Getting shamans and paladins as alliance has been a complete pain. We've been actively recruiting (via bosskillers and the wow recruitment forums) for at least four months for one of either class to no avail. Add in the need for that person to be on the kael vial or already be BT attuned, it's nearly an act of god (that or a guild just recently died). Once again I find this a side effect of the early TBC woes.

Given the choice, I'd gladly have 5 shamans in a raid, without a doubt.

So you took some amazingly bad luck that killed you in 2 seconds, it's going to happen sooner or later. 1k hp is going to save you when you take 3 instant top end ticks of doomfire? Hah, please. However, outplaying the bad luck? So what, you died. Your raid can outplay 1 single soul charge. Even though a death is devastating, you can still win. Bad luck has the same probability as good luck. Being in a position to not get feared into a fire is something you can outplay. Being in a position that even if you're feared into doomfire, its impossible that you die, is another thing (if you're far enough away, by the time you get feared to the fire [in a bad luck case] you wouldn't have time to take 3 top ends). I'm not saying I love the Archimonde encounter, I kind of hate it, and love it. But 1k hp is hardly going to save you there either.

WTF? I'd __LOVE__ to get benefit out of crit, hit, and haste, that mages receive. How exactly is stacking a single stat overpowered? Math will tell you damage stats benefit each other (Ex. +crit and +dmg). You don't see mages stacking +dmg, because +crit itemization isn't wasteful on mages. I skip almost all socket bonuses, because I only use one gem to increase DPS. This is without discussing long-term scaling.

No class WANTS to ignore all stats but one. That's not only mathematically stupid but also incredibly boring when looking for these mythical upgrades without wasted itemization (NONE).

Huh? The amount of times i've seen people under 1k hp on Archimonde but live due to a last secound heal is too many to count. Anyway, Blizzard definately made hp a huge factor in the majority of TBC encounters. Every single fight apart from maybe Akama in BT get's so much easier with more hp on the raid. The only fight before TBC that I ever worried about my hp was Four Horsemen and Sapphiron, now it's almost every boss. I kind of like the extra focus on hp tbh.

If 1k hp didn't matter then we'd never upgrade any of our gear. He used a simple example that didn't add up correctly. Every fight in the game since release has got easier to some extent the more hp you gain, even Akama, despite the difficulty. My words come off poorly because I was directing at the example at hand rather than in general.

I'm not saying shadow priests and warlocks love to stack a single stat, but they get a huge benefit from doing so, larger than any other class in the game. Your damage scales the best with +dmg, but also your self mana regen (as well as group regen for sp) goes up significantly as your damage scales upwards. You may or may not like that it works that way, but face it, it does. When my damage goes up, I gain nothing; crit, maybe 1/5 mana? Like I said, Ascept of the Viper is the best attempt at balancing out stats well, because there's absolutely no way hunters could effectively stack int. +dmg working on lifetap is another good shot at balance, but short lived because these are the only two classes with things like this. Paladins got worse as time went on, with the nerf of Illumination, which wouldn't have happened if they balanced the game twice. Balancing my stats around every single stat available is not great, it's not fun, it's nothing short of horrible. The fact that my (very little) mana regen banks on spirit is ridiculous.

My largest complaint about TBC (and vanilla WoW too) is the burning need to balance the entire game around the PVP setting, despite having a very large PVE game. It's not even a problem if done correctly, but they are insistent on balancing everything in one broad sweep, instead of making things work two different ways in PVE and PVP.

Uh, my example adds up perfectly. You're sitting at 6.9k unbuffed, which means you're somewhere between 9-10k raid buffed. 3 Doomfire ticks (perfectly normal when a fear and a doomfire strike coincide) and one grip tick (almost instant on application, 4% chance of any specific raid member being the target of the grip) is 9.7k damage. Since you're sitting well under 10k raid buffed, you will die instantly. Someone with 11k+ health has a much higher probability of lasting those extra couple seconds, and being able to get off their health stone and a potion, and get decursed.

Will 1000 health save you every time? By no means will it. However, I guarantee that having a 1000 extra health will save your life a significant amount of the time, whereas your minutely higher DPS stats will result in a kill exactly NEVER. No fights have challenging enrage timers anymore, whether a hard enrage (instawipe) or an enrage due to attrition (Gorefiend Azgalor for instance). Every single fight in the game requires a very modest amount of DPS to succeed.

In Naxxramas, the role of a DPS member of the raid was more or less to do as much damage as possible first. There were very few situations where a DPS had to keep themselves alive or worry about their own survival - it was all up to the healer. In Hjyal and BT however, the role of a DPS is very much SURVIVAL FIRST, DPS second.

I'm not saying that every mage, warlock, and rogue should be trying to kill Reliquary in full Gladiator gear. However, stamina is very much a PvE stat now, and ignoring it is simply stupid gear choice.

People will do things the way they see best fit. I'm simply stating it's not necessary to gimp your output stats for every fight, especially the multitude of fights listed in this thread. I'm simply stating we don't besides on Naj'entus. You could wear full arena gear for every fight. You could wear full tier 3. Do as you please. You keep giving these numbers and chances they happen. I've never seen a single person in my guild play stellar and get ran through doomfire 3 times during one fear, that's pretty much implausible. You're more likely a fat kid falls on your raid and kills you than that happening, and like I said, you don't lose from one death. The chances your 2 minute trinket will be down, you won't be in a shaman group, get feared into a doomfire (nope, it doesn't happen every time) and get ran back and forth through it 3 times? Please. On top of that most fires are avoidable if you move when they spawn. We do the fight with 2 shaman, I have a little experience with terrible dice and having to wing it.

That's the last thing I have to say here. This is borderline shit heap, like many posts around here lately. I gave valid information to the actual post, and then arguements started. There's enough garbage to sift through on any forum (this included), let's not make more.

Works for you guys, great. I'll continue to lead the way I do, we seem to do ok. Thanks for your input though.

Using Salvation on Gruul instead of Kings happens for two reasons:
1) Very few of our shatter deaths actually tend to be because somebody was 500 HP short. Most of them are because the people do something seriously wrong - I'm actually working on a Shatter training video.
2) When your tanks are stuck using Sun Eater and Earthwarden because King's Defender only drops when no Warriors are tanking and no weapons ever drop for your Druids, there are threat issues.

This is a derail anyways, if you want to get into the finer points of my raiding choices, send me abusive PMs.

I was under the impression that Gruul ignored ranged threat. I remember reading that here somewhere but I can't find the source again. I'll look it up, but at least in my experience no ranged has ever drawn aggro, and we have some aggro junkies in guild that get kicks out of pulling it on farm encounters.

Now, I'm not interested in giving abusive comments towards you, but when you say "very few of our deaths are due to lacking 500 hp" that means that at least some of them are due to lacking those. We had this same problem on Gruul pre-nerf when trying to learn him, which took us a long time because we really sucked (and sometimes still do suck) on the shatters. This is another issue that is helped a lot by stacking some stamina gear.

He does definately NOT ignore range-threat.
He was aggroed more by once of our ranged.

Ah my apologies then, I seem to have been misinformed (but never witnessed anything indicating the opposite).

I'm interested by this one.

"- Also in a later patch, we'll be able to disable the "decreased melee swing time" effect caused by Mother Shahraz parrying a melee attack. The parry mechanic is exacerbating the already rather intense burst damage that Mother Shahraz can inflict. "

This looks like it could be a general retuning of how parry works on bosses, which will eliminate a lot of the luck factor of parry streaks. Might be a change that applies to all bosses, or it might be tunable on a boss by boss basis.

For a guild that just started RoS a few days ago the RoS and Mother changes will help us a lot. We had quiet a few problems with shield + cast. Well I can't say for sure but I don't think any of the changes de-value the fights, just tune them to be a little more forgiving in which they should be.

A common misconception caused by his hurtful strike mechanic. His hurtful strike will target the 2nd highest threat player in melee range, which means melee DPS cannot safely pass the OT, but ranged DPS can. Combined with this, the OT is typically rage starved but the MT will have infinite rage, meaning the MT can usually produce significantly higher TPS. The net result is that melee DPS have a vastly lower threat cap (110% of the OTs low threat vs 130% of the MTs high threat).

Thus, the fight is aggro sensitive for melee, but not at all for ranged, which leads to the impression that Gruul will just ignore ranged threat. He doesn't, but we still don't find salve on ranged necessary.

Unless I'm much mistaken that threat cap is lower than that even. Gruul doesn't keep track of people surpassing threat according to normal meechanics on the OT; he just hits the person second highest on aggro. So the moment you have even 1 point more threat than the OT, you become the target for HS.

I believe that is correct. There are alot of mechanics that switch targets when someone gets to 101% threat.

If your ranged can't pull aggro on gruul without salv you have a problem. I can't think of a fight I would not pull aggro if I didn't have salv... Maybe vashj Phase 3 if it ran off mid fight(because I could shatter in phase 1 and and again in 3 and never catch the MT)

This is a joke right? In no way do I get equal damage returns from +dmg, and you still disregard how +crit, +haste, and +hit are grossly overpriced for our itemization (almost 10-fold, compared to mages). Again, compared to a shadowpriest, you receive -- AT LEAST -- equal damage output from +dmg AND similar, per point, upgrade from other DPS stats. You're not alone in the SPI / mp5 camp.

It's not like I'm not eating mana pots on cooldown either. We can talk about how overpowered VT is to the group; mages love to bite the hand that feeds them (S2 gear?). We can discuss how those damn rogues are doing double DPS in the same thread. Paladins are doing just fine, between blessings, judgements, Imp LoH, and still phenomenal healing throughput

How can you not relish in the fact you receive near equal DPS upgrades from more than one stat? How can you not want to embrace the power of stats having multiplicative value? You seem to want to harp on +dmg stacking (where a mage sees equal DPS value doing the same) being godly, when little to no gear exists in this realm (outside of Frozen Shadoweave). At least our warlocks have begun to embrace the once "wasted" stats by rolling themselves out of the Affliction lull, becoming shadowmages.

We've oddly been turning down shaman/paladins for months---you can have some of ours iggy!


It's strange to hear that the dynamic is so different on just horde vs. alliance on our server.

If you are in melee range.
If you aren't in melee range, you can't be a target for HS.

That's just natural. Early on tailoring gear was the best itemization for them and Affliction plus FrShadoweave surely gave them the highest dps output. Now they start getting items that have the same or similiar amount of +dmg but also excel in crit&hit. Affliction kinds works like Spriests, spelldmg rocks. They even have the spellhit talent that makes spellhit gear for us so damn useless, just for that tree. Now they get the opportunity to go elsewhere when they hit the spelldmg gearcap and can only evolve in other direction. Spriests unfortunately can't do that.

As you said, spriests get fucked by itemization. Spelldmg is our only stat. The only thing spellhit does is free up 1-3 talent points, which is nice, but nothing that impressive considering you only get more points in imp mind blast or pvp talents for it.
Crit is ok, but then any crit values just get blasted away by the 15% crit from our talent. Crit rating compared to that seems puny. If crit will at some point affect dots (as anti crit affects dots as well ...), that might change. Atm the major upgrade you get from T6 to Tailoring gear are stats (which are always welcome ofc) and manatic. The tailoring boots are still the best in game though.
The problem is that this is not easy to fix. The way spriests are constructed, only putting more spelldmg on our T5/T6 would make things 'fair'. That would lead to spriests being grossly overpowered again. I really don't think a class that tops the healing on RoS or gives nearly infinite mana on Illidan like encounters should be #1 dps. Rogues, Hunters and Arcane Mages are currently topping our dmg meters and that is how it's supposed to be imho.

I too am concerned about itemization for affliction locks (and similarly shadow priests). +dam is our primary stat, but there's no gear available for us to stack that. We are forced to take items with a tiny bit more spell dam (or sometimes even less) and get hit/crit.

Granted affliction warlocks benefit far more from hit and crit than shadow priests because shadowbolt does make up about 50% of our damage. Crits also proc improved shadowbolt which is very nice for our dots (and yours as well ^^).

But we are scaling slower than other classes because of the itemization available. Affliction performs well on the DM, but it'd nice to scale the same way other classes do. The one thing that is keeping us competitive on the DM is that our dots receive more than 100% from spell dam cause they can't crit. However, if blizz refuses to have gear with a ton of spell dam on it, we can't take advantage of it.

Furthermore, their itemization budget punishes stacking one stat. So even if they do create and item with lots of spell damage, it might be inferior to a comparable item with +hit/crit because an item is "punished" for stacking a certain stat. We can see this in the lackluster Trousers of the Astromancer. Any item in BT/hyjal like that would be just as crappy.

Ideally blizzard will introduce a new stat that will help affliction and shadowpriests. Haste is underpowered for spell casters and in it's current form does not affect dots. Blizzard needs to seriously reconsider high level itemization for dot classes so that we don't lose effectiveness relative to other classes.

Well techincally you only need one affli warlock for shadow embrace. Otherwise just let your warlocks spec either 21 demon/40 dest and spam shadowbolt (no fire #$^@#$^ pls, have a heart for spriests!) or alternatively the old ms/ruin build, that works as well. Although I think for the proper gear level, 0/21/40 is the way to go for all but the one shadow embrace bitch. But that should really be there.
Tanks would go a long way to take a talent that reads 5% dmg reduction.

Edit:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

That would be a 'modern' SM/ruin build that allows you to scale with hit/crit gear while as well supplying the raid with shadow embrace and not taking up the extra debuff slot for UA. That's of course less dps output then pure demon/destro. But it might be good enough to keep up with Affliction, if you count your higher crit rate with sbolts and the resulting raid dmg boost from the debuff. Also, as I said, someone should have shadow embrace and given the right gear, this might be better then full affl.