base 80% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 40%.
Plague Strike has a base 100% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 50%.
Icy Touch has had its damage doubled.
Howling Blast only costs a Frost rune, has had its damage doubled, and now deals triple damage against targets affected by Hungering Cold.
Death Coil has had its damage doubled.
Frost Fever and Blood Plague have a base duration of 30 seconds, up from the current 15.
Ghoul Frenzy now last for 1 minute and heals your pet for 120% of its health over the duration of the buff, up from the current duration of 30 seconds and the current heal of 60%.
Rune Strike is now instant.
Ebon Plague now increases magical damage by 8%, down from 13%.
Death and Decay now costs a Blood Rune, down from a Blood, Unholy, and Frost rune.
Corpse Explosion now costs an Unholy Rune, changed from runic power.
Besides the aoe ramifications, one may think "whoa, DKs are getting hugely buffed!" Most of the single target abilities are seeing their damage doubled.
The short version is: no, we're not getting buffed. Sorry. The rune system changes - if interepreted correctly - mean that the coefficient increases will equate to roughly 'equal' sustained damage.
The difference is, we should see much improved burst. I can live with that. In fact, I rather like the idea.
Obviously, with all of this in development, I'm sure we'll see tons of tweaks in the numbers before live. In fact, it's fairly likely that one or more of these major changes will themselves see a major overhaul.
As opposed to my rather 'meh' response to the reported 'new' abilities, I'm positive about our mechanics changes and look forward to seeing them in action.
One thing is certain.
Everything changes. But that's another song. ;)
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Sometimes, Elitist Jerks are Wrong!!! (*Shock*)
Or: Haste Is Actually Pretty Good Right Now.
Most of you know how often I reference Elitist Jerks. There's tons of valuable information there for every class and it's the first, middle, and last (with maybe a few peeks elsewhere) site I go to for information about min/maxing my role/class play. The thread 'managers' such as Consider generally do a fantastic job keeping the original post updated with the 'state of the union' information so you can just look at that post for a jumping off point for DK info.
However, EJ can be wrong, and Consider's unholy thread - the 'CANON' of accepted unholy dps - was wrong recently.
First, a brief story.
During Tier 9 (I know, hard to remember that far back), Scourge Strike was not that strong, even if it was our main ability (that was before the physical and shadow portions were split off). Other than that, unholy was as it had been for some time - good, but slightly behind blood for single target dps while being supreme on aoe fights. The accepted spec was something like 14/0/57 or 17/0/54. I ran the canonized spec and rotations (including the delicious glyph of disease) for quite some time, when on a lark I equipped two one-handed weapons. I didn't change my spec. I just used one-handers. I did more dps on dummies - about 300-400 more. Hmmm. I tried it on boss fights in TOC, again, not changing anything except one vs two weapons. Dual-wielding was 400-500 dps better. I very slightly modified my spec (dropping the two-handed blood talent), and away I went with DW. I did fantastic dps, blowing away everyone in the three guilds I spent time in during that period (yes, that was while I was trying to find a new guild). Elitist Jerks 'experts' never caught on to that trend. I didn't care - I found it to be better, so I used it. Then when ICC opened, Blizz 'fixed' Scourge Strike to be more powerful - favoring the big 2-hander, and they gave us more armor penetration on gear, improving physical strikes even more. I went back to the 'traditional' 2H weapons. But the moral of this story is, EJ can be wrong.
Back to the present.
Kudos to Dreddnaught from my guild in identifying the current problem early. He'd been /whispering me for several weeks about how he felt haste was much better than the theorycrafters were saying. He had been testing it via simulations and looking at different gear, and found that haste was much more valuable for frost and unholy/frost subspec than was being said at EJ. He even made several posts about it over at wow official forums.
Turns out, he was right. Recently, Consider's front page post alludes to stat changes that may affect gear and perhaps even gemming choices. For frost subpec, haste is actually better than armor penetration, especially as gear improves. He now has stat weights seperated for blood subspec and for frost subspec.
This isn't as aggregious an error as some might think. First, to err is human (cut us all some slack eh? :)). Second, going against armor penetration in favor of haste goes against accepted thinking about DKs since their inception. Haste has been a poor stat in part because big two-handed swings don't proportionally get a lot out of speeding up a bit, and haste hasn't affected all that many of our abilities. But with the changes to Icy Talons and with gear scaling in general, haste IS in fact a very strong stat for DKs that take it.
We DKs have loved to talk about armor penetration scaling - which is indeed very good - but we have forgotten how impressively haste can scale as well. Haste ultimately scales better than just about anything because of the way it stacks. Even with arpen, there is a limit - you can cap it in great gear. With haste, talents and buffs stack multiplicatively, and there's almost always more you can keep adding for more improvement. While casters may talk about haste capping (getting spells below the gcd in cast time), for melee that doesn't apply. So, ultimately we shouldn't have been too surprised when it turned out to be so good. I for one am happy about it. It gives us three really nice stats (strength of course, and arpen is still very solid), and options for using both 2H and DW weapons. Still, what will it change? Answer: very little. Herkumi's War Token from emblems becomes a very good trinket. A few items with haste on them are more attractive. Should you gem haste? NO. Strength is still better, and will be from now until Cataclysm.
Conclusion: EJ CAN be wrong, but fortunately they eventually seem to get most things right. Sometimes you have to do what works best for you rather than go with the cookie-cutter info, but it's a very good place to start.
p.s., I'm still thinking about trying frost DW dps, but haven't had the opportunity. One reason is we're doing mostly heroic content and any one-handers that drop go to rogues/enh first so I still only have crappy one-handers. Second, dps is demonstrably NOT better for frost. World of logs parses has them 500-1000 dps less than unholy on many (but not all) fights. That's no excuse to not try it, so I expect I eventually I will do it, but I'm not eager. Maybe next week.
Most of you know how often I reference Elitist Jerks. There's tons of valuable information there for every class and it's the first, middle, and last (with maybe a few peeks elsewhere) site I go to for information about min/maxing my role/class play. The thread 'managers' such as Consider generally do a fantastic job keeping the original post updated with the 'state of the union' information so you can just look at that post for a jumping off point for DK info.
However, EJ can be wrong, and Consider's unholy thread - the 'CANON' of accepted unholy dps - was wrong recently.
First, a brief story.
During Tier 9 (I know, hard to remember that far back), Scourge Strike was not that strong, even if it was our main ability (that was before the physical and shadow portions were split off). Other than that, unholy was as it had been for some time - good, but slightly behind blood for single target dps while being supreme on aoe fights. The accepted spec was something like 14/0/57 or 17/0/54. I ran the canonized spec and rotations (including the delicious glyph of disease) for quite some time, when on a lark I equipped two one-handed weapons. I didn't change my spec. I just used one-handers. I did more dps on dummies - about 300-400 more. Hmmm. I tried it on boss fights in TOC, again, not changing anything except one vs two weapons. Dual-wielding was 400-500 dps better. I very slightly modified my spec (dropping the two-handed blood talent), and away I went with DW. I did fantastic dps, blowing away everyone in the three guilds I spent time in during that period (yes, that was while I was trying to find a new guild). Elitist Jerks 'experts' never caught on to that trend. I didn't care - I found it to be better, so I used it. Then when ICC opened, Blizz 'fixed' Scourge Strike to be more powerful - favoring the big 2-hander, and they gave us more armor penetration on gear, improving physical strikes even more. I went back to the 'traditional' 2H weapons. But the moral of this story is, EJ can be wrong.
Back to the present.
Kudos to Dreddnaught from my guild in identifying the current problem early. He'd been /whispering me for several weeks about how he felt haste was much better than the theorycrafters were saying. He had been testing it via simulations and looking at different gear, and found that haste was much more valuable for frost and unholy/frost subspec than was being said at EJ. He even made several posts about it over at wow official forums.
Turns out, he was right. Recently, Consider's front page post alludes to stat changes that may affect gear and perhaps even gemming choices. For frost subpec, haste is actually better than armor penetration, especially as gear improves. He now has stat weights seperated for blood subspec and for frost subspec.
This isn't as aggregious an error as some might think. First, to err is human (cut us all some slack eh? :)). Second, going against armor penetration in favor of haste goes against accepted thinking about DKs since their inception. Haste has been a poor stat in part because big two-handed swings don't proportionally get a lot out of speeding up a bit, and haste hasn't affected all that many of our abilities. But with the changes to Icy Talons and with gear scaling in general, haste IS in fact a very strong stat for DKs that take it.
We DKs have loved to talk about armor penetration scaling - which is indeed very good - but we have forgotten how impressively haste can scale as well. Haste ultimately scales better than just about anything because of the way it stacks. Even with arpen, there is a limit - you can cap it in great gear. With haste, talents and buffs stack multiplicatively, and there's almost always more you can keep adding for more improvement. While casters may talk about haste capping (getting spells below the gcd in cast time), for melee that doesn't apply. So, ultimately we shouldn't have been too surprised when it turned out to be so good. I for one am happy about it. It gives us three really nice stats (strength of course, and arpen is still very solid), and options for using both 2H and DW weapons. Still, what will it change? Answer: very little. Herkumi's War Token from emblems becomes a very good trinket. A few items with haste on them are more attractive. Should you gem haste? NO. Strength is still better, and will be from now until Cataclysm.
Conclusion: EJ CAN be wrong, but fortunately they eventually seem to get most things right. Sometimes you have to do what works best for you rather than go with the cookie-cutter info, but it's a very good place to start.
p.s., I'm still thinking about trying frost DW dps, but haven't had the opportunity. One reason is we're doing mostly heroic content and any one-handers that drop go to rogues/enh first so I still only have crappy one-handers. Second, dps is demonstrably NOT better for frost. World of logs parses has them 500-1000 dps less than unholy on many (but not all) fights. That's no excuse to not try it, so I expect I eventually I will do it, but I'm not eager. Maybe next week.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Lich King: a DPS DK Perspective
THIS IS IT! The fight we waited all expansion for! The chance to defeat the Lich King is here!
I've commented previously that it is a wonderful fight and that Blizzard did a great job of designing the encounter. Most fights are either 1) dps tanknspanks, 2) survival, or 3) gimmicks. In Icecrown, the only other fight that combines several of these elements is Putricide. On Lich King, you'll have to maintain steady dps on the boss, while bursting adds down, surviving several different potential raid-killers, and coordinate target-switching and slowing abilities.
Lich King is the FINAL boss in Icecrown Citadel, the ultimate challenge remaining in normal and heroic modes (no secret boss here). YOU are NOT prepared!
Pull/Phase One (necrotic plague): DO NOT summon your army in this fight. There are too many adds that can be taunted by them. Go ahead with the rest of your dps cooldowns, including DRW/Gargoyle/ghoul. You'll be behind Lich King, but be sure you know where the Shambling Horrors are being tanked so you can run to them asap if you get necrotic plague. As unholy DK, I pestilence to keep Ebon Plaguebringer up so all the adds take more damage from plague etc, but otherwise we ONLY dps Lich King in P1. There's no need to dps adds, they'll die from necrotic plague. You'll want to max dps just to keep the fight shorter, but also time it so you don't get a third Horror.
P2 transition (Raging Spirits): Know when it's coming so you can immediately run to the edge. You don't want to burden healers while taking too much damage from Remorseless Winter. That, combined with an unfortunately timed infest and/or pain and suffering, can kill you if you're not careful. I usually take the opportunity while running to refresh bone shield and I anti-magic shield to ensure my health stays high. In addition, if you have a ghoul up, call him with you to the edge, or he'll eventually die. You can put him on passive to call him, then tell him to attack the Raging Spirit. If you merely put him on defensive, he'll run back to Lich King so be careful to keep him on Raging Spirits. You'll need the dps on the adds, and you want your ghoul to survive. Pump the dps on the Raging Spirits, you'll want at least 2/3 (on 25-man) down before the transition is over.
P2: Carefully run back in for Phase 2, keeping dps on any remaining spirits. Pestilence to get diseases back on Lich King. Pestilence again the moment Valkyr are targetable. Some DKs Death & Decay here, but I prefer to save my runes for pestilence, slowing, and dps on my designated Valkyr. Groups do this one of two ways; having 'teams' assigned to specific Valkyr, or having a priority - killing them in order. We found better success with the latter. In any case, maximize burst dps on your Valkyr to get it down quickly, but be prepared to move out of the way of Defile. A Defile dropped in the path of Valkyr is an almost guaranteed wipe. Also be prepared to use your chains of ice as needed to slow Valkyr. Death Grip does not work on them. I use my gargoyle again (or other cooldown) when the first Valkyr appear because you want to ensure they all die, along with remaining Raging Spirits.
P3 transition can be scary, but if you've learned P2 transition, you can do it! We pop Heroism/Bloodlust here to try to get the Raging Spirits down; probably gargoyle/drw/ghoul will be up again at this point. Also use your haste pot here. Since there are more Spirits, pay attention to the kill target and burst it down, switching crisply from target to target. You may well have two Spirits up when the transition is over, be careful to stay out of their way, and kill them when you can (but don't miss defiles, etc).
P3 (Vile Spirits): Run back in, but don't get greedy! You can still wipe with defiles or vile spirits (thankfully, no infest)! Your ranged can kill Viles, but as melee, just stay away! You shouldn't have to worry about the enrage at this point (at least on normal), so don't try to run to the tank too soon, and stay away from others so you don't blow each other up. In between, dps LK as you can. Something I missed originally: when you get Harvest Soul on you, if you are properly healed, you'll survive (yaay!), but be sucked into Frostmourne. Inside, (as a DK) you'll have to dps the add, and interrupt the long cast of Soul Rip - which will kill Terenas if you don't. You have 60 seconds to kill the add and escape. Once it's dead, you'll pop back out and rejoin the raid.
P4: as you know, get him to 10% and you win! This is a time for screaming and cheering while you watch the events and/or cutscene. DO NOT RELEASE! You'll be rezzed at the end and get to kill him for free from that point.
To sum up: DPS the boss only in P1. In other phases, dps the adds in the correct order as quickly as possible, then dps the Lich King. Stay away from the many things that will kill you. Spread diseases. My dps on this fight is poor compared to others, but all that matters is surviving and controlling adds!
Congratulations, you've just completed Icecrown Citadel!
These 'guides' to dps DKs have been on normal - as nuances crop up and I find ways to deal with them, I'll try to post on heroic modes as well...
Good luck to all in Icecrown!
I've commented previously that it is a wonderful fight and that Blizzard did a great job of designing the encounter. Most fights are either 1) dps tanknspanks, 2) survival, or 3) gimmicks. In Icecrown, the only other fight that combines several of these elements is Putricide. On Lich King, you'll have to maintain steady dps on the boss, while bursting adds down, surviving several different potential raid-killers, and coordinate target-switching and slowing abilities.
Lich King is the FINAL boss in Icecrown Citadel, the ultimate challenge remaining in normal and heroic modes (no secret boss here). YOU are NOT prepared!
Pull/Phase One (necrotic plague): DO NOT summon your army in this fight. There are too many adds that can be taunted by them. Go ahead with the rest of your dps cooldowns, including DRW/Gargoyle/ghoul. You'll be behind Lich King, but be sure you know where the Shambling Horrors are being tanked so you can run to them asap if you get necrotic plague. As unholy DK, I pestilence to keep Ebon Plaguebringer up so all the adds take more damage from plague etc, but otherwise we ONLY dps Lich King in P1. There's no need to dps adds, they'll die from necrotic plague. You'll want to max dps just to keep the fight shorter, but also time it so you don't get a third Horror.
P2 transition (Raging Spirits): Know when it's coming so you can immediately run to the edge. You don't want to burden healers while taking too much damage from Remorseless Winter. That, combined with an unfortunately timed infest and/or pain and suffering, can kill you if you're not careful. I usually take the opportunity while running to refresh bone shield and I anti-magic shield to ensure my health stays high. In addition, if you have a ghoul up, call him with you to the edge, or he'll eventually die. You can put him on passive to call him, then tell him to attack the Raging Spirit. If you merely put him on defensive, he'll run back to Lich King so be careful to keep him on Raging Spirits. You'll need the dps on the adds, and you want your ghoul to survive. Pump the dps on the Raging Spirits, you'll want at least 2/3 (on 25-man) down before the transition is over.
P2: Carefully run back in for Phase 2, keeping dps on any remaining spirits. Pestilence to get diseases back on Lich King. Pestilence again the moment Valkyr are targetable. Some DKs Death & Decay here, but I prefer to save my runes for pestilence, slowing, and dps on my designated Valkyr. Groups do this one of two ways; having 'teams' assigned to specific Valkyr, or having a priority - killing them in order. We found better success with the latter. In any case, maximize burst dps on your Valkyr to get it down quickly, but be prepared to move out of the way of Defile. A Defile dropped in the path of Valkyr is an almost guaranteed wipe. Also be prepared to use your chains of ice as needed to slow Valkyr. Death Grip does not work on them. I use my gargoyle again (or other cooldown) when the first Valkyr appear because you want to ensure they all die, along with remaining Raging Spirits.
P3 transition can be scary, but if you've learned P2 transition, you can do it! We pop Heroism/Bloodlust here to try to get the Raging Spirits down; probably gargoyle/drw/ghoul will be up again at this point. Also use your haste pot here. Since there are more Spirits, pay attention to the kill target and burst it down, switching crisply from target to target. You may well have two Spirits up when the transition is over, be careful to stay out of their way, and kill them when you can (but don't miss defiles, etc).
P3 (Vile Spirits): Run back in, but don't get greedy! You can still wipe with defiles or vile spirits (thankfully, no infest)! Your ranged can kill Viles, but as melee, just stay away! You shouldn't have to worry about the enrage at this point (at least on normal), so don't try to run to the tank too soon, and stay away from others so you don't blow each other up. In between, dps LK as you can. Something I missed originally: when you get Harvest Soul on you, if you are properly healed, you'll survive (yaay!), but be sucked into Frostmourne. Inside, (as a DK) you'll have to dps the add, and interrupt the long cast of Soul Rip - which will kill Terenas if you don't. You have 60 seconds to kill the add and escape. Once it's dead, you'll pop back out and rejoin the raid.
P4: as you know, get him to 10% and you win! This is a time for screaming and cheering while you watch the events and/or cutscene. DO NOT RELEASE! You'll be rezzed at the end and get to kill him for free from that point.
To sum up: DPS the boss only in P1. In other phases, dps the adds in the correct order as quickly as possible, then dps the Lich King. Stay away from the many things that will kill you. Spread diseases. My dps on this fight is poor compared to others, but all that matters is surviving and controlling adds!
Congratulations, you've just completed Icecrown Citadel!
These 'guides' to dps DKs have been on normal - as nuances crop up and I find ways to deal with them, I'll try to post on heroic modes as well...
Good luck to all in Icecrown!
Monday, April 5, 2010
Heroic ICC: Week One
Thursday's raid (as you know) culminated in a rather joyous celebration of my guild's first 25-man kill. Suh-weeeet!!!
My ten-man run has also made some changes. I had discussed with the other 'leaders' of my Friday night ICC10 regarding our lack of ability to clear the whole instance and still have time remaining to kill Arthas. We'd also been plagued by inconsistent attendance, leading to weekly pugging and raid starts at 10pm. Thus, we made the decision to move to Sun/Monday nights, parallel to our other two guild 10-man groups. This also meant that three of our group members would be unable to attend, since they had mains/alts in those other groups. A difficult decision, but we went with it, and saw a lot of interest in the two day run. This Friday we decided on a last hurrah, and decided to extend the lockout, giving us a full night to work on Arthas. Once again we didn't start until 10pm due to difficulty in filling the group. We had several alts, plus a few newer guildies who'd never seen the fight before. We re-learned it together and killed Arthas for the first time on 10-man, 24 hours after our 25-man kill! Very nice. Now, both my 10- and 25-man raids will be in heroic ICC. OOOh, can't wait.
In any case, this week I'll be raiding as blood. I bit the bullet and installed armor pen gems in every slot that had previously held strength. About 2400g later, I'm ready to go. I might have to tweak things just a little more to hit the armor pen cap, but I should be ready for raids tomorrow. Blood spec clearly will lose out on overall damage meters, as the aoe from blood on trash can't compete with unholy or frost, but I do want to see how it does on boss fights. The biggest problem with blood is that I can't just switch to unholy for trash as my gem slots are all arpen - unless I get a complete armor set for strength and one for arpen - but that's not happening soon as I'm still working on tank gear.
So, hopefully by the end of the week we'll have installment #2 of dps DKs in 3.3.3! Let There Be Blood!
My ten-man run has also made some changes. I had discussed with the other 'leaders' of my Friday night ICC10 regarding our lack of ability to clear the whole instance and still have time remaining to kill Arthas. We'd also been plagued by inconsistent attendance, leading to weekly pugging and raid starts at 10pm. Thus, we made the decision to move to Sun/Monday nights, parallel to our other two guild 10-man groups. This also meant that three of our group members would be unable to attend, since they had mains/alts in those other groups. A difficult decision, but we went with it, and saw a lot of interest in the two day run. This Friday we decided on a last hurrah, and decided to extend the lockout, giving us a full night to work on Arthas. Once again we didn't start until 10pm due to difficulty in filling the group. We had several alts, plus a few newer guildies who'd never seen the fight before. We re-learned it together and killed Arthas for the first time on 10-man, 24 hours after our 25-man kill! Very nice. Now, both my 10- and 25-man raids will be in heroic ICC. OOOh, can't wait.
In any case, this week I'll be raiding as blood. I bit the bullet and installed armor pen gems in every slot that had previously held strength. About 2400g later, I'm ready to go. I might have to tweak things just a little more to hit the armor pen cap, but I should be ready for raids tomorrow. Blood spec clearly will lose out on overall damage meters, as the aoe from blood on trash can't compete with unholy or frost, but I do want to see how it does on boss fights. The biggest problem with blood is that I can't just switch to unholy for trash as my gem slots are all arpen - unless I get a complete armor set for strength and one for arpen - but that's not happening soon as I'm still working on tank gear.
So, hopefully by the end of the week we'll have installment #2 of dps DKs in 3.3.3! Let There Be Blood!
Thursday, April 1, 2010
On Trash
Position 1: Trash doesn't matter! Only boss dps/kills matter!
Position 2: Boss kills = progression. Time spent on trash = less time on progression.
Needless to say, while I hear position 1 frequently, I'm in the position 2 camp.
I'm not recommending gearing/glyphing/spec for aoe/trash (unless you want to use your second spec for it), but I get sick of people losing focus and/or not bringing their 'A' game to trash. My raid has wiped three times in the past two weeks on trash, which is really inexcusable, and a huge waste of time. Wiping aside, killing trash quickly and efficiently has significant benefits for the raid.
So, to that end, I'd like to remind all of us to maintain focus and not be semi-afk during trash. Do your best! And use your cooldowns. That DRW/gargoyle/ghoul will be up when you pull the boss, don't worry. Pull out the stops and perform your very best, during trash AND boss fights alike!
Position 2: Boss kills = progression. Time spent on trash = less time on progression.
Needless to say, while I hear position 1 frequently, I'm in the position 2 camp.
I'm not recommending gearing/glyphing/spec for aoe/trash (unless you want to use your second spec for it), but I get sick of people losing focus and/or not bringing their 'A' game to trash. My raid has wiped three times in the past two weeks on trash, which is really inexcusable, and a huge waste of time. Wiping aside, killing trash quickly and efficiently has significant benefits for the raid.
So, to that end, I'd like to remind all of us to maintain focus and not be semi-afk during trash. Do your best! And use your cooldowns. That DRW/gargoyle/ghoul will be up when you pull the boss, don't worry. Pull out the stops and perform your very best, during trash AND boss fights alike!
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Unholy spec comparison for 3.3.3
So, I've done a full raid (ICC25 Marrowgar - Sindragosa, some VOA or TOGC) with the two 'cookie-cutter' specs for unholy derived from Elitist Jerks' theory/simcrafting:
blood subspec 14/0/57 (with reaping)
frost subspec 0/17/54 (no reaping)
How did it look?
I've already talked about the blood subspec. It was very solid! I was able to put in a top-10 World of Logs parse worldwide, and generally had both solid single-target and aoe dps. As you can see from the Festergut screenie, I did well, and helping me was very solid raid dps (including the top-10 fury warrior and excellent lock). Overall, I'm both comfortable and happy with the spec.
How about the frost subspec? I didn't practice with it much. The only 'major' difference with the spec is the absence of reaping, which means two more blood strikes, and one less scourge strike - and therefore a tiny bit more gcd constraint. So, I was surpised and dismayed when my dps seemed quite a bit lower - especially given the 5% increase in the ICC buff! The other DK was solidly beating me on most fights.... and I was actually much lower on Festergut and Rotface than the previous week. I was about to give up in disgust when I discovered my own absolutely foolish mistake! NO FREAKING BLOOD PRESENCE! So, I have to laugh at myself. I don't have a good comparison on the tank and spank fights. :( However, once I made the correction, I was able to see frost subspec in action, and it seems quite comparable - as reports have said. You can see from my parse below, it wasn't bad even though I spent 80% of the night without a presence (add about 15% to my total and I'd have been at a more respectable ~10,600 overall). I also did one tank and spank - Toravon - and I was pleased. My recount dps was 12,229, good enough for top-20 worldwide on WOL (sorry, no screenie, but you can look me up on WOL).
So, which spec is better?
From my very limited sample size, and my tremendously flawed execution, I'm still reasonably comfortable concluding Elitist Jerks are right on the money. There is very very little difference between the two specs. EJ folks are arguing that for a non-proc weapon such as Cryptmaker or my Shadow's Edge, the blood subspec is better, and with a proc-based weapon such as Bryntoll or Shadowmourne (I don't have either), frost subspec is better.
Personally, I'm going to run with the frost subspec the rest of the week, and see how comfortable I get.
But in general, you may decide to subspec either of the above. Follow the EJ suggestions, or subspec into blood simply because the additional threat reduction is handy (I did notice I was tanking more trash than usual last night - but more careful target-switching should help with that).
Either way, Unholy is looking good!
Next week I plan to go blood: I'll probably put in 5-10 armor pen gems and give it a try!
blood subspec 14/0/57 (with reaping)
frost subspec 0/17/54 (no reaping)
How did it look?
I've already talked about the blood subspec. It was very solid! I was able to put in a top-10 World of Logs parse worldwide, and generally had both solid single-target and aoe dps. As you can see from the Festergut screenie, I did well, and helping me was very solid raid dps (including the top-10 fury warrior and excellent lock). Overall, I'm both comfortable and happy with the spec.
Recount dps actually lower than the WOL parse (unusual!)
So, which spec is better?
From my very limited sample size, and my tremendously flawed execution, I'm still reasonably comfortable concluding Elitist Jerks are right on the money. There is very very little difference between the two specs. EJ folks are arguing that for a non-proc weapon such as Cryptmaker or my Shadow's Edge, the blood subspec is better, and with a proc-based weapon such as Bryntoll or Shadowmourne (I don't have either), frost subspec is better.
Personally, I'm going to run with the frost subspec the rest of the week, and see how comfortable I get.
But in general, you may decide to subspec either of the above. Follow the EJ suggestions, or subspec into blood simply because the additional threat reduction is handy (I did notice I was tanking more trash than usual last night - but more careful target-switching should help with that).
Either way, Unholy is looking good!
Next week I plan to go blood: I'll probably put in 5-10 armor pen gems and give it a try!
Monday, March 29, 2010
Upcoming
I've already mentioned that I was pleased with my first full raid in that 3.3.3 delivered improved raid buff management more than anything.
Frost DKs are getting their chance in the sun, as evidence by two of the three DKs in Paragon's world first heroic Lich King kill being frosties.
My guild gave it a shot and our frost DK saw big improvement.
It did not, however, get us over the normal LK 25-man hump. We're still working on the transition to Phase3 and having some problems with healing and getting all the valkyr down. Heroic 25 will have to wait another week - I sure hope we at least get to it before the buff bumps up to 10%, but we'll see. It gives me even more respect for guilds like Paragon. My guild's straight dps is actually comparable to theirs - but their execution is just astounding. Watching how they place ice orbs in heroic Anub, or how they group and kill the valkyr on Lich King, is just amazing. Kudos to them.
At any rate, I spent the whole past week as unholy with a blood subspec. I'm going to run this week with the alternative - an unholy with frost subspec. The Elitist Jerks comparisons put them very very close but I want to try it on live. If is does indeed end up being very close to the same, I'd rather be blood because of the threat reduction.
Next week I'll try blood - with a few armor pen gems thrown in for good measure (I'm at 800 arpen passive right now), and try to get at least one 264 one-hander in the meantime (I have two 251s, which won't help me make a fair comparison) so I can give frost a good trial.
What this means is I should be able to do a post later this week comparing the competing unholy specs, then a blood post next week, with frost the following. Sorry for those who are waiting/wondering what frost will really do in 3.3.3. I also need to practice enough to be proficient in the spec to give it a fair try. So far, I'm feeling good about it in dummy and 5-man situations.
Finally, wanted to just post that I appreciate the recent comments, all! My system is giving me problems replying - I get an email notification, but I can't see them or reply on the blog itself. I'll rectify that asap.
Frost DKs are getting their chance in the sun, as evidence by two of the three DKs in Paragon's world first heroic Lich King kill being frosties.
My guild gave it a shot and our frost DK saw big improvement.
It did not, however, get us over the normal LK 25-man hump. We're still working on the transition to Phase3 and having some problems with healing and getting all the valkyr down. Heroic 25 will have to wait another week - I sure hope we at least get to it before the buff bumps up to 10%, but we'll see. It gives me even more respect for guilds like Paragon. My guild's straight dps is actually comparable to theirs - but their execution is just astounding. Watching how they place ice orbs in heroic Anub, or how they group and kill the valkyr on Lich King, is just amazing. Kudos to them.
At any rate, I spent the whole past week as unholy with a blood subspec. I'm going to run this week with the alternative - an unholy with frost subspec. The Elitist Jerks comparisons put them very very close but I want to try it on live. If is does indeed end up being very close to the same, I'd rather be blood because of the threat reduction.
Next week I'll try blood - with a few armor pen gems thrown in for good measure (I'm at 800 arpen passive right now), and try to get at least one 264 one-hander in the meantime (I have two 251s, which won't help me make a fair comparison) so I can give frost a good trial.
What this means is I should be able to do a post later this week comparing the competing unholy specs, then a blood post next week, with frost the following. Sorry for those who are waiting/wondering what frost will really do in 3.3.3. I also need to practice enough to be proficient in the spec to give it a fair try. So far, I'm feeling good about it in dummy and 5-man situations.
Finally, wanted to just post that I appreciate the recent comments, all! My system is giving me problems replying - I get an email notification, but I can't see them or reply on the blog itself. I'll rectify that asap.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The Day After Tomorrow (3.3.3)
(note, I wrote this yesterday, but for some reason wordpress and blogspot sites were all blocked on my interwebs).
It's the Day After The Release of patch 3.3.3, which was a 'minor' patch.
So, how do we feel about it?
As I suggested it might be, it's looking like a big boon to raiding DKs!
Last night, our raid ran ICC25 through Blood Queen Lanathel and did the weekly raid and VOA. We had the infusion of a couple more ranged dps, allowing us to better arrange our comp to the fights.
We one-shot all the bosses (except for BQL when on the first attempt our first bitee d/c'd), but wiped on trash. A little lack of focus, but I still left the night both very happy and optimistic going forward.
Reasons:
1) Mangle lasting one minute. We didn't really have a 'mangle bot' as our kitty struggled to keep it up and dps, letting it drop frequently prior to 3.3.3. With the change, we had it the whole fight.
2) Icy Talons. We'd lost our enhancement shaman a few weeks back, and weren't getting the haste buff. Now we are.
I ran unholy last night (pre 3.3.3 spec as I didn't have time to change it), and as far as I can tell, unholy really hasn't been buffed. I did benefit from the above changes however, and it showed in our WOL parse.
In fact, it was surprising how well we did!
Granted, World Of Logs only ranks parses that guilds post, we have the (fairly recent) 5% buff, and many/most of the top guilds are exclusively in heroic now, but we had raiders ranked in the top 200 worldwide for their class over 20 times. Our Boomkin was #4 on Koralon, our Arms Warrior was 6th and 8th on Rotface and Festergut, and I was 9th and 53rd on Festergut and Rotface, respectively.
That 'perfect storm' of hitting the rotation/priority spot on, good group comp, overall high raid dps, and solid gear came together to deliver VERY solid and pleasing results.
Our somewhat undergeared frost DK did see a big improvement in his performance as well.
I did some live dummy-testing (I know, I know, dummies suck) of frost main spec/unholy subspec with my unholy gear and a fast OH almost matched my unholy dps output. Very promising. I think I'll hold off trying this in a full raid until I have a decent offhand weapon, though.
Now, if we can only put it together on Lich King (normal), we can join the heroic cool kids club. :)
All in all, I'm pleased with what I've seen from 3.3.3, and I hope going forward DKs of all specs will find success in Icecrown and beyond!
It's the Day After The Release of patch 3.3.3, which was a 'minor' patch.
So, how do we feel about it?
As I suggested it might be, it's looking like a big boon to raiding DKs!
Last night, our raid ran ICC25 through Blood Queen Lanathel and did the weekly raid and VOA. We had the infusion of a couple more ranged dps, allowing us to better arrange our comp to the fights.
We one-shot all the bosses (except for BQL when on the first attempt our first bitee d/c'd), but wiped on trash. A little lack of focus, but I still left the night both very happy and optimistic going forward.
Reasons:
1) Mangle lasting one minute. We didn't really have a 'mangle bot' as our kitty struggled to keep it up and dps, letting it drop frequently prior to 3.3.3. With the change, we had it the whole fight.
2) Icy Talons. We'd lost our enhancement shaman a few weeks back, and weren't getting the haste buff. Now we are.
I ran unholy last night (pre 3.3.3 spec as I didn't have time to change it), and as far as I can tell, unholy really hasn't been buffed. I did benefit from the above changes however, and it showed in our WOL parse.
In fact, it was surprising how well we did!
Granted, World Of Logs only ranks parses that guilds post, we have the (fairly recent) 5% buff, and many/most of the top guilds are exclusively in heroic now, but we had raiders ranked in the top 200 worldwide for their class over 20 times. Our Boomkin was #4 on Koralon, our Arms Warrior was 6th and 8th on Rotface and Festergut, and I was 9th and 53rd on Festergut and Rotface, respectively.
That 'perfect storm' of hitting the rotation/priority spot on, good group comp, overall high raid dps, and solid gear came together to deliver VERY solid and pleasing results.
Our somewhat undergeared frost DK did see a big improvement in his performance as well.
I did some live dummy-testing (I know, I know, dummies suck) of frost main spec/unholy subspec with my unholy gear and a fast OH almost matched my unholy dps output. Very promising. I think I'll hold off trying this in a full raid until I have a decent offhand weapon, though.
Now, if we can only put it together on Lich King (normal), we can join the heroic cool kids club. :)
All in all, I'm pleased with what I've seen from 3.3.3, and I hope going forward DKs of all specs will find success in Icecrown and beyond!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Sindragosa: a DPS DK Perspective
Sindragosa (edit: sheesh, no one even pointed out the spelling error in my title) - Arthas' own dragon. Frosty matron of surliness. Her whiny, hysterical emote of "Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!" sticks annoyingly in my ears even now. And the one fight in T10 content where resistance gear is not yet dead. Of course, if you're a DPS DK, you have the good fortune of being able to pretty much ignore resistance gear - but we'll get into that in a moment.
Sindy is the next-to-last boss in Icecrown Citadel, the penultimate challenge remaining in normal and heroic modes prior to facing the Lich King himself. It's a reasonably fun fight mostly involving dps burns interspersed with proper placement of debuffed players. Are you prepared?
Sindy is the next-to-last boss in Icecrown Citadel, the penultimate challenge remaining in normal and heroic modes prior to facing the Lich King himself. It's a reasonably fun fight mostly involving dps burns interspersed with proper placement of debuffed players. Are you prepared?
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