I've been absent from Shadow Priest blogging for a while not because I got bored, or quit WoW (although I've come close a few times, I think). I just switched my main to my mage, located back on Zul'jin where my wife and I were playing last year before transferring to KT in the final months of BC.
Posting about mage theorycrafting doesn't seem to fit in a blog titled "A Shadow Priest," hence the lack of activity. I appreciate that some of my older posts are still getting comments -- I like seeing that I wasn't just talking to thin air (but I wouldn't necessarily care if that was the case, either!).
In the past couple months, I've been dedicated to my mage and finally got back into 25-mans about mid-August. He's about as geared out as one can get without dipping into Heroic 25-mans, pretty much. I also transferred my priest back to ZJ as well. I suppose I should update my bio on the right sometime.
I'm starting to get bored as getting gear is way too easy when you clear 10 and 25 man ToC and 10 and 25 Onyxia every week. Hell, it was easy before I was doing that. After a couple weeks I finally got enough people to get interested in going back to Ulduar, and finally saw Thorim, Vezax, and Yogg for the first time -- sadly enough. We're wiping on Yogg's second phase, but that encounter is everything I was hoping it would be. It beats ToC hands down.
I especially like and enjoy encounters designed not to be brute-forced through gear. They show thought and effort on the part of the design team, and other than Ulduar, that sort of effort isn't really apparent in the raids so far implemented in this expansion. 80s are perfectly capable of wiping even in BWL these days. I've been in quite a few pugs myself who didn't bother listening to warning to avoid standing in front of Ebonroc, for instance, or to avoid Nef's shadowflame.
We're not likely to ever do much in H-ToC25, due to too much dead weight on the roster, but H-ToC10 is still a possibility. This is an unfortunate truth, but given the direction raiding has been going since WoTLK launched, and Blizzard's stance towards universal content delivery, it's kind of to be expected, although I'm not a fan of it. Lackluster performance and minimal drive to succeed are simply a natural consequence of the level of (gear) quality being so high these days, compared to what's actually required for the current content. Improving skills and performance in order to push progression content is simply not necessary when your gear is already compensating for so much in the regular runs, but not enough to bridge the gap to the hardmodes/Heroic modes. Many people in the guild who might be interested in Heroic modes for the rewards in doing so aren't interested in putting up with the weaker links that we would have to bring in in order to make those attempts.
Blizzard really, really fucked up with ToC, in so many ways. It's a mistake in every way.
This is turning into a much larger post, so I'll cut it here. Hope to write more in the future. May be mage-related more than priest-related, so fair warning.
Showing posts with label raid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raid. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Expansion speculation
So, since I seem to be on a roll today...
I'm very interested in all of the expansion speculation. I like the idea of two new species and (I hope) a new hero class, as well as an underwater, naga-land landscape (the Maelstorm). I would totally reroll as a Worgen, if that ends up being one of the new species, and I bet my wife would too. The biggest doubt in my mind that Goblins and Worgen will be the new expansion's species is lore considerations: it seems like even more of a shoehorn job than blood elves and the Horde was.
In my opinion, although Lich King brought a huge number of improvements to gameplay, lore, and questing, the endgame content has been something of a bust. Say what you will of brutal, back-breaking encounters in TBC, but they sure gave guilds bragging rights after beating them. Although I never had a chance to see them, you still hear people talking about Kael'thas, Vashj, and Illidan, and even some of the minor bosses, in a kind of awe-inspired tone. Hell, even Magtheridon, Nightbane, and Gruul get some mentions. Naxx was really a poor way to open up raid content, and definitely spoiled veterans and newbies alike, in a very bad way. Nobody cares or is impressed by Gothik (who used to be a guild-breaker), Razuvious, Four Horsemen, or even Kel'thuzad.
Ulduar was neat in concept, but it's getting phased out too quickly. Now the cutting-edge raid will be gladitorial-style combat? Seriously? Where's the epic-ness in that? I mean, the only big lore connection I have heard of is Anub'arak's return as an actual boss, instead of the panty-waisted excuse for a schoolgirl his 5-man incarnation is.
I really hope Blizzard comes out with the new expansion inside of a year. We need to move out of Northrend. I, for one, am sick of it already.
I'm very interested in all of the expansion speculation. I like the idea of two new species and (I hope) a new hero class, as well as an underwater, naga-land landscape (the Maelstorm). I would totally reroll as a Worgen, if that ends up being one of the new species, and I bet my wife would too. The biggest doubt in my mind that Goblins and Worgen will be the new expansion's species is lore considerations: it seems like even more of a shoehorn job than blood elves and the Horde was.
In my opinion, although Lich King brought a huge number of improvements to gameplay, lore, and questing, the endgame content has been something of a bust. Say what you will of brutal, back-breaking encounters in TBC, but they sure gave guilds bragging rights after beating them. Although I never had a chance to see them, you still hear people talking about Kael'thas, Vashj, and Illidan, and even some of the minor bosses, in a kind of awe-inspired tone. Hell, even Magtheridon, Nightbane, and Gruul get some mentions. Naxx was really a poor way to open up raid content, and definitely spoiled veterans and newbies alike, in a very bad way. Nobody cares or is impressed by Gothik (who used to be a guild-breaker), Razuvious, Four Horsemen, or even Kel'thuzad.
Ulduar was neat in concept, but it's getting phased out too quickly. Now the cutting-edge raid will be gladitorial-style combat? Seriously? Where's the epic-ness in that? I mean, the only big lore connection I have heard of is Anub'arak's return as an actual boss, instead of the panty-waisted excuse for a schoolgirl his 5-man incarnation is.
I really hope Blizzard comes out with the new expansion inside of a year. We need to move out of Northrend. I, for one, am sick of it already.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
DPS rotations and abilities, part 2
On with the second part of my (way too long) post about Shadow Priest DPS rotations and abilities from yesterday. This one focuses on slightly more advanced tactics that are mostly relevant in the middle of boss encounters.
There are 3 main things I want to stress that all shadow priests should keep in mind while DPSing. Following all 3 of these guidelines correctly will cause your DPS to skyrocket. I promise!
1) Presence.
If you've ever seen a WWS report, you might notice the second column reads "Pres.", short for Presence. This term is what WWS uses to describe time spent doing damage of some kind; for instance, dead people do nothing, and someone who died early in an encounter would have a much lower presence than someone who stayed alive to the end. This statement can be flawed somewhat, as DoTs ticking will count towards your Presence as far as WWS is concerned, but for the most part it holds true. Say it once, say it again, repeat it like a mantra in your head during every encounter: dead people do no DPS. Or put it another way: stay alive, pew pew, collect loots. Put your healing potions and Healthstones in an easily accessible location, bandage if you have to (if timed right, you can even bandage on encounters with lots of AoE damage like Sapphiron -- one or two ticks are better than none!), and you stand a good chance of survival if the healers aren't sleeping. And trust me, they most often aren't, it's the lazy DPS that rely on the healers, rather than themselves, to stay alive that keep them wide awake most of the time.
2) DoT Uptime
This point runs a close second to the first one, but its pretty obviously predicated on you staying alive. During your DPS rotations, you're going to want to shoot for 90% uptime on your Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague, compared to Shadow Word: Pain, which ideally should be up 100% of the time. To find your uptime in any given fight, find your most recent WWS report, take the number of ticks of your SWP, and divide that number into the number of ticks of VT. Do the same thing with DP, again dividing the SWP ticks into the number of DP ticks. Ideally, given almost perfect rotations, you will have 90% uptime on both of them. Don't shoot for 100%, as that may compromise your primary focus of casting Mind Blast, but you want it to be as reasonably close as possible.
A corollary to this rule is don't clip Vampiric Touch! You never want to recast Vampiric Touch before its timer runs out, as you lose a significant amount of DPS (up to 20% of the spell's DPS, or 2% of your total DPS) if you do this on a regular basis. And that's just assuming you only regularly clip the last tick. Not to mention clipping DoTs wastes mana. You already "paid" for all of those VT ticks with a mana cost, clipping it just makes sure you get less bang for your buck.
At least DP you don't have to worry about so much as the cooldown on the spell prevents you from clipping it accidentally. Fit a recast of the spell in as soon as possible when the cooldown comes up.
3) Use the spellqueue!
The spellqueue is a player-coined term that describes the "grace period" the server gives communication of your actions, like using spells or abilities, between your game client and the server in order to allow for normal latency levels. Giving you that grace period helps prevent your spells from interrupting each other constantly due to latency that isn't under anyone's control. Essentially, the spellqueue gives you the ability to fake superhuman reflexes and cast spells back to back, one immediately after another, as if you were timing button presses exactly as the current spell finishes casting. All you have to do is start casting the next spell about half a second to one second before your current spell finishes casting.
Anyway, "Use the spellqueue" may not sound like much of a tip, but you have to think about its effect over a few minutes. Someone using the spellqueue properly can easily get off many more casts than someone who waits for the current spell to stop casting before starting a new one.
Lets do some quick, dirty, and probably inaccurate (but still illustrative) theorycrafting: assuming 2 second casts of a hypothetical spell that does 2,500 damage with each cast, that's 75,000 damage possible over 1 minute. Using the spellqueue right will approximate this number. Not using it means you lose up to 0.5 seconds of possible casting time with each spell (assuming 250ms latency, about the limit of what most people consider reasonably "playable"). Adding this loss up over one minute, you've lost 7.5 seconds of casting time... and that's just over 1 minute! Take that the typical boss encounter lasts about six minutes, and you just gave away 45 seconds of face-melting destruction, or twenty-two and a half casts of our "Uber Spell of 1337ness." That's a 12.5% DPS loss.
This means using the spellqueue properly could equal a 10-15% dps increase with very little effort on your part--no gear changes, re-speccing, or re-gemming required! Use it, love it, live it.
There are 3 main things I want to stress that all shadow priests should keep in mind while DPSing. Following all 3 of these guidelines correctly will cause your DPS to skyrocket. I promise!
1) Presence.
If you've ever seen a WWS report, you might notice the second column reads "Pres.", short for Presence. This term is what WWS uses to describe time spent doing damage of some kind; for instance, dead people do nothing, and someone who died early in an encounter would have a much lower presence than someone who stayed alive to the end. This statement can be flawed somewhat, as DoTs ticking will count towards your Presence as far as WWS is concerned, but for the most part it holds true. Say it once, say it again, repeat it like a mantra in your head during every encounter: dead people do no DPS. Or put it another way: stay alive, pew pew, collect loots. Put your healing potions and Healthstones in an easily accessible location, bandage if you have to (if timed right, you can even bandage on encounters with lots of AoE damage like Sapphiron -- one or two ticks are better than none!), and you stand a good chance of survival if the healers aren't sleeping. And trust me, they most often aren't, it's the lazy DPS that rely on the healers, rather than themselves, to stay alive that keep them wide awake most of the time.
2) DoT Uptime
This point runs a close second to the first one, but its pretty obviously predicated on you staying alive. During your DPS rotations, you're going to want to shoot for 90% uptime on your Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague, compared to Shadow Word: Pain, which ideally should be up 100% of the time. To find your uptime in any given fight, find your most recent WWS report, take the number of ticks of your SWP, and divide that number into the number of ticks of VT. Do the same thing with DP, again dividing the SWP ticks into the number of DP ticks. Ideally, given almost perfect rotations, you will have 90% uptime on both of them. Don't shoot for 100%, as that may compromise your primary focus of casting Mind Blast, but you want it to be as reasonably close as possible.
A corollary to this rule is don't clip Vampiric Touch! You never want to recast Vampiric Touch before its timer runs out, as you lose a significant amount of DPS (up to 20% of the spell's DPS, or 2% of your total DPS) if you do this on a regular basis. And that's just assuming you only regularly clip the last tick. Not to mention clipping DoTs wastes mana. You already "paid" for all of those VT ticks with a mana cost, clipping it just makes sure you get less bang for your buck.
At least DP you don't have to worry about so much as the cooldown on the spell prevents you from clipping it accidentally. Fit a recast of the spell in as soon as possible when the cooldown comes up.
3) Use the spellqueue!
The spellqueue is a player-coined term that describes the "grace period" the server gives communication of your actions, like using spells or abilities, between your game client and the server in order to allow for normal latency levels. Giving you that grace period helps prevent your spells from interrupting each other constantly due to latency that isn't under anyone's control. Essentially, the spellqueue gives you the ability to fake superhuman reflexes and cast spells back to back, one immediately after another, as if you were timing button presses exactly as the current spell finishes casting. All you have to do is start casting the next spell about half a second to one second before your current spell finishes casting.
Anyway, "Use the spellqueue" may not sound like much of a tip, but you have to think about its effect over a few minutes. Someone using the spellqueue properly can easily get off many more casts than someone who waits for the current spell to stop casting before starting a new one.
Lets do some quick, dirty, and probably inaccurate (but still illustrative) theorycrafting: assuming 2 second casts of a hypothetical spell that does 2,500 damage with each cast, that's 75,000 damage possible over 1 minute. Using the spellqueue right will approximate this number. Not using it means you lose up to 0.5 seconds of possible casting time with each spell (assuming 250ms latency, about the limit of what most people consider reasonably "playable"). Adding this loss up over one minute, you've lost 7.5 seconds of casting time... and that's just over 1 minute! Take that the typical boss encounter lasts about six minutes, and you just gave away 45 seconds of face-melting destruction, or twenty-two and a half casts of our "Uber Spell of 1337ness." That's a 12.5% DPS loss.
This means using the spellqueue properly could equal a 10-15% dps increase with very little effort on your part--no gear changes, re-speccing, or re-gemming required! Use it, love it, live it.
- One word of caution: careful when doing this with Mind Flay. You don't want to clip Mind Flay, ever if you can help it, for the same reasons I give in point number two. Just wait till it's done channeling. There is also some evidence that trying to jam Mind Flays in too close together will cause the game to lose track of where the ticks of damage should be, and you end up losing 25% of that damage or so to the game "clipping" Mind Flay when it shouldn't be. Just don't do it, it's not worth it if you're trying to maximize DPS.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
New Divine Hymn
Okay, so I lied.
Matticus just gave the priest community a heads-up on the new Divine Hymn currently on the PTR. There was a seemingly minor change to the tooltip wording that seems to indicate Divine Hymn will soon be a raid-wide "smart heal." His comparison to Circle of Healing seems pretty much spot on.
This is a potentially raid-saving spell available to ALL priests that gives us shadow priests in particular a little bit more utility in a raid context. I already have it ingrained in me to use Hymn of Hope when necessary from raiding with my fiancee, a healing priest. This new Divine Hymn will just give me another good reason to pop out of Shadowform in crunch time. And don't forget Hymn of Hope is getting a major facelift as well.
Let's hope this change goes live.
Matticus just gave the priest community a heads-up on the new Divine Hymn currently on the PTR. There was a seemingly minor change to the tooltip wording that seems to indicate Divine Hymn will soon be a raid-wide "smart heal." His comparison to Circle of Healing seems pretty much spot on.
This is a potentially raid-saving spell available to ALL priests that gives us shadow priests in particular a little bit more utility in a raid context. I already have it ingrained in me to use Hymn of Hope when necessary from raiding with my fiancee, a healing priest. This new Divine Hymn will just give me another good reason to pop out of Shadowform in crunch time. And don't forget Hymn of Hope is getting a major facelift as well.
Let's hope this change goes live.
DPS rotations and abilities
Hopefully my last post of the day.
In my guild's forums the other day, I struck up a conversation about optimal DPS rotations.
My current DPS rotation, starting from the moment I enter combat, is this:
Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Flay - Mind Blast
I'm aware this is flawed -- bear with me. The late Mind Blast is a holdover from my BC days. I have the habit of DoTing up the target (beginning with VT) before casting a MB in order to get mana regen flowing as fast and furious as possible. Mind Blast used to restore the most mana of any of my spells so I wanted to ensure I had Shadow Weaving stacked to max before casting for the biggest damage. These days, it's still the mana restorer, but with an entirely different role in your rotation.
Shadow Priests have gone from a primary purpose of restoring mana to a dps-centric design. My thought process and habits are still in the last era, and I'm working on changing my thinking away from "I am here to restore mana" to "I am here to melt faces." Waiting to Mind Blast till you've stacked Shadow Weaving to 5 is a waste of mana and potential DPS. Mind Blast is the most important dps ability in a shadow priest's arsenal, and any player concerned with maximizing his or her potential DPS is going to want to center their rotation around it.
Take my current spec as an example of fail. I only have 1 point in Improved Mind Blast. The other shadow priest in our raids who, besides being much better geared, does far more dps than I do does so because of Mind Blast, primarily. That is, doing more of them. According to a recent WWS report on Patchwerk, he cast in the neighborhood of 165 Mind Blasts and averaged about 5100 DPS. I did about 3600 DPS and cast 106 Mind Blasts -- only about 66% as many as he did. While gear explains that DPS gap somewhat, the difference in our rotations explains much more, with a sprinkling of interesting ability mechanics. Here it is paraphrased from his words.
This other priest leads off with Mind Flay. Mind Flay has an interesting bug these days that causes it to stack two Shadow Weaving buffs instead of one. I've only confirmed this happening when I have no existing Shadow Weaving buffs, but it may well occur no matter how many you have when you cast it. This is a good thing, however, letting that Mind Flay run its full duration when you could use that time to cast higher damage spells or DoT up the target is probably not such a good idea. "Clip" it immediately -- that is, cast it and immediately start the next spell as soon as the Global Cooldown allows. There is a secondary benefit to an initial Mind Flay, and that is giving tanks time to "threat up," for which 2.5 seconds is, for better or for worse, plenty of time these days.
After the initial MF, the next step is to "start the clock" on your rotation by casting Mind Blast. If you are centering your rotation around Mind Blast, you will want to use it every time the cooldown is up. This is top priority. The rest of the time you will spend keeping DoTs up and Mind Flay-ing when possible. Fully talented, you will have a 5.5 second cooldown on MB, giving you 3 or 4 GCDs, depending on haste, to do other stuff.
Therefore, incorporating this knowledge into a new rotation would look like this:
Mind Flay - Mind Blast - Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Blast
There is another little tidbit everyone should know concerning Shadow Word: Pain. When you apply SWP to the target, its base damage is set from any debuffs on the target. When Mind Flay refreshes SWP on the target via Pain and Suffering, the base damage is not recalculated! Therefore, you might think the key to maximizing DPS means you need to cast SWP twice, once at the beginning and once to reset its base damage value once the rest of the raid unloads on the target. This would be a good guess, but to avoid wasting a GCD doing that, we should instead swap the positions of SWP and DP in our rotation in order to give the raid more time to apply maximum debuffs to the target before casting SWP. The good news here is that SWP is fire and forget, so once its cast, at least in a normal encounter, you can usually drop it from the rotation.
Now that I've thoroughly bored any potential reader to tears, I'm going to cut this post off here and continue it in a second part, probably tomorrow, that mostly concerns mid-encounter dps rotations.
In my guild's forums the other day, I struck up a conversation about optimal DPS rotations.
My current DPS rotation, starting from the moment I enter combat, is this:
Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Flay - Mind Blast
I'm aware this is flawed -- bear with me. The late Mind Blast is a holdover from my BC days. I have the habit of DoTing up the target (beginning with VT) before casting a MB in order to get mana regen flowing as fast and furious as possible. Mind Blast used to restore the most mana of any of my spells so I wanted to ensure I had Shadow Weaving stacked to max before casting for the biggest damage. These days, it's still the mana restorer, but with an entirely different role in your rotation.
Shadow Priests have gone from a primary purpose of restoring mana to a dps-centric design. My thought process and habits are still in the last era, and I'm working on changing my thinking away from "I am here to restore mana" to "I am here to melt faces." Waiting to Mind Blast till you've stacked Shadow Weaving to 5 is a waste of mana and potential DPS. Mind Blast is the most important dps ability in a shadow priest's arsenal, and any player concerned with maximizing his or her potential DPS is going to want to center their rotation around it.
Take my current spec as an example of fail. I only have 1 point in Improved Mind Blast. The other shadow priest in our raids who, besides being much better geared, does far more dps than I do does so because of Mind Blast, primarily. That is, doing more of them. According to a recent WWS report on Patchwerk, he cast in the neighborhood of 165 Mind Blasts and averaged about 5100 DPS. I did about 3600 DPS and cast 106 Mind Blasts -- only about 66% as many as he did. While gear explains that DPS gap somewhat, the difference in our rotations explains much more, with a sprinkling of interesting ability mechanics. Here it is paraphrased from his words.
This other priest leads off with Mind Flay. Mind Flay has an interesting bug these days that causes it to stack two Shadow Weaving buffs instead of one. I've only confirmed this happening when I have no existing Shadow Weaving buffs, but it may well occur no matter how many you have when you cast it. This is a good thing, however, letting that Mind Flay run its full duration when you could use that time to cast higher damage spells or DoT up the target is probably not such a good idea. "Clip" it immediately -- that is, cast it and immediately start the next spell as soon as the Global Cooldown allows. There is a secondary benefit to an initial Mind Flay, and that is giving tanks time to "threat up," for which 2.5 seconds is, for better or for worse, plenty of time these days.
After the initial MF, the next step is to "start the clock" on your rotation by casting Mind Blast. If you are centering your rotation around Mind Blast, you will want to use it every time the cooldown is up. This is top priority. The rest of the time you will spend keeping DoTs up and Mind Flay-ing when possible. Fully talented, you will have a 5.5 second cooldown on MB, giving you 3 or 4 GCDs, depending on haste, to do other stuff.
Therefore, incorporating this knowledge into a new rotation would look like this:
Mind Flay - Mind Blast - Vampiric Touch - Shadow Word: Pain - Devouring Plague - Mind Blast
There is another little tidbit everyone should know concerning Shadow Word: Pain. When you apply SWP to the target, its base damage is set from any debuffs on the target. When Mind Flay refreshes SWP on the target via Pain and Suffering, the base damage is not recalculated! Therefore, you might think the key to maximizing DPS means you need to cast SWP twice, once at the beginning and once to reset its base damage value once the rest of the raid unloads on the target. This would be a good guess, but to avoid wasting a GCD doing that, we should instead swap the positions of SWP and DP in our rotation in order to give the raid more time to apply maximum debuffs to the target before casting SWP. The good news here is that SWP is fire and forget, so once its cast, at least in a normal encounter, you can usually drop it from the rotation.
Now that I've thoroughly bored any potential reader to tears, I'm going to cut this post off here and continue it in a second part, probably tomorrow, that mostly concerns mid-encounter dps rotations.
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