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.


mandag den 25. oktober 2010

Delayed post.


So Cataclysm is slowly getting closer and closer and the 13th of October patch 4.0.1 will hit the EU servers and we will have to adjust and ”relearn” to play our classes.  Am I looking forward to it ? Yes, most certainly after maximum 2 days of raiding each week with ICC, RS, TOTGC and UL I am quite sure that it will be great fun to raid these over farmed instances with an almost new class.
As I have stated in my first post my main is a mage and I have been playing him as my main character since the day I started to play the game quite a while back. So obviously my main focus will be the upcoming mage changes, but I might add that I haven’t won a Beta key and I haven’t bothered to download the Live game in order to play. This decision was solely made due to I find that from October to December is where I have the time to learn to play my class and how boring would it be if you already mastered it and then just had two months with standard farming and crying in private whispers because all the others were incompetent retards who didn’t manage to hit their buttons in the correct or just slightly correct way.
Anyway, I must admit that I first was a little against the remake and removal of almost half our talents and a complete remake of our class, but after a bit of thinking I do actually think that it is a quite brilliant idea.
So yes – The Mage, one of the current top DPS classes and the remake is looking quite tasty even though we aren’t given Flame Orb yet (dr00l for any Diablo 2 player).
I am fairly sure that this is more or less the build which I will be trying out first. It is a fire build (yay don’t we all love fire and huge ignites? Reminds me, here is a link to a Youtube Vid of the mage Greatshock from “For the Horde” who gathered a 100% crit set and was fooling around on the Saurfang encounter: http://manaflask.com/forum_topic.php?forum_id=19&topic_id=31091) and this is the build which I reckon will be the standard fire build until Cataclysm: http://wowtal.com/#k=RsnZtqt.a5o.mage. It is the build which I reckon would yield the highest single target DPS, but for a fight like Lich King on heroic I would change my build in order to get free Flamestrikes when the Valkyr Phase starts: http://wowtal.com/#k=RsnDX8_.a5o.mage. Though I might consider switching one talent from Netherwing Presence into Impact, but I do not have a feeling of “how often” Impact will proc, however, I will have an idea the 13th of October.
However, even though I assume fire will be the “top raiding build” I must admit I do feel tempted to try frost since it does look like it got a major overhaul. However, I am afraid that frost will never become a spec which will be able to compete with fire and arcane.
Arcane, I do feel an urge to hit my head against my keyboard when I play it and I must admit that I am quite sure of that I ended up getting a physical disorder after playing arcane in what seems to be endless Lich King HC tries due to our only retard paladin decided to stop playing, just after he received Shadowmourne (Always fun when the first person who gets Shadowmourne decides to quit / give his account to his brother and the 2nd person which received it got it and more or less stopped playing the day after while being one item away from BiS.

I am sorry for not getting this post up around the release date of patch 4.0.1, but I had quite a lot of irl things which had to be attended, however, I will post it anyway and make a brief update on my experience with the patch so far.

25th of Oct. it has been about two weeks after the release of one of the most game changing patches so far and there is a lot to talk about.
Firstly as a mage I was quite thrilled when we started our raid on Wednesday the 13th  and fooled around in Ulduar. There had been a quite noticeable damage boost for mages which I reckon would be approximate 1500-2000 dps close to BiS and it was quite fun for most of the casters (hello fatkins, lolocks and “I kill myself priests”), but for melee, except death knights, it was another story. Fury warriors had dropped something close to 50% in dmg and most of the other classes being within the range of 20 – 30% (rough estimates based on the meters in my guild) and there was quite a lot of frustration, which is very understandable – Going from #1-3 on dmg to just barely above the tank, man it must feel frustrating.
Though most of this was only to last a day since quite a lot of hotfixes were made during the night and some casters were nerfed while some melees were given a buff, which was needed, but rogues was and is still a broken class imo.

Our next raid was in ICC and we didn’t really feel much difference except people failing on stupid stuff while giving the excuse “My ui doesn’t work, I didn’t get a warning” as well as excuses related to class mechanic changes and yes, there were some changes, but some of it was just plain stupidity.
There was more or less not any real problems until we encountered Sindragosa and our melee dropped like flies, and thus blaming healers for being unable to keep them up – II do myself not play a melee or healer, but it is quite obvious that with Judgment of Light gone there is a lot of “passive” healing gone, this is also combined with the fact that the HP pool might be bigger, but the healing mechanics has changed as well. However, our melee wasn’t really understanding it and along with paladins going from being a “MUST HAVE” healer they ended up being the poorest healing class (until it was hotfixed a few days later, thank God) so I was asked to relog my resto shaman and spam some Chain Heal along with Healing Surge (mana expensive, but a damn good heal).
This is where our problem began, at the Lich King our pala tank was killed in what we later could see in logs, in 1,20 sec. due to the class mechanic and we had to switch him out since he more or less was unhealable.
However, we was unable to take down LK that week due to massive stun/slow failure and tanks taking immense amount of damage. This was fixed within the next reset where we one shottede LK.

Again I apologize for the late update and no pictures, but I thought it would be better to get a post up so I wouldn’t get even further behind and I will try to make my posts more date relevant.