lørdag den 18. december 2010

Restoration shaman - Starting out in Cataclysm


World of warcraft Cataclysm so far has been quite entertaining leveling wise, I do admit that I never really enjoyed question, but I think some of the quests was quite enjoyable.
Heroics is quite good fun IF you tag along with friends or guildies who you know will know what to do or just thinks "Hey, crowd control might be useful " instead of the WOLTK minded people who go "AOE GO GO " that is doable when you've gather a bit of gear and got a decent tank and healer, but I still prefer as a healer to do some crowd control since I barely have to use any mana then compared to Greater Healing Wave spam when the tank takes on +4 mobs.
But so far I am quite happy with the current state of restoration shamans, and despite we are the "all rounder" I still think that tank healing and raid healing is both places where a restoration shaman is in the very top in both niches.
Since the expansion is quite new and there is +thousand theories on how to play and value stats - sadly quite a lot of those people is people who never will step into a raiding environment  before they are standing in "welfare" epics. I am not saying that my way of doing it is the correct one, but it is working for me, and quite well I must admit.
So stats on gear we have three options mastery, haste and crit and if you can get an item with haste on - then get it haste is your "primary secondary" stat if that makes sense to put it that way. After haste go for crit since crits is always nice, but due to the talents we also gain mana when critting with spells, but it isn't nearly as good as haste. Mastery isn't a bad stat, but your targets will have to be at less than 60% hp in order to start benefitting "enough" from it therefore unless you want to top meters on Chimaeron, but else you will gain more from haste and crit.
Primary stats is intellect and spirit which is on most gear and currently I have a rule of thumb - "Does the item has spirit? If not, reforge it by taking the stats in this order mastery > crit > haste" Spirit will become "less" valuable when you reach a certain level of it due to mana regn becomes less and less of an issue, I am currently on 2400 spirit unbuffed and the only way I go out of mana (oom) is if I use my spells foolishly or having to spam Greater Healing Wave (GWH), but spirit is a very, very good stat only surpassed in my opinion by intellect. This is due to several reasons 1st: higher mana pool which also grants more mana returned from replenishment, 2nd: your spells hits harder, 3rdly you gain some crit.
For gemming it is quite similar: red slots = +40 intellect unless you are a JC and then it is 67 intellect, yellow = 20 haste / 20 intellect not much to say boosts two of the best stats + you gain a socket bonus and it is almost always worth it. Blue = 20 spirit / 20 intellect unless you are freshly dinged you might want to put +40 spirit in, but I would suggest 20 spirit /20 intellect.
Concerning meta gems is there really only one option and that is +54 intellect +2% mana, if people start arguing +54 spirit +3% critical heal just ignore them your critical rating is currently so low that it extra healing on the crit is useless and when it becomes more efficient you will have such an amount of regn that the spirit becomes less valuable than 54 intellect. Again, if this is my opinion everyone is entitled to their own, but just because you read something on a forum does not mean that it is correct.
That will be all for now, I will post how restoration shaman has been so far raiding wise later on.

fredag den 10. december 2010

Small update


I guess an update is appropriate  so here comes.
Here is a picture taken about an hour before the launch:


(Sorry for the bad quality, but it was taken with my mobile phone)















And bam the time was 00.01 and the you were asked to logout in order to get into Cataclysm, but as a massive amount of players were spamming their "Login" myself and I along with thousands had problems logging in a range from 10mins to almost 1½ hour, I got in like 30mins or so after release so I was in the what I would call in the better part of people. since the amount of mobs / items and the respawn timer was horrible and what I was asked to tag along for a dungeon I lost the "advantage" I had while being in "the front". That slowed down my leveling quite a lot and I dinged 18 hours after the release and having played none stop.
So busy, busy quest, kill / collect, turn in rinse and repeat until you look like a madman and bam you are 85. The fastest person in my guild was 12 hours, I was a bit slower, but leveling as elemental was piece of cake.
So ding, ding, ding 85 and the next step was obviously to start gearing myself for heroics and I quickly found a group. in the guild, and we farmed dungeons until we were bored and decided to check out "Vortex Pinnacle" on HC. This was a quite fun instance the first boss was fairly easy and the second boss is just pure fun the first comment when we pulled him was "lol, this is awesome" and we eventually managed to kill the last boss. After this HC I've pretty much farmed HCs and they aren't really that hard except perhaps for Grim Batol we did spend quite some time in there, but eventually we pulled our asses together and cleared it.
The last two days I've been farming HCs getting hc gear along with Justice Point gear, and it is coming along nicely.
Currently I am valuing stats like this: spirit > haste > crit > mastery on items and gemming: red = 40 int, 30 spirit (no one got the "big one yet") yellow = 20 int / 20 haste and it works okayish.
For glyphs I've thrown away Earth Living since it is the least HPs increase from Riptide (which I've found after doing quite some HCs is always my 2nd or even 1st healing spell).

That will be all for now,  too many HCs to farm and stuff to experience.

søndag den 5. december 2010

Getting Cataclysmic !

Cataclysm is so damn close now that it is almost unbearable, but I guess we will have to wait the remaining 30ish hours.
So are YOU ready for Cataclysm? Have you stocked up on flasks, food and pots in order to make the leveling go smoother? Have you capped yourself with Justice Points and Honor points in order to grab some fast upgrades? I have - on two characters and there is a good reason for that, and that is not me being a brainless farmbot, but my guild is currently a bit low on healers, well a bit is an understatement we got 6 healers and one trial , and while we most likely will be progressing with 7 it seems that there quite easily could arise some annoying problems. The problems could be one of the healers being abnormally slow with leveling, another could be one person being unable to raid one day and thus we would not be able to make a proper raid. You might argue that there ought to be some people with a healing off spec, and yes there is people who play hybrid classes, but there is a huge difference between being able to spec healer and then actually play healer to a degree which is satisfying.
So I offered to play my resto shaman in the beginning of this expansion until we had gotten a few more decent healers to bolster our ranks, so I've decided that I will try to cover the beginning of the expansion from a resto PoV as well as mage.
So here goes resto PoV:
I've decided that this properly is the spec that I will be using in the beginning http://wowtal.com/#k=mvVjJ27r.a8t.shaman.Rc6inp some may argue that leaving out Improved Cleansing Spirit is stupid, but unless there is a heavy dispelling fight I would prefer to have 5% more Damage Reduction while casting. A talents which I am quite thrilled about is Focused Insight. You get an "on demand" burst which from what I've seen from videos and read will become quite handy and it is another reason to try to squeeze in Shocks, not only does it help downing the boss faster (And yes I am aware that the damage output is quite small, but a little damage there and a little damage there and suddenly you can notice a little change). A debated talents is Telluric Currents and despite the fact that I like the idea of being able to throw in a few LBs there isn't any talent from my point of view which can be changed in order to be putted in there.
Glyps: It is a matter of personal preference that I've taken Riptide over Earth shield, but also due to we will be running with atleast two resto shamans, possible three, and yes Earth Shield is nice, but it can only be placed on one target where Riptide can be used on every 25man along with the pets, and with the extensive amount of damage the raid will take I would prefer that over Earth Shield. Water Shield and Earthliving is a must have as well as the major glyphs.
Stats will look different that they do today and I doubt that you will find people stacking one stat as a madman since you will have to balance your int, spirit, crit, haste and mastery (which I doubt will be worth going for except you are healing tanks or a heavy AoE fight where the raid is below 60% hp for the most of the time). And you will want to go for socket bonuses the most of the time since it just is better than stacking one stat. Personally I will gem more or less like this: Red = int, yellow = int / haste, blue = int / spirit, but that is just my personal opinion and it might be altered throughout raiding and certain fights.

torsdag den 25. november 2010

Another point of view.


Beside my mage I have more or less decided that I will level my shaman as my second character, and due to the healing situation in my guild I have been thinking about getting it leveled rather fast.
As you might have guessed I want to play restoration and this is due to several reasons:
1st Shamans is in my humble opinion the “best overall” healing class and perhaps the one who have been changed the least for the release of Cataclysm.
Chainheals initial healing has been nerfed, but I do actually thing that it is a good change since it will force you to use a larger part of your healing arsenal instead of just spamming Chainheal because it was such a strong heal both for AoE, which it still is, and for single target healing where it would crit for 14-18k and leave a massive hot on your target.
One of the major changes to most of the healing classes is that they now have the opportunity or they must do damage now in order to keep a buff up on themselves. There is those who think that as a healer the only thing you should be able to do is – Heal, and then there is those who adjust and see the opportunities in the changes as for an example I will take restoration shamans since it is the class which I am most familiar with. The talent “Focused Insight” – “After casting any Shock spell, your next heal’s mana cost is reduced by 75% of the cost of the Shock spell, and its healing effectiveness is increased by 30%”. This is a massive “on demand” burst healing one can launch while not feeling guilty of doing damage to the boss with a few GCDs add this 30% effectiveness with our mastery Deep Healing I think that Shamans will have the opportunity to specialize more in either raid healing or tank healing.
In addition restoration shamans gets a new heal “Healing Rain” which in its current state isn’t that healing impressive (from what I’ve read) it heals for close to 2k pr. Tick if there is 5 or less people in the area and then heals for less as more and more people is in the area, but since it is capable of proccing Earth Living on the target it is in my opinion a decent AoE heal. One has to remember that the amount of “burst” both on the tanks and the raid is being reduced and the tank dying within somewhat near of 1 second shouldn’t be that much of an issue anymore.  
Another new talent is “Telluric Currents” which will allow you to cast Lightning Bolts and essentially will allow you to do damage instead of just ideling / throwing a heal which you know will be 70/80% overhealing aswell as the druids hots would heal the target up without your help. And again it is the idea – Healers can do if they please do damage, and this is not a new thing you could take a look at almost every single video released by Paragon or Ensidia; If the healer got mana and a free GCD he or her usually throws a DoT on the target and when you search through some of the wipes you have had on 1-2% imagine if your healers would have had a DoT running almost constantly.
Another aspect is in my opinion that since most guilds most likely will run with 7 healers until they get the hang of the fight, enrage is first a problem when you actually manage to stay alive for that long, you will not be as penalized if the healers can do some damage. I am well aware that they won’t top damage meters or do billions of gazillions of damage, but every single bit of damage counts for a first kill! – Why else would we do theory crafting, respec for encounters and use pots and flasks.


tirsdag den 23. november 2010

Getting closer to Cataclysm.

Patch 4.0.3
Another patch fixing more bugs – yeah, right – I have NEVER experienced as many bugs /glitches and general problems with my mage.
Firstly I switched from my 0/33/3 spec to a theoretically higher singletarget output 2/31/3 spec, but what I accaulty managed to get was lower, and not just by a few 100 dps, but closer to 1000 dps which honestly should be impossible when gainng 2% dps. Though it might be added that my crit rate on fireballs was … well, playing with almost 62% crit, gaining 5% from critical mass and then 5% from the Fireball glyph I should in theory be at approximately at 72%ish crit on my fireballs, but I noticed that I several times was below 60% and my fellow mage who has less crit that I was around 80%. Crit is ofc. Unreliable, however this is just maddening along with the fact that my dps was significant lower than the previous raids.
Though when we started on Festergut I really started to become annoyed – I got Vile Gas as one of the first during heroism and as usual I used my Ice Block and used my Cancel Aura macro, but despite I’ve used Ice Block didn’t have the Vile Gas debuff my character still acted like I had the debuff.
On Rotface (Yey, for 3 DFOs in 5 months and no caster trinket from Halion in 3 months) I was surpassed by quite a lot of classes which I never have trouble beating despite having shit luck with my RNG, and I’ve encountered a new bug with Blink or atleast in my experience my first bug with Blink in ICC.  I blinked to avoid the big ooze and his slime spray, but instead of moving anywhere I just used a GCD and stood right where  was when I pressed blink.
From that point I was pissed and it didn’t help that my damage sucked mooseballs on the remaning fights and you might say: You just suck, isn’t that a reasonable reason ? Sure, if it wasn’t due to the fact that I changed my spec to gain more single target dps, I did exactly what I’ve always done and I committed very, very few mistakes during that raid, oh yeah and Living Bomb CAN STILL be fucking overwritten by another mages, or glyphs is still bugged (to our benefit though) and nothing has been fixed. Brilliant just brilliant.
But as the running joke in my guild current is “It will be balanced / fixed at 85”, and I do realize that the current raids is not really of great importance, but it is of a damn great annoyance

Issues with fire atm.:

Combustion:
It has become more “regular”, but during the majority of my experience with it has it only been one mage who would “benefit” from it, an example is Deathbringer Saurfang where I haven’t encountered a single time where I and my fellow mage both have had Combustion work equally. I do know that there is a certain amount of factors e.g. crits / hs / ignite and the RNG luck with the far from 10% proc chance on Impact, but when one does 50-70% lower dmg with Combustion while doing almost the exact same thing I do suggest that there is a problem with it. It must be said though that during our last Halion kill it did seem as it was fixed, but since I only have been once I won’t say that it has been fixed.
Another problem is Impact sometimes overrules the other mages Living Bomb, it has become better, but there is still several of fights where I put up Livinb Bom and get an Impact proc just to notice 2 seconds thereafter that my Living Bomb seems to have vanished, and when I then ask my fellow mage “Did you use Impact?” his reply is always YES, and this also works the other way around.

In theory fire mages should also be capable of putting out a decent amount of damage during movement with the talents Firestarter and Hot Streak, but I find that about in 50% of my fights either Scorch “acting” strange meaning: You cannot cast it while on the move, but you can start cast and then move which either is a bug or the talent is unclear. When Hot Streak procs you should get an instant Pyroblast and this should just as Scorch be castable while moving (and has been so previously), but sometimes you are unable to cast it and have to make a “quick” stop in your movement in order to get it to cast.
Impact: The tooltip says a 10% chance to proc Impact, but I have done a little testing and it does seem as if the proc rather is lower than 10%, one might say that the proc rate is more or less the same as the one on Arcane Missiles before patch 4.0.
While taking about annoying bugs there is also quite a few bugs which gives us damage :

Pyromanic should only be up for 10seconds with an internal cooldown of 35 seconds, but it may bug and you run around with a constant 10% spell haste increase.

Oh yeah, while whining I doubt that mastery ever will come close to being a “primary” stats since the idea is decent, but since a high amount of our damage is coming from Crits (Hot Streak, Ignite) and we still want a decent haste level and this is for several reasons: 1. Faster casts is always win, 2nd: the “haste caps” on Living Bomb 5-6 or 7 ticks.



And now to something quite closely related
Yes, Cataclysm is no longer far, far away in a developers head, but is getting closer and closer every day and is now less than a month and most of the information has already been released so it is only to wait and get ready to some powerleveling, after my examination on the 7th that is, but the main question now is – How will the mage class work in Cataclysm and since I haven’t been playing on the beta and PTR I can’t really tell.  However, I do sneak around at most forums and a general problem seems to be the mana. However, several things may still be tweaked / fixed and if we come to face problems with our mana you are really going to see the difference between a good and a mediocre mage.



Beside that I have more or less decided that I am going to level as arcane and this is for several reasons:
1st : Insane burst – No class or spec comes close to the burst damage an arcane mage can make.
2nd : Arcane Blast (talented) will put a slow effect on the target and therefore become almost as good as frost regarding CC (ofc. Pet and Deep Freeze does still give frost the upper hand, but why spec frost if you can obliterate mobs before they even get close to you.
3rd: Glyphed Evocation + a 2minute cooldown … it is just insane along with Mage armor imagine your downtime where you have to sit and drink to gain mana / hp.
This is for questing and solo leveling if I were to enter dungeons I would spec fire due to the superior AoE damage and fun factor.  

torsdag den 28. oktober 2010


Patch 4..0.1a with minor fixes.
Sooo the patch was supposed to fix some of the bugs which had occurred since the release of patch 4.0.1 and I myself as a mage had encountered a few glitches and bugs.
1st: Impact sometimes “overwriting” another mages dots which was quite annoying.
2nd  The talent Firestarter seems to be slightly bugged from time to time which meant that you could encounter that you were unable to cast scorch while moving and thereby making Firstarter completely useless. I thought it had been fixed, but I encountered the problem several times as late yesterdays raid.
3rd Prime/ Major glyph bug: There is a bug with the glyphs which currently is a DPS gain – One more dps glyph = sweet.

This is the bugs which I have stumbled across the last couple of weeks, however, I must admit that it is hard to see that you now are competing with warlocks, boomkins and shadow priests for #1-3 on damage and it seems that a single target boss fight in ICC we  have lost somewhere in between 1000-1500 DPS not that I am complaining since mages isn’t in as a position as rogues and feral druids, but it is always painful to experience a nerf.
Though there is also an upside – Fights with more than one target, this is where we shine these days with talents like Pyromaniac, Impact combined with Combustion and instant Blastwave + Flamestrike – well, the result  makes you almost jizz in your pants, however, you really have to min – maximize combustion to get the full effect so I highly recommend the addon Combustion helper if you feel that you aren’t getting the full benefit from Combustion.
I managed to almost get everything to perform perfectly on Deathbringer Saurfang in our raid the 27th of October finishing with almost 25000 DPS and 400.000 damage done to adds, this was while running with 5 healers and getting zero Power Infusions – I was quite pleased with myself there, but when we encounter fight with only one target you might be better of with Arcane if your haste level supports it; I personally wouldn’t dump below 30% haste as arcane.

Another thing which of late has been bothering me quite a bit while raiding and also is one of my concerns for Cataclysm: Crit – Before patch 4.0.1 myself and my fellow mage in the guild was critting around 80ish oercent, and sometimes dipping in 90ish percents, with fireballs and that was when you only had to get two crits in a row to gain Hot Streak, however, now we seem to have problems with critting more than 65-70 percent and that is with pretty much luck and you now have to get three crits in a row to gain Hot Streak – Now it isn’t because I am obsessed with Pyroblast, however, atm. our 2-set tier10 bonus has around 5-10% less uptime which along with the nerfed crit is quite  significant in my opinion.
Talking about critical strikes and haste combined with the need to gain 17% hit from talents alone and from what I have read on forums and heard from people who currently tests dungeons and raids on the beta is:
fire is having some serious mana problems and several people talks about having to switch to mage armor during the fights or spam free scorch. Arcane seems to have the same problem aslong as the fight exceeds 3-4 min duration, however, you might argue “Then don’t use Arcane Power” that could be true, however, without using that arcane drops quite a lot on DPS, and this leads me to frost which I have read several people suggesting as the “most optimal” raid spec since the mana sufficiency along with frost being less penalized when your crit and haste raitings is low / medium. However, this is only testing from the beta which other people have made so I do not really have any personal reference to it.