World of Warcraft General Discussion

The Game Room
1761

I originally specced Demonology but went Affliction after one of the recent talent wipes, in my opinion there is less down time with Affliction as the minions become less powerful as you get to higher levels. So far anyway, this may change I guess.

It’s like a little time machine, I had most of that gear when I was your level. Here is my Warlock now: Kelantholas I was very happy with my staff which dropped off a random murloc last night first time I have received a useful weapon upgrade from a random drop.

1762

For me, it depends on the fight, Auriya, Hodir, IC (rng dependent), Vezax, I can usually break it on. Mimiron is getting close as well, now that I only have to dance around in phase 2 and 4. Just a reminder that compared to my guild I suck, and even more so when compared with what I can do if I’m paying enough attention.

Vezax is currently my favorite fight in the game. After the chaos of the Keepers, and before the greater chaos that is Yoggy, one boss with only three things for me to keep track of the entire fight. Hard mode will be uuugggllly though, turning it into a very carefully managed dps race, with no mana return.

I haven’t even stepped inside 10 man Uld yet. May not for a while, either.

We’ve got 3 orbs, and fast Ignis on farm. Yoggy should be, but we didn’t drop him last week, so I won’t call it farm yet. The Thursday night 10 group is rumored to be opening Alagon this week.

Oh, don’t know if you’re aware, but medium mode IC drops the data disk.

How many Fragments do you guys have?

1763

It’s really going to depend on your gear–if you haven’t run instances yet, then you’re pretty much limited to crafted gear (which is actually pretty decent). I would say that 1500 is probably a reasonable expectation when buffed–if you can post a link to your Armory, I might be able to give you some suggestions for improvement (mage is what I do–I really don’t know that much about the other classes, but I raid as a mage so I’m more familiar with that).

As far as the numbers we’ve been tossing out–no, those aren’t going to be possible, most likely, as Frost. In Burning Crusade Frost was a perfectly viable raiding spec, but in WotLK it’s been supplanted by several others (Arcane, Fire, Frostfire, and some “specialty” builds of these). But Frost is a fun spec and very viable for questing, instances, PvP, and heroics (and even low level raids–I have a friend who loves Frost and we took him to his first Naxx-10 run the other day. He managed to pull 2000 DPS raid buffed in crafted purples, a few blues, and a couple of greens.)

Edit: and you snuck in with the Armory link! :slight_smile: I’ll take a look.

1764

The raid is saved as an instance with a Raid ID. If you go back to it later (either with entirely the same group, or one with a few different members) it will be in the same state you left it (with the exception that some trash mobs might respawn if they are tied to a boss that you didn’t kill. This is why you might hear about people being “locked” or “saved” to an instance. Once you down a boss in a raid you are saved to that Raid ID and you can’t join a different raid ID until the lock “resets” - this happens on Tuesday.

Naxx lends itself to division readily because it’s divided into 5 “wings”. It’s not uncommon to clear the Arachnid, Plague, and Construct wing one night and then clear Military and Frostwyrm on another night.

1765

Speaking of Armory links, here’s mine:

In terms of upgrades, I’m thinking my main concern is my bracers and all the armor (as opposed to trinkies and rings) in the right-hand column (gloves, belt, leggings, boots). And I guess I’ll buy a titansteel destroyer once I’ve saved up some cash. Oh, and I’m saving up my marks of heroism to replace my sigil, as well, which is my only piece of noob gear remaining.

1766

Oh, yeah, Auriaya is fun for me. I’m usually at or near the top of the chart for that one. We’re still not confident enough on Mim to really pull our best performances, but we’re getting there. I usually end up as the tank on phase 3 when our main warlock isn’t there–that’s fun.

We’re still in the “dammit, get out of the way when you have Life Leech!” phase of Vezax. We’ve got our interrupts down pretty well, but people aren’t running away fast enough or else they all run in the same direction despite instructions (shades of Mother Shahrazz, sigh). But we’ll get it. Lately we’ve been having some attendance problems, too, which doesn’t make things easy.

It’s a fun diversion, and surprisingly easy (at least on normal mode) when you’re used to 25. We take our “A team” raiders and have a blast with it. If we can coordinate everybody’s schedule (hard to do, unfortunately) it shouldn’t take us long to get Yogg.

Nice! You’re definitely further along than we are.

Yep. One thing I’m not clear on, though (been too lazy to read up yet, since we’re not close): Do you have to do all the hard modes in a single raid lockout to open Algalon, or just get them all down at some point?

Not sure…I think we’ve got around 10 now. Unfortunately one dropped last night and the priest that we’ve been giving them to was absent (first time he’s been absent in ages–he’s nearly 100% attendance).

1767

Is that what it’s about? Buffed? When people say they can do X DPS, are they talking about being loaded with potions, scrolls, buffs, etc.? Because I count mine as the base DPS.

1768

Nothing so drastic need occur so as long your wife understands that wow>life. Or, in the alternative, that you’re able to work out some kind of schedule. I know, it sucks having to schedule one’s leisure time, but it happens.

In any event, it’s entirely possible to just do a couple of hours here and there and still get a good portion of raiding done. We have, in our 10 man groups, a rotating cast of characters, which somehow manages to work itself through. Just figure out which bosses have the loot tables you’re interested in, discuss it with the guild and work something out such that you can be at all, or at least some of those boss kills without harming anyone else’s raid schedule.

It takes work, but it can be done.

At the end of the day, you have to find in a guild people who are compatible with how you want to raid: schedule, loot distribution, raiding philosophy, non-annoying voices in vent and so on.
Telperien:
As for waiting to put your points into affliction until after you get a new one is concerned: you can respec; the first time costs I think 1 gold. What that does is refund to you all of your talent points in exchange for paying the trainer the required sum of money. The price goes up each time, finally capping off at 50 gold. If you don’t respec for a while, the cost penalty eventually depreciates.

Wombat:
I’m not sure if your question is serious, or a gimmick. On the off chance it’s a serious question, I’ll attempt an answer.

Simple, respec: frost is about control, not zomgdps. Of course, there are better frost builds than others, so I’d have to see your talent distribution to make any informed decision. Also, one’s gear weighs heavily on the maximum potential DPS one can do taken in conjunction with a judicious monitoring and use of available cooldowns.

My guild doesn’t necessarily min/max by design, but I raid as FFB/Ice Shards because everyone else raids Arcane. My dps is slightly under theirs, but if there’s a casterdps heavy distribution, it’s beneficial to have one fire mage if for no other reason than improved scorch.

As far as your trial with a target dummy (boss level, right?), you’re not ever going to hit numbers as high as you will in a raid unless all of the raid people follow you to the dummy and buff you. However, the single most important stat to stack until you’re capped is your hit rating. No other stat will increase your dps as much point for point as improving your hit rating will.

Buffs. In raids they’re the key. Also, cooldowns, which frost mages don’t have in large supply. Well, not for upping one’s DPS anyway.

1769

Well, that’s sort of the problem - not everybody is talking about the same thing. Some talk about unbuffed (or self-buffed) on the boss dummy. Some talk about overall raid DPS, including trash. Some talk about single-target boss DPS for a non-gimick fight like Patchwerk. Others will pull out their single highest DPS ever (say, Loatheb or Hodir) and claim that’s their DPS.

Generally the best use of the DPS meters is as a check on yourself. Try out new gear or new rotations and see if your numbers improve/decline. Trying to use it to compare to other players is fraught with difficulty. Some classes have great AoE, some rely on specific buffs from other players, some do much better standing still than running around. Each fight is different. This is why a few of the groups I raid with don’t allow the posting of DPS meters in raid chat - it just causes angst.

1770

I’m not planning to respec, or at least not yet. I’m just going to start putting stuff in affliction next time I level, and maybe respec later when I am a bit further along, and have the money for it. I meant “next time I get a talent point free,” not “next time I roll a warlock.” Sorry if my phrasing was unclear.

1771

Oh, yeah. You’re not going to hit those kind of big numbers without being fully raid buffed–flasks, pluses to crit and hit and all sorts of things that raid buffs can give you. Just as a personal example–on a target dummy at my current gear level, I can hit around 3.5K, maybe a little higher if I get lucky on crits and procs, or lower if I don’t. Instance level buffs will get you more, 10-man more than that, and 25-man still more. For 25-man, you can reasonably assume that the raid will have just about every conceivable buff available (or at least most of them).

A few suggestions after taking a look at your Armory (and please forgive me if I suggest things that you don’t have access to–I’ll try to keep it to just stuff you can get via questing or instancing:

  1. You could go with a better head enchant, if you have one available. I didn’t look at your reps, but you should try to get Exalted with the Kirin Tor–they have a very nice head chant for casters. Frost Resistance isn’t really doing you any good.

  2. Mana per 5 isn’t a terribly useful stat for mages. We’re all about the pewpew, and Frost is a very mana efficient spec anyway. If you can, replace the shoulder enchant with spellpower + crit, which you can get from grinding rep with the Sons of Hodir.

  3. Why a Moonshroud robe? It’s not a terrible choice (spirit is more important for mages than it used to be) but that’s really more of a healer robe. Ebonweave or Spellweave would probably be a stronger choice.

  4. Do you have another trinket you could replace the Commander’s Badge with? Stamina is nice, but not really important for mages. You’d be better off with a trinket that gives you spellpower or some other useful stat.

Everything else looks pretty good, again given your gear level. Your enchants are good and so are you gems. Oh, except your boots. I’d put Icewalker on those. What level is that enchant, anyway? 6 health? :smiley:

As far as your spec goes, for questing and light instancing it’s fine. Frost is one of the few trees where you can get away with putting all 71 points into it and people won’t laugh. :slight_smile: If you wanted to move things around a bit, though, Clearcasting in the Arcane tree is a nice talent. I would consider moving one point out of something (like maybe Frost Warding) and putting it into Winter’s Chill to max that out. And also, if you’re going to be doing any instances or grouping, Shattered Barrier can be a very annoying talent (nothing like Frost Novaing half the mobs before your tank has aggro on them…)

All in all, though, things look pretty good. And Frost rotation is pretty easy–just keep tossing Frostbolts until Brain Freeze procs, throw fireball, repeat. :slight_smile:

ETA: I didn’t mention your Hit rating, which is indeed quite low. The reason I didn’t is because you didn’t say you wanted to raid, or even do heroics. It’s really not a terribly relevant stat unless you do–but if you do, it becomes very relevant, and as **ashman **said, the single most important stat to max out if you want good DPS.

1772

Geez, that sounds as bad, if not worse, than the quest chain for my draenei shaman’s Water Totem. It was kind of weird - I was given a potion that let me breathe water for 60 minutes and got sent to talk to some big boss water elemental off the coast of Bloodmyst Isle. It took less than 5 minutes to find this elemental, who promptly sent me back out of the water to collect samples from corrupted elementals above a nearby waterfall. Of course, there was no direct route to these corrupted elementals; I had to run a long circuitous route, on dry land, around a bunch of cliffs to get there, with the water breathing potion’s timer ticking away the whole time. So I got the samples and skedaddled back to the big elemental, who then gave me the next step: run all the way to freaking Ashenvale. Of course, being only lvl 23 I had to literally run the whole way, as I have no mount yet and I hadn’t previously visited Ashenvale so didn’t have the FP (though my Ghost Wolf form helped with its 40% speed increase). Needless to say, that 60-minute water-breathing potion was good for maybe 10 minutes of actual underwater action. I logged out after running to Ashenvale, collecting the needed item, and hearthing back to Bloodmyst Isle, so I don’t know what I have to do next.

Quoting from memory, a scene from All In The Family, which I only heard the audio of more than 20 years ago, but applicable:

Archie Bunker is asking his wife, Edith, about a chair that has appeared in the living room.

Archie: Edith, did you bring this chair in here?

Edith: Probably.

Archie: Probably what?

Edith: Probably I did.

Archie: Well probably you did could also mean probably you didn’t. Right?

Edith: … probably.

Also funny, before this started I was considering mentioning that now this thread has become unwieldy and maybe it’s time to close it and start Round 3? :smiley:

Well, I can repost mine from earlier, but other than that I’ve got nothin’ :stuck_out_tongue:

1773

I will confess that I was grabbing the spears thinking it was treasure at first, then finding out I was hindering the spear-firing, then decided to go shoot the spears myself (I think I hit once out of 2 spears). After the first attempt w/Skadi, I didn’t even get close those spears on our second and third try! Yep, the newbness shows!

1774

I don’t know if this is the same for other classes/specs, but I can tell you right now that a lot of the Protection Warrior 7.5 gear, before Uldar came out, was *not *BIS, at least as far as individual pieces went: if you were looking at individual items, there would often be another piece that would probably be considered an upgrade.

Where tier gear really comes into play is with the set bonuses, as well as the way other gear stats play off each other. There will be pieces you swap out depending whether you want the 2-piece or 4-piece bonus. Personally, I normally only wear three pieces of my 7.5 as my normal tanking set (my avoidance set bumps it up to the full five). Part of the problem is that there are often different definitions of “best” for tanking gear–as a Warrior tank, you can potentially have an HP set, an avoidance set, and a block set, and the “best” gear for one boss won’t be the “best” gear for another.

To add a bit more onto someone else’s posted explanation: each boss is associated with the trash that comes before it. Once you kill the boss, the trash that goes with it is also permanently dead for that particular raid lockout. If you fail to kill the boss, the trash between it and the previous boss (or entrance) will eventually respawn.

So, for example, if you start running Naxx, you’ll probably start with the Arachnid Quarter, where the bosses are Anub’Rekhan, Grand Widow Faerlina, and Maexxna. Once you kill the first boss, Anub, you and everyone else present gets saved to that particular raid ID.* Let’s say you then clear the trash up to Faerlina, wipe a bunch, and call it a night, planning to come back the next day. When you zone in to Naxx tomorrow, you will find that the quarter is clear up to Anub, and his room will be empty. But, all the trash up to Faerlina will have respawned, and you’ll need to clear it again to get to her.

Different raids have different resets; the most common one is Tuesday morning. The way you can tell what raid IDs you’re saved to (and Heroic instances, if you’re running enough in a day that you can’t remember which you’ve done yet), is to check your Raid tab (on the Social window, hotkey “O”). Up at the top, there’s a red button–I forget exactly what the wording on it is, but it may be something like “Raid IDs.” Click that, and it will pop open a side window that gives every raid ID and when it expires/resets. (Also useful if you’re doing mount runs and can’t remember when ZG resets, or if you’ve done your Kara run for the week yet.)

*If you were to break up the raid right at this point, and one of these people were to start a new raid, the people they brought in them would start where you’re at right now, with Anub dead. If you were to try to zone into Naxx with another group, whether it was a new run or a partial one, it would tell you you’re already saved.

1775

Just to add to SwG’s note above, heroic dungeons also save progress in a similar way.

1776

SwG? Yikes, I should hope I’m not shot *with *guns… :smiley:

But yes, as **Tom Scud **pointed out and you may have guessed from one of my parenthetical comments, a Heroic instance works exactly like a raid from the perspective of how it gets saved–it just resets every morning instead of every 3-7 days. (Obviously, there are a lot of other differences between a Heroic instance and a raid, but we’re talking purely about save mechanics here.)

1777

First off: ashman, welcome to the Dope!

It seems you got off to a rocky start with us, but we can be a forgiving lot, especially in this thread. Also, we at times tend to trip all over ourselves saying sorry for runs gone bad, or not starting a certain quest right away, or grabbing spears that are integral to the bringing down the boss, etc. All of this is just being polite which reinforces our Guild and Doperness; we want to build it up, not tear it down.

I look at our guild as guys and gals assembled together at a Dopefest. People that you have no problem buying a beer and chatting about anything that comes up at that moment in time. Not just WoW, but life in general. Any of these guys I would buy a beer for because they have been polite and helpful here (in-thread), and also when we are in-game. That goes a long way, especially since we don’t see each other IRL except on those rare occasions at a Dopefest. (winks at Flightless Bird) Anyways, ashman, you could fit in quite well here if you just remember the “buy a beer and chat” rule. Be the kind of person that someone would love to buy a beer for and respectfully chat about proper gearing for raids, your kid’s accomplishments, whether Detroit will wrap the Cup tonight or will there be a game 7, or …whatever. I think you do have a lot to contribute here; just remember to keep it friendly, and it will be well received or at least respected. I think you have done better since a couple of pages back, so I think this will all be fine further down the thread.

Another idea is that you can start your own thread for hardcore WoW players and raiding and such, and still participate in this thread with other WoW topics. You actually might find a few other posters who will love to go in there and get deep into the aspects of raiding.

Good Luck, and have fun on the Dope!

1778

Here’s the armory for my BM-spec hunter for comparison purposes. You might find the talents I selected interesting – I just redid my BM spec based on tons of EJ reading after being increasingly unhappy with my performance in groups and raids. I’m not looking to raid 100%, but I did it with an eye toward increasing my DPS.

A few things that jumped out at me: **Bestial Discipline **is made of tasty. Pets want focus so they can hit their special attacks more often – so I recommend maxing that out. **Cobra Strikes **is made of tasty too.

So all in all, I’d recommend: dropping Hawk Eye (not as much bang for the buck imo), reducing Frenzy to 3 points (5pts is overkill, way I hear it), dropping Thick Hide (unless you’re spending a lot of time healing up your pet), maybe dropping Endurance Training (unless your pet dies a lot).

What pet do you usually use? I’m still rocking the raptor that was my first tame, although I will pull out the monkey on and off.

Gear: I recommend replacing your pants, melee weapon, and bracers with an eye toward AGI/CRIT/STAM/INT, in approximately that order since you’re in Outlands now. (at least, I think that’s the right priority.) Trinkets can be really nice for that as well if you can’t get your hands on better gear right away.

Better hunters (Where’s Shot from Guns? :smiley: ) can correct me on any of what I’ve said, especially the priority order – that’s about what I’ve been doing it in with HIT thrown in as a nice bonus when it’s possible without losing another stat.

Okay, my turn to ask for critique! Here’s my baby holy priest. I just spent some time agonizing over the robes – actually, armory’s showing Robes of Arugal, but I’d actually gone back and forth between that and the Robes of Doan. I’m thinking I’ll try to find more SPI chants to even things out, so to speak.

I need to upgrade her wand too… So. Thoughts on her setup?

1779

Aww, not everyone here is a dick it seems. Of course, I didn’t really expect that what I was saying would really light the fuse on so many tampons, but apparently I misread that one. It happens.

While I suppose it’s good to know that people can be forgiving, it’s not really something I need for which I require forgiveness. Then again, when writing online, a lot the nuance of how I speak is lost: for instance, you can’t see my goofy faces and the like.

Anyway, my guild has probably little more fucking around than is healthy, sometimes we’re all laughing too hard to focus on the fight and thus wipe. On Freya, last night. Who knew it was possible?

Then again, she was buffed somewhat so we should have probably focused.

Anyway, someone looked up my priest, who I realized is in his PvP gear instead of his PvE gear. So, I should probably log back on and switch gear so he can be properly armoried. He has a gear level of 2345 (I think. Maybe it’s 2340, depending on whether I keep my ilvl 213 pants for the gems and set bonus, or if I put on the ilvl 219 piece -it goes down, no sockets.) Anyhoo, I can’t log in right now as my new computer just arrived and I’m currently installing. :slight_smile:

1780

I’ll make a note of your suggestions. I’ve been maxing out what I choose based on the “more is more” principle, but I guess that doesn’t always work. I’ll respec and see what happens. I just got that sword, too, drat it. I probably could hang onto it for a bit, since the few better ones I see are a bit pricey for me at the moment. I’ll take a peek at the bracers and pants on offer. I have been using a bear since about level 14, and I adore him, but I caught a gorilla after a couple of people suggested it to me. He’s not bad, but since I’m a few levels above him, he doesn’t hold the mobs away from me very well right now. I think I’m going to stick with the bear, at least until I can tame exotics, but I’m trying to give the gorilla a fair chance first.