I think with the moonkin form changes to mana gain and the fact that you get a lot of damage multipliers from talents, it's definitly viable, though feral might still come out ahead in terms of downtime (heal yourself and move on) as energy > mana in my opinion.
That being said, if you wanna level as balance, I'd say go for it.
I think with the moonkin form changes to mana gain and the fact that you get a lot of damage multipliers from talents, it's definitly viable, though feral might still come out ahead in terms of downtime (heal yourself and move on) as energy > mana in my opinion.
That being said, if you wanna level as balance, I'd say go for it.
I'd say the biggest winner in favor of feral leveling is the 30% movement speed in catform. Lets you reduce time between each mobs consequently. Add to that better stealth in case you want to skip stuff. But other than that, moonkin is really solid nowadays, you can kill stuff in a couple of spells, and I'd say it's better if your gear is mostly resto stuff.
With the recent changes, is leveling as moonkin viable or is feral still the king of leveling?
Question fails to parse correctly. Moonkin being viable (which I reckon it is) does not imply that feral stops being significantly better (which it, with speed boosts, passive self-healing, and healing and dps not sharing resources).
What is your spec like pre 3.0? With good spirit, spirit tab and meditation you should never run out of mana doing quests. I simply do SW:P, MF and SW. (Only VE and VT if I want variation). Drop out of shadow and heal myself when I'm low on health. I don't wand. I suspect you might be using "warlock" gear while levelling, resulting in a dip in your sustainability. Look at the shadow priest tier gear and you'll see the spirit in there. (iirc, around 250 mp5 on paper doll with no buff/aura was the norm).
In 3.0, you'll lose meditation if you take dispersion at level 70. You can use dispersion like a mage uses evocation. Or you can take inner focus and meditation first, and go down to dispersion on the way to 80. (Level 70 raiding builds have dispersion, but I don't see why you can't go discipline first when levelling).
In comparing pre 3.0 to 3.0 I'm not considering spec difference or even a gear deficiency, but playstyle difference.
Pre 3.0 I could pull 5-6 mobs, dot/fear them all and finish with them dead and my mana pool still healthy due to multiple VTs. Now there's no sustainability at all in multimob pulls thanks to replenishment's diminishing returns (only the first application returns mana). I don't consider drinking a form of sustainability so don't go there; sustainability to me is how long you can go until you have to drink.
If it comes down to single mob nuke pulls I'm not satisfied shadow is going to be better then disc/holy in terms of kill speed/efficiency. Sure, shadow has dispersion if you spec it for a chunk of mana back every three minutes. Sure, it has VT if you use a rotation based on it. However holy has two extra nukes in it's cycle (more if SoL procs) and loses no DPM on SW:P if the mob dies early.
- Able to interact with all quest items while in Moonkin form.
Bloodberries are currently (ok, as of 3.0.2, it might have changed in 3.0.3 since I haven't tried since then but it seems incredibly unlikely) lootable in Ghost Wolf whereas previously you would shift back to normal. Thus, given that cats/bears/Ghost Wolves were already able to herb and skin while shapeshifted my assumption is that all quest items are now lootable in allshapeshift forms. I haven't extensively tested this, but I believe that was at least one other item I was surprised to be able to loot in Ghost Wolf - Bloodberries definitely spring to mind as ones that I am almost certainly changed and are lootable as part of a quest available for all level 70s. Trying to test other quest items is an issue given that I've already done all the quests on both my level 70 shaman and druid.
In comparing pre 3.0 to 3.0 I'm not considering spec difference or even a gear deficiency, but playstyle difference.
Pre 3.0 I could pull 5-6 mobs, dot/fear them all and finish with them dead and my mana pool still healthy due to multiple VTs. Now there's no sustainability at all in multimob pulls thanks to replenishment's diminishing returns (only the first application returns mana). I don't consider drinking a form of sustainability so don't go there; sustainability to me is how long you can go until you have to drink.
If it comes down to single mob nuke pulls I'm not satisfied shadow is going to be better then disc/holy in terms of kill speed/efficiency. Sure, shadow has dispersion if you spec it for a chunk of mana back every three minutes. Sure, it has VT if you use a rotation based on it. However holy has two extra nukes in it's cycle (more if SoL procs) and loses no DPM on SW:P if the mob dies early.
I tried smite leveling to 71 in beta and it was annoying. In T6 healing gear, which I am sure is sub-optimal, I was able to 3-shot almost everything at 72. Mind Blast, MF, MF. I used the PW:S glyph, nothing else was available, and shielded between pulls. The minor heal was enough to heal me to full. I never lost health or mana.
Maybe I was doing something wrong as holy, but it seemed much slower. If needed, I'll just use my BT neck, fly to Shatt and respec for instances.
How did you approach Smite leveling that was comparable or better than shadow?
-Prot may be your best bet on a pvp server. What makes prot stand out is that it's extremely burst resistant and has a fighting chance vs absolutely -any- class and spec 1v1, even mages. You'll save a lot of time running back to your corpse if players are aggressive on your server. You'll also be in a great position to solo most group quests up to at least the mid 70's even with middling gear. Make sure you pick up a glyph of rapid charge and charge range.
-The highlight of arms is bladestorm and sweeping strikes. You can round up a bunch of quest mobs and explode them. You're also a solid tank. I'd recommend it for pve or pvp servers, although be forewarned that you're still a free HK for a number of classes and specs.
-I wouldn't recommend Fury to anyone. While the reduction in downtime from Bloodthirst and bloodcraze was notable, it still couldn't zip between mobs like fury or arms with charge and/or intercept, it's the weakest spec in PVP unless you can control The Matrix, it's weaker than prot or arms for tanking, and whiffing on a target for 10 seconds is the most goddamn frustrating thing in the world.
-I wouldn't recommend Fury to anyone. While the reduction in downtime from Bloodthirst and bloodcraze was notable, it still couldn't zip between mobs like fury or arms with charge and/or intercept, it's the weakest spec in PVP unless you can control The Matrix, it's weaker than prot or arms for tanking, and whiffing on a target for 10 seconds is the most goddamn frustrating thing in the world.
Does the change to Titan's Grip (5% miss penalty) make it more viable?
That gives about a 10% chance to miss on specials on same level mobs, plus there is the 3% hit talent you can pickup to reduce hit needed to 7% (about 110 hit rating).
Does the change to Titan's Grip (5% miss penalty) make it more viable?
That gives about a 10% chance to miss on specials on same level mobs, plus there is the 3% hit talent you can pickup to reduce hit needed to 7% (about 110 hit rating).
It definitely makes it more viable, but I still wouldn't spec it for any reason ever. As much fun as it was when beefy mobs just exploded on contact with me when I got one of those main hand+off hand+BT+whirlwind combos off, the various advantages of arms more than outweigh that IMO. Unless arms gets nerfed to the ground (Or BT's health regen gets buffed to the point that you end most fights at full health), I can't see myself ever speccing fury for any reason.
Edit: Let me pull back a bit: I will probably give TG a fair shake some time, but since arms and prot are so superior for tanking instances (and I intend to do a lot of that as I level), I don't really see it ever being the build for me. My couple levels experience with it left a sufficiently foul taste in my mouth that I don't feel a need to put myself through that again. Another factor you should consider is that my fury DPS set is crap; if you have a good, hit-heavy fury DPS set, you might enjoy it a lot more than I did.
How did you approach Smite leveling that was comparable or better than shadow?
Pre-3.0, main reason I leveled to 70 with a hybrid spec (23+/26+/5) was that it allowed me to grind effectively while wearing the same set of gear (heavily weighted towards +spirit) that I used for group healing. I would guess that it was still slightly slower than someone using shadow spec and gear with a good combination of dps and mana regeneration. However, having the triad of Improved Divine Spirit, 5/5 Spiritual Guidance, and 5/5 Spirit Tap meant that in a solo grinding situation it was possible to kill mobs serially with Spirit Tap up almost all of the time (same as spriest, obviously) and gain a quite substantial amount of spell damage; often the limiting factor would be getting in range of the next mob with enough duration left on Spirit Tap to get the full benefit of the bonus spell damage.
Post 3.0, the synergy of this build is damped somewhat by the fact that you only get 25% of your spirit as extra spell power rather than 35% (due to changes in Imp Divine Spirit), so proccing spirit tap isn't as big a damage boost any more. However, the changes to Holy Fire make it somewhat better as an opener for grinding.
My own feeling is that there is a narrow 'sweet spot' of mob life values (which depends somewhat on your spellpower) for which disc/holy holds its own in terms of kill speed. Specifically, if you can reliably kill a single target mob with Holy Fire->Mind Blast->Smite (possibly x2)->SWDeath, and start on a new mob five seconds later, then you get maximal use of the good damage-per-casttime of HF and SWD while using them pretty much as their cooldowns come up. Further, an spriest facing a similar mob will neither quite be able to kill it with Mind Blast+SWDeath, nor get full benefit from their powerful DOTs or self-stacking abilities like shadow weaving.
Against significantly weaker mobs, the spriest can just DoT them up en masse (SW:P, VT) and massacre them as desired with SWD, Mind Blast and Mind Flay, achieving far more damage output and kill speed than disc/holy due to the much higher DoT damage (also, spriest doesn't need to cast to heal himself in this situation). Not only that, but if the disc/holy priest tries to keep up by killing these mobs in serial fashion the cooldowns on Holy Fire, Mind Blast and SWD will prevent it.
Against significantly stronger mobs, the better DoT damage and self-applied damage bonuses (Shadowform, stacked shadow weaving, twisted faith) again put the spriest ahead of disc/holy.
As an aside, note that while you referred to 'Smite leveling', most of the damage for disc/holy (in a grind situation) still comes from other spells - smite spam is for bosses, where the cooldowns on our better options mean we have to use Smite.
In short, while I enjoyed leveling as disc/holy and plan to continue doing so in WoTLK, I think you need to choose your targets more carefully if you want to keep up your kill rate.
Anyway, to provide some input to the original question of leveling spec: for pure solo leveling speed, I think shadow is still better. But if you want a hybrid spec that comes close to the same grinding speed, while still providing superior healing abilities when you want to group, I would suggest
level 60: 23 points disc (meditation, imp divine spirit), 25 points holy (searing light, divine fury, spirit of redemption and 4/5 spiritual guidance). 3 points in spirit tap.
level 63: get to 5/5 spiritual guidance, add 2/2 Focused Power (more damage and dpm)
level 68: add 5/5 Enlightenment (5% spirit is 5% more mana recovery, 5% spell haste means 5% faster kills)
level 74: add 5/5 Mental Strength, and Power Infusion (more mana recovery, a little bit of crit, and a slight boost to average speed)
Beyond this point the choices become less clear and would depend on your gear and the situations you find yourself in most often. The next available talents don't provide an obvious boost to killing speed (or in some cases provide a rather poor one, as for Surge of Light). If you have lots of mana and are often using PW:S when grinding, get 3/3 Reflective Shield to kill things even faster. If your mana sometimes runs low but you have decent crit rating, put two points in Improved Spirit Tap.
How did you approach Smite leveling that was comparable or better than shadow?
Now that makes more sense. I always thought SOL was mediocre for leveling. I tried to force the issue by using Smite full time. What seemed to happen is, about half the time I'd get a SOL proc on a kill shot and then have to scramble to the next mob.
level 63: get to 5/5 spiritual guidance, add 2/2 Focused Power (more damage and dpm)
level 68: add 5/5 Enlightenment (5% spirit is 5% more mana recovery, 5% spell haste means 5% faster kills)
level 74: add 5/5 Mental Strength, and Power Infusion
Unless I'm missing something, you need to invest 2 points in Mental Strength before you can reach Focused Power, which is a 25pts talent.
The end result is the same though, you'd get 5/5 Mental Strength and PI at level 74.
maybe Unholy with all movement increased can be better.
Unholy is the best due to that + permanent pet, however pick the one you like the best, another 10 hours leveling as Blood spec isn't going to change much.
Having used both Lightheaded and Carbonite I can say that they both have their benefits and shortfalls.
The big ups for Lightheaded are the wowhead comments which Carbonite doesn't have (as far as I'm aware). Sometimes you're doing a new quest and the quest text just might not be obvious enough, or you might need some help with strategy in which case these can be useful.
Carbonite's tracking system seems to be pretty good though; you get two seperate mini-windows, one for quest tracking and another carbonite mini map. The quest tracking window lists quests in order of proximity with the quest objectives closest to you listed at the top of the pane. Any quest objective can be selected in the window to provide a compass bearing to point you in the right direction (as the crow flys). The nice thing about the minimap is that it shades areas in which you will find mobs you need to kill for quests/items you need to pick up/npcs you need to visit.
I haven't used Questhelper so I can't speak from personal experience, but from what I've seen looking over friend's shoulders it seems like you could call it Carbonite Lite. What I will probably be doing for Wrath is running both Carbonite as my main quest tracker and Lightheaded as a go to when I need more information.
So far I vastly prefer Questhelper to Carbonite, in large part because Carbonite looks like it was drawn with crayons by a retarded octopus (yes it really is that ugly). Tomtom is a far nicer directional arrow, and Tourguide is the best leveling help I've used, although I'm unsure if it will be wotlk ready.
"I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions. I'm just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty." -Taylor Mali
-Prot may be your best bet on a pvp server. What makes prot stand out is that it's extremely burst resistant and has a fighting chance vs absolutely -any- class and spec 1v1, even mages. You'll save a lot of time running back to your corpse if players are aggressive on your server.
I honestly don't see you soloing any healer-class. (From personal experience)
Does the change to Titan's Grip (5% miss penalty) make it more viable?
That gives about a 10% chance to miss on specials on same level mobs, plus there is the 3% hit talent you can pickup to reduce hit needed to 7% (about 110 hit rating).
If my personal dps at level 70 is any indication, Titan's Grip is "not viable". I tested it out on 3.0.3 release day in Sunwell, with a 2/5x/8 build (ie 2 heroic strike, titan grip + incite). My dps went down by about 500-600dps compared to the previous week as 53/8/0. On thursday, I respec back to 53/8/0, and I gained back 500-600dps.
Btw, this is from a previous fury warrior who has enough hit not to need to regem for the new -5% titan grip. Also, most of my gemming is still fury oriented with emphasis on strength over crit.
If you have nothing against using a single 2-hander weapon, I do not see why you want to take a subpar dps spec for levelling. If you have never tried arms, give it a go and you'll pleasantly surprised. IMHO, titan's grip will only be viable again once you can get deep wounds into your fury builds.
PS. Just to add, like mod says, arms is superior for tanking instances as well because of the revenge procs.
For levelling, we're looking primarily at short fights, solo. Even in instances, the vast majority of fights will be brutally short relative to raid boss encounters. This means that anything buffing Rupture needs to go, as do talents like Relentless strikes, Focused attacks and Ruthlessness that yield energy/combo points over the long haul. If your target usually dies before the third finisher (or even often the second), there's no point proccing extra energy or combo points. Similarly, CTTC will be near impossible to keep up in an outdoor situation. HFB is possible but annoying, and there's no point putting enough into assassination to get it. Deadly poison won't have time to stack/tick, so I'll be using Instant on both hands and using Eviscerate rather than Envenom (so that will need talenting). That also means I want Deadly Brew to make sure a poison debuff lands on the mob for Mutilates - added bonus there in retricting runners. Fleet Footed is also useful, as is Opportunity to buff the opener.
For levelling, we're looking primarily at short fights, solo. Even in instances, the vast majority of fights will be brutally short relative to raid boss encounters. This means that anything buffing Rupture needs to go, as do talents like Relentless strikes, Focused attacks and Ruthlessness that yield energy/combo points over the long haul. If your target usually dies before the third finisher (or even often the second), there's no point proccing extra energy or combo points. Similarly, CTTC will be near impossible to keep up in an outdoor situation. HFB is possible but annoying, and there's no point putting enough into assassination to get it. Deadly poison won't have time to stack/tick, so I'll be using Instant on both hands and using Eviscerate rather than Envenom (so that will need talenting). That also means I want Deadly Brew to make sure a poison debuff lands on the mob for Mutilates - added bonus there in retricting runners. Fleet Footed is also useful, as is Opportunity to buff the opener.
Wouldn't you want to get murder? remove blood spatter and use only evisc for the 2 points in murder maybe? If not blood spatter, though I think that is what I'd remove, remove focused attacks(1 in vigor might as well and 2 in murder) as you wont get enough energy to make a difference that is substantial in burst short fights. Thoughts?
11/06/08, 11:04 AM
. (Only VE and VT if I want variation). Drop out of shadow and heal myself when I'm low on health. I don't wand. I suspect you might be using "warlock" gear while levelling, resulting in a dip in your sustainability. Look at the shadow priest tier gear and you'll see the spirit in there. (iirc, around 250 mp5 on paper doll with no buff/aura was the norm).
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