GoA for three tanks is a lot better, since you can dodge the knock back.

I realize most people posting here are well past my guild in progression, but hopefully there are a few people here interested or kind enough to still offer advice to a guild that is just entering SSC and TK. We have HKM/Gruul/Magtheridon down to a reliable one-night (under three hour) experience now which opens up doors for our guild in raiding, but it also means that we are going to have to take a hard look at how to increase our DPS if we're to be successful. Here is a link to our WWS log from last night's HKM/Gruul/Mag kills as well as our first ever attempts on Kazzak:

WWS Report

As far as pure DPS goes, I'm guessing our Gruul kill is the best report to look at. That's the report that prompted me to write this post, at least. If you see anything you might suggest for the rest of our guild please go ahead and I'll pass it along, for sure. I'm specifically hoping for help with anything I might be missing, though. I feel like I have enough gear to be doing more than 600 DPS in this fight, even without the presence of a shadow priest, but I'm not.

I have read the warlock DPS thread in the class forums and have read some of this thread as well. I have taken a lot from those readings, although I have yet to implement all I have learned. Here are the areas *I'm* aware of where I might improve, based upon my readings:

-My gear has a few spots where I can upgrade. I can't help it if the gloves never drop for me from Attumen or Magtheridon, but if they do I'll be rolling. The same can be said of either warlock neck in Karazhan. I'm putting in my 10 Arena games a week towards the Merciless Gladiator's spellblade. And there are a few sockets where I should be destroying even more runed living rubies (sigh) to replace them with veiled noble topaz, I suppose. I'm working actively to cap my +hit, but these things take time.

-I have the Quartz addon installed, but I've not yet become practiced enough with the /stopcasting macros to use them in a raid. I have questions about this, but I don't think this is the thread for it.

If you can see anything else I could do better, I'd love to hear about it. That includes any reasonably achievable gear upgrades that I'm not already aware of. And again, I'm sure my guildies would appreciate anything you have to offer for them as well. Our DPS has increased a lot lately, partially due to information on these forums, but if we rest where we are we'll just get slaughtered in SSC/TK.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Your logs don't indicate a shadow priest. Do you have one in the guild? If not, I'd recommend either having one of your holy priests switch or recruit one. The misery debuff along with shadow weaving will increase DPS quite considerably. Put the shadow priest in with the mages (or other mana hungry individuals) and they'll love you for it.

I would love some advice on the following two WWS. Anything about the raid as a whole and specifically about my performance would be much appreciated.
Lurker:
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Gruul:
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Neither was a great night for me, I kept dying in Gruul because I'd been away from WOW for a couple weeks and Lurker was a first attempt for me.

Thanks

We do have a couple of shadow priests but they were not available to raid last night. Thanks for the response.

Is there any reason why your hunters didn't use their pets on Gruul? Even none BM pets do significant DPS and with the avoidance and mend pet changes they require much less attention than they used to. In fact going over the other bosses in your WWS your hunters don't seem to use pets really at all, that would be a fair DPS increase.

It might also be nice in general to have your Paladin use Judgement of Light instead of Judgement of Wisdom, Judgement of Light is extremely nice on Void Reaver. Especially if you have an Affliction Warlock along due to a bug with it and Unstable Affliction (Unstable Afflictions casts send the healing done by Judgement of Light through the roof). On our Void Reaver kill today I did 200k direct healing, and 220k healing with Judgement of Light, easily topping the total healing contributions. And I'm specced more for tanking than I am for healing!

I'm no rogue expert, but I notice you dont get bloodlust, WF totem or BS. You also have blood pact so you have a warlock in your group.

Group composition was something people of all levels should have learnt back in BWL.

Also bladeflurry, I thought it was a 2 min CD? Use it more.

I disagree, with respect to dps. Once you have more than +1000 dam for most specs, CoA is higher DPS than CoD. With CoD if cast in the last 59 secs of the fight any damage is lost. If it is bumped off due to the debuff limit its damage is also lost. With CoA it is easier to manage your threat than with CoD. CoD is most useful, if timed properly, for bosses with immune periods.

I seem to be adding to the Lurker/Gruul WWSes.
Gruul is on farm for us, while Lurker is still a relatively new fight.

Lurker: Wow Web Stats
Gruul: Wow Web Stats

Our mages have been trying to figure out how to get their DPS to go higher. All three of them already use /stopcasting macros, but their current theory is that our latency (being an Oceanic guild) is still limiting their DPS despite that. Any advice for them would be appreciated. The guild has also been wondering if our shadow priests and warlocks should be having higher DPS, or whether their current DPS is reasonable for their gear and our progression level.

Any other observations you can make that might help us improve would be welcome as well. Thanks!

Our enhancement Shaman (Mariomario) has asked me to post our latest WWS from Void Reaver in order to get some assistance on anything he can do better. From what he says he was pushing very hard on this kill but feels as if he is "missing something". Not being savvy on Enhancement Shamans I am hoping to get any assistance I can pass on to him from people here.

Wow Web Stats

Thanks.

Both your warlocks are using CoA on gruul switch them to CoE and CoS, your raid DPS will go up significantly. Also, both could use work on there DoT uptime and it has been proven that UA is more dps than ruin for affliction locks, Spawnz is still running with ruin.

++EDIT++ Sorry, not uptime but, more +spell hit. Both are running at about half of what they need.

Second, your mages need to drop Fire Blast from there rotations and simply concentrate on fireball and keeping the scorch debuff up. Also Ize needs to change back to 10-48-3, arcane simply doesn't put out the DPS until he gets the 2 piece t5 gear.

I believe that is what he always uses in raids, but this is probably the information he is looking for.

With a quick glance and from memory that looks to be all the gear he wears in raids bar the PVP trinket and perhaps his legs.

Any more help would be greatly appreciated.

Regarding your Shadow Priests:
Twixy:
Spec: Quality spec, has all the important things. He has 2/2 Marty (a purly pvp talent) instead of inner focus. If you are a pure pve guild, tell him to switch that, but its a minor thing.
Gear: Fantastic gear. All the right gems, has both the important tailoring sets. +1100 shadow damage, hit capped (15.5%, close enough). Replace ZHC as soon as possible (dark moon crusader trinket would be the best, money allowing).

With his gear, it is a crying shame to be pulling only 599 dps on a fight like gruul (which he did not die on nor stop and bandage on). Looking at his spells caste from the WWS parser, it is quickly clear why. His dot up time is decent for SW:Pain, but needs work on VT. His most glearing reason is an abismal amount of casts for Mindflay. He only has 51 ticks, or 17(!) mind flays cast. In a 5 minute kill that number should be nearly double. If he is stopping because of threat, tell him to get the -2% cloak enchant asap.

Soira:
Spec: Should have 5/5 Shadow Focus which would make him hit capped, with only 3/5 he is needlessly eating an additional 4% miss rate. Other than that, all good with the spec.
Gear: Not nearly as advanced as Twixy. The T4 gloves and legs are pretty crappy (Trial Fire Pants from opera event and the gloves off attune would be much better) but the 4/5 set bonus is probably worth grabbing the shoulders for. Tell him to replace all his gems with pure +9 spell damage (runed living rubys) and not to worry about the socket bonuses - they suck. Grab the -2% threat to cloak enchant too.

Soira has over 200 less +shadow damage than Twixy, yet is very close on the damage meters. Where twixy only manage to get 51 ticks of Mindflay, Soira was able to do 73! Still a bit low, but the difference is quite clear, as he only lost to twixy by 3,000 damage.


Aerlyn
Spec: Quality spec. <Gives Gold Star>
Gear: Tell him to get -2% threat on cloak, shadow priests deffinatly need it. He also needs a shoulder enchant (easily obtainable from aldor/scryer vendors). His gloves appear to be his pvp set, as it has spell penetration on it.

He keeps his SW:P and VT up about as well as the other 2, and he gets off 80 ticks of Mind Flay, the best out of all 3, but still should be getting more off.




All of your priests could use some work, but in looking through the WWS the biggest error was that of the raid leader. 3 Shadow Priests, 2 Warlocks and not a single cast of Curse of Shadows!! That is +10% damage to 5 raiders just thrown out the window. There also appeared to be no Curse of Elements and you had 3 mages! Who ever is in charge of telling your warlocks which curses to do needs a boot up the ass, which is most likely the warlocks themselves.

Another Oceanic guild here - Ize is some Arcane spec but (I'm assuming) doesn't have two piece T5 set bonus ... and if he does, then he is DRASTICALLY underperforming. On a short fight like that, WITH a moonkin he should be smashing the others.

The other two Mages are doing ok, just need better gear as their average fireball hit is a little low. Here is the WWS of our first ever Lurker kill last night for comparison for you:

Wow Web Stats

Differences are small, neither of us had a Shaman, but I also didn't get CoE for the whole damn fight (only just noticed, Im going to chew some Warlocks tonight) so my numbers would be much higher had I had both of them.

His offhand and totem seem to be a little odd. Is he saving points for season two? Farming mana tombs heroic daily? Upgrading from that first will be massive for him.

Thanks for the help. I'll translate the advice for other locks into softcore/casual language (complete with flowers!) and see that it gets to them.

As far as spec goes, I see a lot of what you're saying about my points in affliction, but I'm at a loss as to how to SPECIFICALLY fix it without pulling over my points from demonology. I guess I'll have to do just that... they're only for PvP anyways. I don't care to lose affliction talents like Curse of Exhaustion or Improved Howl of Terror that I use on a regular basis for non-raiding activities. In a softcore guild, I'm allowed to set aside a few points for non-raid benefit. BTW, while Lalli does have 5/5 shadow embrace, we have 6 locks and it's hard to know who will be raiding on a given night, which makes it tough to divide up spec choices like this.

Again, thank you for taking the time. It really sounds like I need to fight through getting the /stopcasting stuff working. I know at least one of my guild's leaders has seen the suggestions regarding shadow priests, so I'll leave it to leadership to sort out the appropriate action.

Cheers.

Thank you for the comment. I wouldn't be the one who knows why they don't use pets, but I will pass on the suggestion.

His DPS for VR looks decent, this isn't the greatest fight for Enhancement Shaman due to threat issues. I don't use any Shocks at all on VR due to the fact they don't get -15% threat reduction from Spirit Weapons and I switch into some +stam gear for this fight as I'm riding the threat cap anyway. Your tanks/hunters will decide how much DPS he can do more than he will.

It's also hard to judge the Magtheridon parse since Mariomario was a cuve clicker. OP generally puts ranged and healers on boxes instead of melee since there's less DPS time lost for them. You had lots of ranged to spare, so I'd recommend trying this.

His offhand (as everyone has said) is way to fast. Tell him to use one of the PvP one handers while he waits for the points for a Merciless Gladiator weapon. His Relic Totem is the second best thing to a Totem of the Astrall Winds, but get him to keep farming for it.

Thanks Advice, DeeNogger and Xei for the pointers - not watching the debuff slots is my bad (was leading raid that night), I'll be sure to pay more attention to those in the future. I've passed them on to the guild.

As you guessed, Ize (the arcane mage w/o 2/5 T5) is only trying out arcane spec right now. Given our on-and-off attempts with Tidewalker and his amazing 17k-in-one-second burst damage, it'll unfortunately be awhile before he gets 2pc T5.

Thanks Advice and Xei! Yes, currently experimenting with spell rotations for 48/13/0 without 2xt5, and will continue for a while until this has been experimented with Darkmoon:Crusade and TLC. (And if the second t5 drop, might go perma-arcane for raid)

Advice - this might not be the right thread (perhaps class mechanics and theorycrafting) but I always thought that so long as scorch is always kept up, weaving fireblast into the [max fireball + one scorch to keep debuff up] would increase the dps?

To quote http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t12855-w...rafting_2_1_a:

"- As long as it can run full duration, CoD > CoA for sustained single target dps, even if you are deep affliction primarily because of the opportunity cost of re-casting CoA."

CoA does more damage, yes. It also involves more GCD uses, which means less volume of shadowbolts, and thus less DPS. Ergo, CoD leads to increased dps so long as you use those extra GCDs intelligently (shadowbolts), so long as you can meet the requirements of CoD going off.