It sorta depends on how Blizzard mathed out your optimal stats. For example, if you’re a shadow priest specced into Succumb to Madness, haste outweights int in terms of DPS – a ring with 100 haste will give you better performance than one with 100 int. However, if you’re a rogue of any spec, it takes about 4 points of haste to equal 1 point of agi (and all the gear you find is going to loaded with haste bc F U).
I’ve seen this in theorycrafting a lot of classes, in fact.
The ancient inviolable dogma of “primary stat uber any secondary stat” is apparently now all wrong for a lot of specs, in a lot of cases. Weird, to an old WoWer like me.
However, you’re right that terribly-itemized gear continues to be a time-honored tradition Blizzard is upholding. :rolleyes: I’ve vended a lot of gear because of that.
Speaking of shadow priests, how does Surrender to Madness even figure as a viable spec? I understand you become a titanic font of shadowy death, topping every DPS chart in the raid, until your Insanity finally drains away, Voidform collapses, and you die… and not combat rezzable until the three-minute debuff times out.
You do zero DPS while dead. How is this a winning proposition?
This weekend a guildie walked me through how to download Simulationcraft, and the Pawn addon (and how to use them together).
Very helpful for deciding which piece of gear would be an upgrade. Especially since ilvl is no longer king like you guys are saying. I’ve already seen two pieces that were 10-15 ilvls above what I had equipped but would not have been upgrades based on my current setup/stat weightings.
Similar but related question. I had two dungeon runs this weekend (one heroic random and one mythic arcway) where we had a shadow priest doing like 50-60K dps… Is there currently something weird with spriests on recount, or is the rotation really difficult, or did I just randomly get grouped with two separate but equally… uninformed… shadow priests?
Wha? uniformed shadow priests? Who could think of such a thing! 
My only spriest is Alt #1, who’s only lvl 103 right now. My impression, by comparison to my recollections of leveling my alt (MM hunter), is that yeah, it seems harder to generate good DPS and kills are taking longer. But that’s not very good evidence, since leveling (and in crappy leveling gear) is not very representative.
I plateaued* on my main so maybe I’ll level this alt more. If I arrive at some insight I’ll share here.
*A lucky weekend. A level of artifact research and two levels of artifact traits. Dinged exalted with Nightfallen. Got Blazing Drake to drop from Madness of Deathwing (and, in so doing, scored Awake the Drakes achievement for another drake mount – TWOFER!). Now to wait for Xavius LFR to open to continue Suramar quest chain.
From what I understand it you essentially use it as an execute and try to time it so the boss expires at around the same time you do, and end up with dps curves looking something like this.
I was afraid it’d be something like this. A burn-phase timebomb. Gimp your DPS from pull to execute, and then push the Big Red Switch and blow up all over the boss.
Obviously, this is a raiding strat. You don’t dare try in in LFR; they’ll “forget” to rez you or maybe kick you for being a bad player and dying all the time. :rolleyes:
I don’t raid (other than LFR, which isn’t really raiding), so this is something I can disregard. But this may indirectly answer your initial question: the alternatives to StM are exceedingly meh. Looks like Blizz’s shadow priest developers have decided it’s Surrender or nothing, from a performance perspective. (I think they’re just laughing at us.)
My spriest isn’t specced into STM, but I’ll just say that the revamp has turned my priest into a toon I just don’t want to play any more. For a casual player like me, the rotation is just clunky as all hell. The whole design seems to be crafted around boss fights, with all of the DPS being backloaded into that “one big spell” … and pretty much everything I fight is dead before I get to that. With my playstyle, I totally prefer “sustained DPS”.
I tried Arcane on my mage for a while, but I switched back to Fire. Dunno why, but I just like Fire better. Seems like most of the mages I see running around in the Guildhall are also Fire.
Just hit level 108. Hoping to hit 110 in time to do the Horseman event, assuming they have it this year. I already have the mount, but there’s usually rings or something I think…
You guys… WeakAuras… my dps was decent, but I was kinda lagging behind the top folks in my guild, so yesterday I downloaded weakauras and imported a cool looking setup I found on mmochampion. It was an instant and significant boost to my dps since I am now managing my cooldowns so much better. I even did a pug mythic+7 last night (nelth’s lair) that went super smooth (we got the timer). And they didn’t even need to carry me, I was basically tied with a mage for top damage output. I’m part of the team!!
I’ll have to look into that. I’m starting to get a feel for the rotation on my MM-tard, and my throughput seems reasonable (only being beat on DPS charts by actual raiders with much better gear), but my spriest still feels like a work in progress. Still, I ran normal Darkheart Thicket on my spriest and turned 50-60kdps at level 103, and there were moments when Voidform made sense and stayed up a good long time, so maybe StM can also make sense (as the logical extreme of Voidform).
There’s my answer to your question about expected damage output, btw: I got 50-60k out of a level 103 in an instance. I would be very disappointed as a 110 getting only that throughput. (As in, “WTF am I doing wrong?” So, maybe more evidence of the spriests you grouped with being apathetic or incompetent.)
They unlocked LFR Xavius yesterday, and I was in a group that one-shotted it. More casualties from trash than the boss, even. The stacking Corruption mechanism never seemed to matter, which seems wrong, and the fight itself was not complicated. I guess I’ve been conditioned from LFR Archimonde to expect a Determination stackfest first time out on a raid-end boss fight, so I was both pleased and disappointed. (Shocking! I was actually disappointed that the fight seemed too easy. Am I turning into a closet hardcore? :dubious:)
After the fight, you get a chance to prance around a small portion of the “Purified Emerald Dream.” The main attraction is that you get to capture Emerald Whelpling combat pets. Yaay for little green baby dragons! (I think I’m a sucker for whelpling combat pets.)
Finishing Xavius allowed me to finish up the entire Suramar quest chain (since I was already Exalted). The quests were interesting, but only one was challenging: killing four elite 110 Nightborne patrol robots in the Noble section of the city, with roving elite detector type NPC patrols. You pick your fights carefully or you’re overwhelmed by adds; at 12 million health, your primary target forces you to fight long enough that adds become likely unless you clear judiciously and choose your battleground well. Still, no deaths (a couple of close escapes, but hunters have good survival tools and most mobs don’t chase you into the canals).
Congrats! I should unlock the final set of Suramar quests tonight, really looking forward to it (I still need like 600 rep).
Regarding the Xavius fight. In normal mode its kinda funny, the strat seems so complex and confusing but basically boils down to “sleepy people kill the adds that move slowly towards him and suck up the pools they leave behind” and people with blades run out of the group. My guild hasn’t downed Cenarius on heroic yet so nothing to report there yet (but last night we cleared up to Cenarius, so hopefully we can down Heroic Cenarius on Thursday and start on Xavius and I can report further).
Regarding the trash, yeah its a mess but the trick is to have everyone spread out and fight the urge to stack for AOE.
Heroic Xavius is definitely a step up in difficulty from Normal. Its basically the same fight but all the mechanics need proper attention (where as in Normal/LFR you can kind of limp through if you screw a few up). We didn’t get him, but I think we totally can get him next week.
Was a great night for me personally since my bonus roll got me the storm relic I was hoping for from Cenarius which let me replace the 825 I was using (with a crappy trait) with an 865 that has the BiS trait. Also got some titanforged shoulders from a mythic+ run. Looking forward to seeing what these things do for my dps (the relic increased the ilvl of my artifact 12 points!)
I’ll tell ya what, being stuck at level 100 (because I don’t have Legion) makes it kinda suck trying to hunt rares in Tanaan Jungle. The place is swarming with 110s who, I guess, didn’t manage to earn enough Apexis Crystals for the Corrupted Dreadwing mount before Legion. We poor 100s can’t get to the rares fast enough before they’re one-shot by 110s.
I was in Zeth’gol when the Blood Moon spawned. I joined in grabbing crystals and helping to drain the moon. Spent some time doing that. Boss spawned, I was about 50 yards away from it, and still couldn’t get to it fast enough :mad:
I was cheered up while playing a different toon, though. My hunter took the portal from Stormshield to Lion’s Watch, and my freshly-installed NPCScan addon (I hadn’t used it in a while) immediately blared at me that Doomroller was up. I mounted up and made a beeline through the air to the spawn point, and landed just in time to fire off one arrow before the boss died.
Looted the “corpse” and ended up with the Tundra Icehoof mount
Hi and sorry to bother y’all, but does anyone know of an add-on whereby one can check one’s auction items without having to actually GO there?
Thanks
Q
Never heard of an in-game addon that can do that. The WoW Remote app for a smartphone can do that, completely outside the WoW program, but that’s not the same.
ETA: googling isn’t turning up any either. Anyone asking the same question as yours seems to be answered with the phone app or maybe web-based scripting datamining The Undermine Journal; nothing in-game. 
I don’t think the game client exposes auction data unless you interact with the AH, so addons can’t get at that info. (There is probably an event trigger for when your auction sells or expires, so that the notification can appear in your chat box, but that’s about it)
So this was interesting …
With my cable internet & WiFi, I typically see in-game latency around 55ms/55ms, give or take 5-10ms. But since patch 7.1, and right along with a ton of other players on the forums, my latency started getting to 1000+ms, sometimes into the several thousands. This, of course, made the game completely unplayable.
I tried everything suggested on the forums, to no avail. I had my wife shut off the TV (connected to the WiFi so she can watch Netflix), shut down Facebook on her laptop in case FB was jamming things up looking for updates, shut down her laptop entirely in case it was Windows 10 doing background update downloads or something. Nothing helped.
In desperation, I opened my browser and logged directly into my router’s configuration software. I clicked the link that said, “DHCP Client List”. Lo and behold, in addition to our two computers and our TV, there were THREE Android devices connected to my WiFi! Our only Android device is my wife’s phone. I promptly changed the router’s password, which booted the other two Androids off.
And, now, I am happily back to seeing 55ms latency, and all is well.
Honestly, though, I’m baffled as to how those other Android’s got on there. My WiFi was password secured.
Finally made it to heroics. Wow…these seem way harder than heroics in previous expansions. Lots of bosses, and even a couple of trash mobs, seem to have instant one shot death attacks that you can only avoid in a particular way…and I’m generally dead before Deadly Boss Mods tells me what to do…or before I can decipher whatever it is telling me to do. Sometimes it just says “Oak, you’re dead”. Well, not really, but something flashed on the screen and i was dead before I could read it.
And PVP just sucks for Alliance lately. We sometimes win 1/10 BGs. Going 1/5 is pretty common. 
Haha wait until you start doing Mythics; those are a gas.
Horde has sometimes figured out Alterac Valley; I win about 75% of my games, unless it’s the weekend, and then I win maybe 10% of my games.
My Arcane Epic staff is like 4 upgrades away from complete. Anyone else complete a weapon yet?