mastery
Latest
Lichborne: BlizzCon cause and effect for death knights in patch 4.3
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. So the past few weeks have actually been pretty exciting for death knights. We saw a lot of new info come out of BlizzCon, including getting a couple long-standing questions answered with new updates to the patch 4.3 PTR. Today, we'll cover the basics of what we discussed with the devs at BlizzCon and see what fruit those discussions have borne on the PTR itself. Bloody questions One of the first questions asked at the Class Q&A on BlizzCon 2011 day two was more of a laundry list of blood death knight grievances, such as our issues with spike damage and with avoidance working against mastery. While we have gotten a good bit of dev love on the forums on these beefs, it was actually pretty nice to see it answered candidly on stage, if only to see a dev give an on-the-spot, straight-up answer.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 4.3 and its implications
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. I admit I was hoping there would be more changes to warriors to talk about by now. At least so far, the patch 4.3 PTR has been fairly quiet on the warrior front. Sure, fury got a nerf, and a fairly large one. Fury's been the melee spec that's actually done good damage this raid tier, so I knew the writing was on the wall for it. What I didn't expect was the particular blend of buff and nerf that the spec has seen. Meanwhile, arms and protection have not changed at all, and this far into the PTR, I find that kind of baffling. Nerfing Dual-Wield Specialization to remove the 5% physical damage bonus -- that, I understand. It's an easy Band-Aid to rip off of the spec to flat-out reduce all damage done, and with all physical attack power buffs adding 20% instead of 10% melee AP in 4.3, it's likely we won't really even feel it. What that change does is lower fury's base so that it doesn't scale better than every other melee once the AP changes are in. No, I'm not surprised at all by that, and I wouldn't be surprised if Precision gets a nerf as well to reduce our white damage slightly. While I absolutely do not agree with these changes, believe them justified in any way, or support them, I at least understand them.
The Light and How to Swing It: 4 tips for upping your combat table coverage
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. With the advent of the Holy Shield buff, there's simply no such thing as too much mastery -- except, you know, past the hard cap for raid bosses. That's too much. But! Up to that point, you should approach mastery the same way a grizzly bear approaches a tumultuous beehive: You want to inhale as much of that sweet, sticky mastery as you can before you get stung to death by the swarm. I've talked about combat table coverage before in one of my first columns, and while not much has changed since then, the advent of a new tier has made complete CTC all the more attainable, and the introduction of the new Holy Shield has made it all the more desirable. The more normal hits you are able to take to the face, the less potent your Holy Shield is going to be. We want to mitigate (har, har) that downside to the cooldown, and to do so, we need to stack as much mastery as we (safely) can. I add the word "safely" -- scare quotes and all -- because safety is key. If the mastery is the delicious treat, the ornery bees are the constant threat of scooping up too much mastery in your greedy paws and suffering from a survivability loss as a result. There's always a break point between just enough mastery and having so much that you're trading off too much stamina and avoidance for it. In the end, you'll have to feel that out for your own purposes. That said, in this column, I'm going to outline four easy ways to boost your combat table coverage -- by hook or by crook -- so you can scrape your way to the magical 102.4% number. I'll go over an amazing addon that'll visualize the process for you, a spreadsheet that can remove the fog of war from the whole process and make gear choices much more transparent, proper consumable choices you can make, and more.
The Light and How to Swing It: Just how masterful can mastery healing get?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Sometimes I feel like I can't get away from Illuminated Healing. Our holy paladin mastery has been receiving nonstop tweaks since its introduction, and it's always flirting with viability. Stats like haste and critical strike rating are predictable. I can draw up some formulas to show you how many extra ticks of Holy Radiance you'll receive at a given haste level. Mastery is much more nebulous than that, as its effectiveness depends entirely on the encounter and your healing assignment. Everyone has some amount of mastery rating on their gear, and there's even some passively built into our characters. While having a bit of mastery to make our heals bubbly helps our throughput, it's certainly not overpowered. There are a few holy paladins who, in an attempt to see how far Illuminated Healing can go, have enchanted, reforged, and gemmed into mastery completely. With IH bubbles absorbing 35% of the value of the original heal, stacking mastery can obviously make something interesting happen. How potent can Illuminated Healing really become?
Lichborne: Why the death knight blood tree needs tweaks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Patch 4.2 will likely be on live servers by the time you read this, but I figure we've talked enough about the patch 4.2 in past columns. If you read those, you probably have a good idea of where everything is for death knights. This week, I've decided it would be a good idea to take a break and talk about something that didn't get much attention in patch 4.2: the plight of the death knight tank. It's been sort of an undercurrent in the death knight community since the beginning of Cataclysm. The death knight blood tanking tree is just sort of gummed up. It's not that we're underpowered, per se. No, a well played death knight tank is pretty dominant in heroic dungeons and even normal raiding. You only start really falling behind in heroic raids, where the problem becomes really evident: You're doing twice as much work for the same results, more or less. Most of the issues are centered around Death Strike and how it interacts with our resource system. The quirks of said resource system are so demanding that you end up staring at your rune bar more than the battle in front of you, trying to game the system just right to squeeze out one last Death Strike.
Shifting Perspectives: Why the tank Q&A sucked
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we started writing this column last Wednesday. Don't get me wrong: It's not that I don't like the developer Q&A sessions. They're a great idea, and although they don't make up for Ghostcrawler's absence from the forums, they're a nice insight into the developers' thought process and a peek at the issues that matter most to players. The effort's appreciated even when players ask pointless questions (of which the need to do so appears to be a congenital disorder) or use the opportunity to grandstand about issues no one cares about. But the tank Q&A was ... not Blizzard's best effort. To borrow a phrase from Harry Knowles, I love hard-working Blizzard, I'm blown away by creative Blizzard, and I'm in awe of big-dreaming and overreaching Blizzard. But I freaking hate lazy Blizzard.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A tale of two furies
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Well, all we've heard from the PTR for warriors is deafening silence. As I said before, my general distrust of patches has been fully awakened with patch 4.2's complete lack of enormous nerfs. The past week has been pretty active for me. While every boss in every raid who can drop shoulder armor of any kind has endlessly refused to, Cho'gall finally coughed up my axe, so I'm happy about that. I'm also working to gear up my other worgen warrior (he's pretty solidly ilevel 356 by now) and have started the climb on my tauren warrior. I just missed ol' hornhead so much that I'm willing to put up with Warchief NoNeck. I've also been running parse after parse on both my 85 warriors, in both SMF and TG specs and various gear sets -- literally dozens of parses. Why? Because I had a nagging voice in the back of my head after I recently argued that hit now totally overshadows mastery as a fury DPS stat. I want some Nutter Butter cookies, the voice whispered. Even though they don't sell those up here in Canada, I want them. Thankfully, after I got it some lesser cookies, it shut up about that and instead insisted I test my assertions out for myself. The results kind of surprised me.
Spiritual Guidance: Further changes on Patch 4.2 PTR to consider
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen tries to go back to the future -- or the past, or something. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. It's been another exciting week for healing priests who have their sight focused on patch 4.2 and the next raiding tier. First, Blizzard announced that it was going to go ahead with its plan to change how critical heals worked. Previously, Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) explained that the developers were looking to increase the value of crit for healers, since most classes were ignoring it in favor of other stats. Now that they've gone ahead with their plans, we'll need to examine the impact this will have on discipline and holy priests. But before we do that, we have to look at the most exciting news for priests this past week: Our set bonuses got changed! If you missed it, last Thursday Zarhym hopped on the forums and announced that the developers had made some changes to the set bonuses of several classes. Priests were, of course, on that list.
Raid Rx: Healing changes and Firelands thoughts
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading on the Matticast. Here's one of the larger healing changes coming up in patch 4.2. It'll affect all healers for sure, since it affects the critical strike of heals. We first learned Blizzard was contemplating this change several weeks ago in a Dev Watercooler post. All healing critical strikes now heal for 2 times a normal heal (+100%), up from 1.5 times a normal heal (+50%). source I'll go over my thoughts about the proposed healing changes for patch 4.2. I also had the opportunity to try out some of the new raid encounters on the PTR in Firelands. Think you're ready for the upcoming healing challenge?
Spiritual Guidance: Gaming shadow priest mastery trinkets
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. This week, the venerable shadow-specced Fox Van Allen asks Theralion's Mirror who the fairest priest of them all is. Spoiler alert: It's not Dawn Moore. One of the biggest mysteries for shadow priests during the development of Cataclysm was what our mastery mechanic would be. We had some vague notions of what we were getting early on -- Shadow Orbs -- but it took the boys at Blizzards a very long time to define what those orbs would actually do. Perhaps it's that history that leads to one of the greatest misconceptions among shadow priests today. Most of us believe that Shadow Orbs are our mastery mechanism. They're not. If they were, shadow priests wouldn't see them until we trained mastery at level 80. Instead, we start seeing orbs as early as level 10.
The Light and How to Swing It: Illuminating holy paladin stats
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Intellect has been our best stat for quite some time, and Cataclysm has only reinforced that. We get spellpower, mana, and critical strike chance from every point of intellect, which makes it valuable for every aspect of holy paladin play. We want to gem for intellect, enchant for intellect, use intellect consumables like Severed Sagefish Head and the Flask of the Draconic Mind. All of our spells scale off of spellpower, which makes it an amazing throughput stat. The fact that it gives us critical strike rating is just icing on the cake. Divine Plea's mana regeneration scales off of our maximum mana, and so stacking intellect gives us both mana at the start of the fight and then additional mana every time we use Divine Plea. My only advice is to be sure to use all plate gear, as we receive a 5% intellect bonus when wearing all plate. Mail caster gear may seem attractive, but the intellect loss isn't worth it. Intellect is designed to be our best stat, and that's why we can find it on all of our gear. Even if you hated intellect, you can't get rid of it. The real gearing decisions come down to choices between the secondary stats.
Encrypted Text: Dissecting rogue stats
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any article suggestions! Do you remember when armor penetration was all the rage? While combat rogues lusted after all the ArP as they could get their hands on, the other physical DPS classes shared the same desire. I forgave all of the feral druids who asked for the leather gear with armor penetration on it; I know we have to share the agility-based leather gear with our furry friends. I didn't put my foot down until hunters, warriors, and even death knights started rolling on our stuff. While having such a powerful stat allowed us to scale competitively, it also created a massive amount of gear competition. Blizzard's developers decided to end armor penetration's reign as the top stat and actually named a successor to the throne -- agility. Agility is now a rogue's best stat, and since it's always on our gear, we never have to worry about whether we'll see it or not. The plate DPS classes now only want strength, and so our precious leather is safe from their clutches. The stat redesign also shifted the balance of power between the other secondary stats, and we saw several stat functions changed as well.
Lichborne: Blood Death Knight Tanking 101
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. A lot has changed since the last we did a Blood Tanking 101 article. There's only one tanking tree for death knights now; you don't need to worry about defense rating; and parry haste is a thing of the past. While we have talked about various aspects of Cataclysm blood tanking in past columns, this column is meant to be your one-stop shop for all things blood tanking, to give you a general idea of what you'll need to do to start seriously tanking at the heroic dungeon and raid level as a death knight.
The Light and How to Swing It: Illuminated Healing still no Val'anyr
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why Val'anyr was totally a hunter weapon. When playing a healer, there's no single "right" way to play. Tanks can adjust their gear and strategy to boost their threat or avoidance, but both of those statistics are easy to track and monitor. Damage classes are obviously optimizing for one thing: DPS. Healers, on the other hand, can both get to the same point while taking completely different paths. Checking your healing per second on a healing meter won't show all of the times that you saved someone's life or made a great decision, and it never tells the whole story of an encounter. The best example is how your total healing done will plummet as your raid group gets better and better at avoiding damage on a particular encounter. Healing meters do have a few useful purposes. They allow us to empirically test different strategies and gear choices, and we can monitor the effect of changes that we make. They also allow us to evaluate talents and individual abilities, which means we can make educated decisions about our talent and spell selection. When reviewing my healing done, I can figure out exactly what works and what doesn't. One thing has consistently stood out as negligible to my overall healing: Illuminated Healing. How did our mastery bonus end up so impotent?
Lichborne: Major patch 4.0.6 changes for death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Join World of Warcraft's first hero class as we head into a new expansion and shed the new kid on the block label. Patch 4.0.6 was surprisingly busy for death knights. While we did cover some of the specifics back when the first patch notes came out, how it's all played out is a little different, especially with some additional hotfixed nerfs that dropped for death knights. That said, despite the nerfs, we're really not in that bad a place, and for certain death knights, there's even good news. This week, we'll take a look at some of the most important changes that came with patch 4.0.6 and how they affect your playstyle and gearing decisions.
The Light and How to Swing It: Patch 4.0.6 for retribution
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Justicar Alex Ziebart heralds retribution's triumphant return. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author. Patch 4.0.6 is right around the corner. Isn't it about time we discuss what this means to the retribution paladin? You've all waited for this long enough, so let's skip the pleasantries and get right down to it. We're going to go through the paladin patch notes relevant to retribution paladins one by one. Do note that we are not covering all of the paladin patch notes, such as the mana cost changes to heals or those that impact holy and protection talents. While some of those things may technically impact retribution, we would all much rather talk about issues very specifically related to hitting things with a righteous vengeance until they die. Let's dig in.
Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priest changes in patch 4.0.6
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Each Wednesday, the shadow-specced Fox Van Allen takes the helm of Spiritual Guidance, giving the world a brief respite from the not-so-evil machinations of his nemesis, Dawn Moore. On days that are not Wednesday, Fox is available for childrens' parties. I'm a big fan of where shadow priests are right now in Cataclysm. We're able to churn out highly competitive damage in just about any fight. Combine that fact with our damn near legendary survivability, and it's hard to imagine why anyone would even think about playing another class. In the interest of full disclosure, though, shadow priests aren't quite perfect. The spec has some small issues, and by now, we're all pretty familiar with what they are. Shadow priests have to suffer a terribly underpowered AoE, a limp mastery stat, and a weak Mind Blast. The good news: Blizzard game developers are taking a stab at fixing every major problem with shadow priests in the upcoming patch 4.0.6. The even better news: Shadow priests are getting some added bonuses that we didn't even ask for. That's right: The best is getting even better.
Arcane Brilliance: News and notes for mages from PTR patch 4.0.6
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, a magical journey awaits ... a fantastic voyage through a mystical realm. I speak, of course, of the Public Test Realm, and the wondrous patch notes that dwell therein. Now before we begin, I should make it clear that mages aren't getting anything even remotely earth-shattering in patch 4.0.6. It's not like Blizzard is letting us autofire while moving or anything. But a patch is still a patch. Things are going to change, and though mages have been left largely un-fiddled-around-with (at least in comparison to many other classes), we do have some incoming alterations to be aware of. So with our expectations in an appropriately subdued state, let's peek beyond the jump for an annotated look at what be happening, yo.
Lichborne: The great death knight Cataclysm tanking stat weight debate
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Join World of Warcraft's first hero class as we head into a new expansion and shed the new kid on the block label. So here's the thing about figuring out your tank stat weights as you go into raiding: They're all subjective and likely to stay that way for a while. Between Blizzard's redesign of the way stats work, the way boss fights work and the newness of expansion, we're still trying to get the data we need to figure out the best exact way to min-max our gear. Right now, there are a few specific schools of thought on how to gear yourself for raid tanking, and right now, they all seem to be working for specific raid groups. Today, we'll take a look at the major tank survival stats and discuss the new quirks, benefits, and drawbacks of each of them as you start gearing up in earnest for the raid game.
Encrypted Text: Slicing up hit and expertise for Cataclysm rogues
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me, especially if you've been playing subtlety lately! I love hit and expertise. While their mechanics and nuances can be complicated, I enjoy the diversity they bring to our gear options. We have stats like critical strike chance, which give us a chance to hit harder; haste, which lets us hit more often; and of course, hit and expertise, which let us hit our targets more often. The interaction between all of these different gear stats is one of the most interesting parts of theorycrafting for me. Think about it, would you really enjoy picking gear if you were just choosing between haste, mastery, and crit? Unfortunately for us, hit and expertise are also our only two remaining stats with tangible caps on their potency. While we were able to cap out on critical strike chance and armor penetration in the past, one of those stats has been rebalanced and the other completely removed. Because of the caps in place, hit and expertise's value drops off immediately after reaching that golden value, and so we're left always keeping those caps in mind.
