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Spiritual Guidance: Diagnosing bad shadow priest DPS
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen comes from out of the shadows to bask in your loving adoration. Shadow priests are in a glorious place right now, just as they've been for most of the Cataclysm expansion. We top the DPS charts on a number of different fights. We're no fire mages, but shadow priests are all over the Warmaster Blackhorn and Madness of Deathwing top 10 DPS lists. Unless you're in a raid with one of the best fire mages in the country, there's no reason why you can't be at the top of the DPS charts too. If you're not, though, there's hope. The website World of Logs (and its equivalents) offers a lot of great ways to analyze your own personal performance and the performance of your fellow raiders. But how do you use it, what should you look for, and what metrics actually matter for shadow priests? Let's take a look.
Encrypted Text: Examining the rogue's assassin ancestry
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 questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. If you start looking into the history of the rogue class, you end up reaching several dead ends. The reason is that a rogue who's easy to track or trace isn't much of a rogue at all. We specialize in disappearing, which makes rogue family trees notoriously difficult to map. Garona Halforcen is often considered to be the mother of the rogue class, executing one of the earliest and most daring acts of assassination and regicide in Azeroth's history. The truth is that if we want to find our spiritual beginnings, we have to look back even further than Garona and even further away than Azeroth. The true ancestor of today's rogue class first found life eons ago, in another realm, known only as Sanctuary. There, the assassin class stood against the three Prime Evils, defeating the Burning Hell's greatest powers with elegance and subterfuge. The rogues of WoW were inspired by the assassins of Diablo II, and that influence can still be felt today.
Tauren druids at the end of Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, there is a cow level. In November 2010, before Cataclysm hit, I wrote a series of articles on why (or why not) to play a particular druidic race for theorycrafting, lore, and roleplay purposes. These articles turned out to be a really big hit with readers, and you can find them here: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid This week, we're going to revisit the tauren, who are in a truly unique position among the druids. They don't represent the class' old guard (exclusively night elves), but neither are they truly among the new.
Lichborne: Useful consumables your death knight should stock
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 you've geared out. You've memorized your rotations. You've practiced them at the testing dummy. What's the next step? What do you do now to get your game to the next level and get some good habits going that will set you apart from the pack? One of the easiest ways to do that is to pay attention to your consumables. Consumables are one-time use items that can heal you or give you a stat boost of varying lengths of time. The downside is that they do cost money or time to acquire. The upside is that they can have a significant boost on your DPS or survivability. Any player who's trying to play at the top level or even the middling level can and should use them. Today, we'll take a look at some of the most basic consumables death knights should be using and discuss how to get them and when to use them.
Spiritual Guidance: How to increase your HPS as a discipline priest
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. I received an email three weeks back from a discipline priest who told me she thought her performance on the healing meters was too low. Though there wasn't any pressure on her from her guild to change what she was doing, she was bothered that her peers often outhealed her by a significant amount -- even another discipline priest with worse gear and a laggy computer. She told me she'd first noticed it at the start of Cataclysm, despite the fact that her performance on meters should have gone up with the change to combat logs (which allowed absorption from Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis to register on meters). She kept up with her assignments regardless, and none of her targets ever died, but something just didn't seem right to her. The priest linked me her armory but said that she didn't think it was anything to do with her gear choices, which I agreed with upon my own inspection. She also described what she was casting, none of which seemed horribly egregious to me. What could be wrong?
In defense of intellect plate
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. There was some talk on the official forums recently about the logistical issues presented by plate gear with intellect on it. The best part of the preceding sentence is that it was true last year, it's true this week, and will probably continue to be true next year. While the gear itself was originally called spell plate due to its spellpower stat, it's now usually referred to as intellect plate. The issue isn't with intellect plate or holy paladins, because they've both been serving their purposes perfectly. The problem is how intellect plate interacts with boss loot tables, affecting everyone else in the raid.
Totem Talk: Maximize your fire elemental DPS on Ultraxion
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once just the expert on enhancement shaman, Josh Myers has spent most of Dragon Soul as elemental, and he's not quite sure how he got there. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Of all the fights in Dragon Soul, Ultraxion on heroic mode is the ultimate DPS check. Heroic Spine of Deathwing definitely tests your raid group's ability to do a large amount of damage in a miniscule amount of time, but Ultraxion forces your group to maximize its sustained DPS. As a result, it's very commonly the first real wall most heroic progression guilds hit, at least until they can get the gear to make it a cakewalk. If you're working on heroic-mode Ultraxion or are having trouble killing him on normal, there are a few things you can do to maximize your elemental shaman's DPS on this specific fight. Gear, glyphs, and talents First off, the easiest way to help your DPS on Ultraxion is to check your glyphs. Most elemental shaman nowadays run with Glyph of Unleashed Lightning as one of their prime glyphs. This makes sense for nearly every other fight in Dragon Soul, as they all require some amount of movement. Ultraxion, however, is a straight up stand-there-and-shoot-lightning-and-lava-until-your-fingers-fall-off-or-he-dies fight, and Glyph of Unleashed Lightning gives absolutely zero DPS if you're not moving. Switching this out for Glyph of Lightning Bolt will give you a slight boost in numbers. Your three glyph choices should be Lightning Bolt, Flame Shock, and Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem; more on the FET glyph choice in a second.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Warrior mistakes to avoid
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. One of the interesting things about my current astonishing obsession with transmogrification and all things related to it has been seeing older itemization. You know, strength and agility plate. Warrior tier 6 is lousy with agility. That's a legacy of the past, of course, and as the design of the game moves ever onward, artifacts like that are left in its wake. After all, most level 70 warriors nowadays move straight to Northrend dungeons and are not likely to look at Black Temple until much later, when farming for transmog gear. The stats aren't important enough to go back and redesign the set. What I really find interesting about this is seeing where the class has been, not just visually but also in terms of design. It's kind of like archaeology (the actual field of inquiry, not the in-game profession) or paleontology, reconstructing the class and its roots from the remainders of what it wore. Granted, I was there, so to a degree it's like excavating Pompeii with an immortal who survived the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius and keeps grumping about how people in his day didn't complain when they were buried in pyroclastic material. Which is a complete lie, by the way, we did nothing but complain about it. But I digress. The warrior class has come a long way in seven years, and the artifacts of past design lie strewn about. New players and even old veterans can be forgiven for making a few mistakes based on the rubble. Let's go over a few.
Do mages really need 3 competitive PvE specs?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking about specs, and DPS, and possibly smurfs, though I shouldn't get ahead of myself. Patch 4.3.2 has dropped, and for mages, the only item in the patch notes is a 6% damage nerf to Fireball and Pyroblast, ostensibly to bring fire mages back in line with arcane mages for top prize in the What Spec Will My Raid Leader Expect Me to be Raiding With This Week Sweepstakes. For good or ill, every patch brings changes like this, as the spec balance carousel continues its eternal round. That's been mage history, in a nutshell -- fire and arcane take turns pushing each other from the top of the PvE heap, and frost just shakes its head and queues for an Arena match. It's like a giant teeter-totter, with fire damage stacked on one end and arcane damage stacked on another. Blizzard goes back and forth between the ends, adding just a bit more of each type of damage or taking some away in an attempt to get the thing perfectly balanced, but try as it may, one end or the other is always sticking up in the air. The number crunchers crunch the numbers after every damage pass and crown one spec king ... until the next pass, when the cycle repeats. And frost mages just watch and wonder when it will be their turn to go raiding.
5 common mistakes paladin tanks make
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. I know this is not going to come as a very big surprise, but it's not very difficult to tank as a paladin. As any warrior tank would gleefully assert, even a trained monkey can operate the 939 rotation and squeeze in a Word of Glory from time to time to boot. Indeed, as the old adage goes, a paladin tank is easy to learn but difficult to master, and in many respects, that's very true. And very important. It's not good enough to just play the class -- we want to master it! There are several common mistakes aspiring (or even veteran!) tanks make that hold them back from hitting their full potential. These range from covering threat generation to gearing to survivability. And correcting each is an important hallmark on the path to optimization. 1. Not hitting Crusader Strike enough Crusader Strike can be accurately described as the heartbeat of the protection paladin rotation. With its 3-second cooldown, resource generation, and generous contribution to one's overall damage numbers, Crusader Strike is situated in a hallowed place -- essentially, the center of gravity of our threat and damage. Not Crusader Striking enough can easily and mortally wound your damage output and thus your threat generation.
Scattered Shots: Frostheim's interview with an imaginary Ghostcrawler
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. This is not actually an interview with Ghostcrawler. I did not ask him any of these questions, and he did not answer with any of these answers. But in a deeper sense, a more spiritual sense, Ghostcrawler and I are two lost souls reaching for each other across the vastness of the information superhighway, each seeking that other half to fill the emptiness within us. We are platonic life partners bound by the love of the hunter experience. Because of this connection we share, this ephemeral bond, I am able to predict how he'd answer if we did in fact conduct an interview. If I happened to sit at a bar next to Ghostcrawler in the not-too-distant future and our eyes met over a glass of stout in a moment of magic, I think we can agree that everything in the following transcript is exactly as he would say it. The only thing that might possibly be different is the words.
How to kill a flag carrier
We've spent the last few weeks talking about Warsong Gulch and how to be a successful flag carrier. This week, let's talk about the most important skill for everyone else: how to turn that flag carrier into a greasy spot on the ground. These skills apply relatively equally to Warsong Gulch, Twin Peaks, and even Eye of the Storm. If the enemy has a flag, you want to kill them.* Let's remember that the entire other team will (should) be protecting their flag carrier. That really leads to the basic strategy here -- how do you kill that one dude when 10 other folks are trying to keep him alive? It's not as hard as you might think, but it does take a little forethought. *Unless you're in Eye of the Storm, in which case: Get the damn towers.
Is my shadow priest's DPS high enough?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen comes from out of the shadows to bask in your loving adoration. All jokes removed to achieve SOPA compliance. Shadow priests are a DPS spec, and as such, it's only natural for us to judge our self-worth by checking our spot on the damage meters. But what kind of DPS should shadow priests be putting out? Is 10K enough? 20K? 40K? From time to time, I get emails from readers concerned about their performance in heroics, raids, and the like. This week, I'd like to share one of these emails and then give a public response. Why? Because, like it or not, we've all wondered whether or not our performance is good enough. My fiance and I play wow as shadow priests. Every now and then, I get her into a dungeon. Then the problems start. Every single time we have to pick up group, with as many guildies as we can, outsiders put down her DPS. Then it takes another month to get her to try again. Our guild leader tells us that 10K is an OK amount of DPS in the HoT dungeons. If that was the case, why do we keep getting made fun of? We are the only Shadow Priests in the guild. And, it is impossible to get help from the big raiding guilds on our server. So, I turn to the Master of Shadow Priesting to see if we can get some help. We follow EJ's rotation ... or at least what we can understand of it. Keep DoTs up, mind blast when it is up, mind flay otherwise, unless Dot's need to be refreshed. Keep empowered orbs up. On trash that will die quickly, mind spike 3 times, then mind blast, repeat. Signed, Tyler Is a Stupid Jerk and No One Likes Him* *Names may have been changed to protect anonymity.
The Light and How to Swing It: The Fall of Deathwing, ret edition, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! This is it, guys and girls. This is the moment we have all been training for while hitting that poor target dummy in Orgrimmar, because only repeatedly bashing a plank of wood will truly prepare you to square off against a dragon as epic as the big DW. So pick up your weapon, your bag of tricks, and your handful of cooldowns -- it's time to kill Deathwing the Destroyer. Spine of Deathwing I remember when there was wild speculation on what the Deathwing fight in Dragon Soul would actually look like. The devs announced that we would jump on him for part of the fight, and my strange brain secretly hoped that we would start at his tail and work our way up, maybe chopping off his legs and wings into a giant container of dry rub so the Titans could come on down and throw it on a massive barbecue. Honestly, we should have done that with Onyxia so she couldn't be resurrected 14 times!
Encrypted Text: My ganking toolbox
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 questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. I love being prepared. I always like having the right tool for the job. My desk at the office is covered with spare parts and manuals, and my junk drawer at home is filled with cables and loose screws. And when I say junk drawer, I mean junk cabinet. I won't throw away something that could be useful later, which has me worried that my next TV appearance will be on Hoarders. Luckily, I can't be judged for all of the goodies that I keep in my rogue's bags. One of my favorite threads on the official rogue forums is the Ganker's Kit of Ganking. It's a very robust list of items in WoW that can help you kill your targets and avoid being killed yourself. I find that we're usually so focused on our normal gear that we forget about all of the other items in our inventory that can make playing a rogue fun.
Lichborne: 5 common death knight mistakes
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 guide that tells you how to play is pretty helpful, don't get me wrong. But just reading that and following along often isn't enough. Sometimes, we make mistakes anyway. If it were simple as reading a guide, we'd all be in heroic raid groups never doing any less than 40,000 DPS on Madness of Deathwing and/or never dying due to our constant chain of Blood Shields while tanking. But human error will always enter into things. Of course, realizing what mistakes you're making and getting them fixed is easier said than done, especially when they're being yelled at you by an irate guild leader or that especially grumpy member of your Raid Finder group. This week, we'll look at some of the most common mistakes death knights make and offer some short and sweet commonsense tips to avoiding them.
Night elf druids at the end of Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we ponder each druidic race's prospects in Mists of Pandaria. In November 2010, before Cataclysm hit, I wrote a series of articles on why (or why not) to play a particular druidic race for theorycrafting, lore, and roleplay purposes. They turned out to be a really big hit with readers, and you can find them here: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid While most of the information contained in these articles is still accurate, a few things have changed since then, and each race approaches the end of Cataclysm and the expansion's events from a different perspective. Because each race's background obviously hasn't changed, I thought that rather than write another comprehensive guide, it'd be useful to revisit each race briefly to see how they and their druids are handling the shift from this expansion to Mists of Pandaria. Of course, once I started writing, I got really into it, and the column started metastasizing in celebrated tumor fashion, so this week's outing is confined to the original druidic race. Within the game, this is who you are as a night elf druid. This is what the world thinks of you, and this is what you think of the world -- or at least, it's one perspective on it.
Totem Talk: A restoration shaman wish list for Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and cohost of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how. Leading up to any expansion, especially before any beta access has gone out, is a great time to start your wish lists -- things you want to see, things you don't want to see and changes that you just might not want to consider as a possibility. We've already have received a sneak peek at the new talents that will grace our classes when the expansion goes live, as well as some changes to the way spells are being distributed. The fact is, though, that what we've seen so far has raised quite a few questions that have yet to have an answer. One of those big questions is what will happen to our beloved Telluric Currents? We're at a point where most restoration shaman can't live without the talent. It's a huge source of our mana regeneration, especially now in Dragon Soul. Also, before we get any further: This week's image is supplied by an up-and-coming artist by the name of Jeanette Dulzo, daughter of one of my raiding priests Galdrea. She hasn't set up a website, but I'm hoping this young artist will keep at it and set one up soon. The full picture of her concept of a female shaman can be seen after the break.
Shifting Perspectives: The 5 top mistakes new ferals make
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin! It was finished. I spat, again, attempting to purge the taste of gronn from my mouth. Ugh. My ribs still hurt from the powerful backhand which had struck me unawares and knocked me from the ledge, but it was over. Skullcrusher was dead, his minions scattered--and I was ready to take the fight to Deathwing. My eyes lifted, tracing the path of the gigantic corrupted dragon across the sky... Stones skittered closely behind me, and I whirled to find another druid standing atop a small boulder. His solemn eyes were mesmerizing, but it was the words I heard. "Bah. Ready for Deathwing? More like, ready to be Deathwing's dinner." I snorted. "And what would you know, old-timer? Shouldn't you be getting back to your tree?" The other druid shrugged, and turned away. "As you wish." He abruptly shifted, assuming the form of a great panther, and began to quietly pad away. Suddenly, I noticed that his fur was criscrossed with scars from head to toe, and a nagging feeling arose in the pit of my belly. "Wait," I said abruptly. "Maybe I've misjudged you." The strange druid reassumed his elven form, and turned back, smiling. "Good. We've lost too many of our people fighting the Quiraji, Illidan, Arthas, and now this abomination. I don't want to lose another." With that, we began to speak in earnest.
The Light and How to Swing It: Nerfing Holy Radiance to the ground
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. Paladins haven't always had the most amicable relationship with the community team and developers at Blizzard. Retribution paladins have fought for years with the blues over their perception of being constantly nerfed, which is a nice way to say that ret paladins enjoy playing the victim. Their claims do have some merit, though, as the paladin class has undergone major transformations in nearly every expansion, and not always for the better. In patch 4.3.2, the developers are handling a few balance issues. Fire mages are being tweaked downward, while hunters should be doing slightly better overall. Oh, and the mana cost of Holy Radiance is going up by 14%. Holy paladins are already complaining on the forums about this nerf, but the truth is that it's irrelevant. Even as Holy Radiance has seen two nerfs in as many patches, it's still an amazing spell. It takes a lot more than a 14% mana cost bump to erase Holy Radiance's dominance.
