Irrespectively of how fast you kill each individual mob, Relentless Strikes is still at its full power if you make it to the next mob before your energy fills up -- which equates with Vigor improving the value of Relentless Strikes for leveling.
I will be leveling with some sort of Mute variation. Right now, opening with Ambush, Mute, Evis/KS, Mute will drop almost every single 70-71 mob on the initial energy burn. While the build has trouble with adds compared to a combat build, the burst damage is so high that I have no trouble with an additional 1 or 2 mobs assuming Evasion is up.
I will still go combat swords for instances, but for grinding I find Mute to be more effective or a least more fun.
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).
Very true, and feral is undoubtedly faster. However, with the changes to Hurricane and Thorns, and the addition of Owlkin Frenzy and Brambles + short cooldown Barkskin the AoE grind potential of moonkin can help to make up for this to a certain extent. In my experience with root + treants + dots etc soloing elites is easy mode. And with dual spec and gear homogenization it will be far easier to be very effective at both DPS, soloing, and healing instances while maintaining only one set of gear. This is especially useful while leveling, as having separate feral and caster gear is a significant annoyance.
I just tried this spec for my priest, he has pretty much the best "healing" gear avaiable to a priest, got sunwell loot and all. Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
I have to say it looks very promising, I have 1500 mana regen while casting, meaning I never loose mana, i can spam smite like crazy, and I can aoe like crazy with SoL
Oh, and I tried looking though 5 pages, so I cba looking thrugh more =p what do you recommend me to level for a DK? What spec would u recommend, becuse I hear people saying Unholy is good for AoE, but seriosuly how much do you AoE?
I am fan of the TomTom/LightHeaded/TourGuide triad.
Is there a version of Tourguide out with Wrath quests in it? I haven't been able to find them, but I have loved this trio on my recently levelled alts.
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.
I've been playing exclusively with a TG build for the past 2 weeks. Adjusting gear slowly, seeing what works and what doesn't. As mentioned, it's quite glorious running up to something and getting a MH/OH + Whirlwind double crit and watching something just instantly die. The downside is that a miss or lack of crits can make some fights very painful.
There seems to be a very noticeable "bubble" with TG. The bubble relies on 2 things: Hit and Crit.
Hit is an obvious one. If you are missing attacks, your DPS blows. However Hit also carries over to your ability to Crit. In regards to crit - crit increases uptime of Rampage and Flurry (in addition to double/triple damage on attacks). If you can reach a point where you are criting the majority of your attacks, and also not missing, you can keep flurry up 100%, and your DPS is insane. However, once you drop below a certain hit/crit rating, you drop under the "bubble" and you will notice a very substantial hit in DPS.
During Beta and on live at various times I tried running with 10% hit, and 35% unbuffed crit. This was "sufficient" for most things, however it drops quickly as you level, and you will drop under the bubble somewhere around the mid 70s. By 77 you will be feeling the loss of stats and notice a dramatic decrease in DPS.
I've swapped as much gear and gems as I possibly can, and I can achieve 15% hit with 40% crit unbuffed. I won't be wearing all the hit gear on WOTLK release, but after a couple levels I will swap in a key item or two to regain some hit rating.
The key, is gem as much as you possibly can for hit and crit. You will lose half of your crit rating and half of your hit rating by level 80. Plan to have some gear swaps ready as you reach the higher 70s. Helm of illidari shatterer is a great helm for this purpose. Stormrage ring is another. Also keep in mind that there is a Stormrage ring clone from the DEHTA quests in Borean tundra which may help some people out if you don't have a 2nd hit ring.
Edit: TLDR Version: TG is very gear dependent - if you can't reach obscene amounts of hit/crit - don't bother.
How's that again? How does Surge of Light help you AOE? Is it a case where you crit enough with Holy Nova that you get lots of instant free Flash Heals to deal with mobs beating on you? Just trying to fill in the blanks...
I personally didn't like SoL, but I haven't played around much with holy AOE damage and in any case my crit rating is very low (I think I have 7-8% crit, before talents are considered). With serial grinding I have the issue that I will usually wait until the cooldown on Holy Fire is done before casting on the next mob, so I end up tending towards a minimum of about 12 seconds between kills. When I get a crit+instasmite combo it sometimes lets me kill a mob in 1.5 seconds less than I would have otherwise, but
A) it doesn't happen that often
B) even if I change my rotation (opening with Smite on the next mob because HF and MB are still on cooldown), the 10-second cooldowns on HF and MB will tend to eventually push me back on to the natural interval
Further, while there are some cases where you gain 1.5 seconds from SoL proc, more frequently it happens that either the mob doesn't die (in which case you've only gained 0.5 seconds), or you could have killed it with SWD anyway. In these cases SoL only gains you a small amount of damage and some mana - and with this build mana regen is so large that the fact that SoL makes the spell free is basically irrelevant.
I haven't really thought about using the SoL proc to Flash Heal myself in a grinding situation - normally casting Renew on myself is better heal-per-casttime, and it's rare that I have to worry about heals per second in solo play.
In any case, your proposed build is similar to mine, except that I would move two points from SoL into Enlightenment to bring it up to 5/5.
I only read through maybe 10 pages, but I think fire is a perfectly viable leveling spec for LK for people who raided at level 70. I was thinking something like Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft at 70. Yes, I know I don't have elemental precision but I just can't justify going 8 points into frost for it when arcane has some good stuff also when I have capped spell hit without the talent at 70. Anyway, the idea is to then build arcane working toward arcane meditation and then finally fill out world in flames near 80 such that the final spec looks like Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft.
Yes, over time my spell hit percentage will fall below the cap, but by that time you'd hope that you wouldn't need to fight as many orange level mobs. The point of having high spell hit early is so that you can immediately go to a zone like Dragonblight at 70 and start leveling there. I went straight to Zangarmarsh at 60 and it worked out quite well. By the time I hit Terokkar I was fighting only +2 mobs.
I only read through maybe 10 pages, but I think fire is a perfectly viable leveling spec for LK for people who raided at level 70.
I'll bet some people could make good with Frost as well. There are some good AoE locations in in Sholazar, and there are always quests that can be done quickly with Frost AoE.
Yes, I know I don't have elemental precision but I just can't justify going 8 points into frost for it when arcane has some good stuff also when I have capped spell hit without the talent at 70.
This is a very *very* important point. Unless you're planning on leveling on mostly orange mobs, your spell hit cap is just 6%. If you're gemming for high +hit, you're better off just resocketing all of that +hit into spelldamage gems or something.
Is it worth skipping zones due to quest level restrictions? I know that in BC, if you tried to skip Hellfire, you'd wouldn't be able to pick up a majority of the quests in Zangarmarsh. At least when I've tried going there at 61 there were a lot of gray exclamation marks.
The zones are mostly self-contained. There are the usual breadcrumb quests (go talk to guy X in new place Y), but not a lot of lines that have pre-reqs in other zones.
I played through all of Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, and Dragonblight as Horde relatively late in the beta. It might be different in later zones, or if you are Alliance.
I was talking more from a standpoint of the quest minimum levels. Would you end up starving yourself of quests and being forced to grind if you were to skip the first zone? If you can obtain enough quests in the non-starting zones to level with, it could be a great way to get ahead of the pack and avoid the massive tagging fest that goes on during the first week when everyone pours into those initial zones.
Dragonblight quests are all 71-72 required at least, Grizzly Hills are 73 required, Zul'drak is 74 required, etc. It could be worth skipping some zones, but skipping Howling Fjord/Borean Tundra completely is not a good choice.
Dragonblight quests are all 71-72 required at least, Grizzly Hills are 73 required, Zul'drak is 74 required, etc. It could be worth skipping some zones, but skipping Howling Fjord/Borean Tundra completely is not a good choice.
Like I said, I skipped Hellfire completely at the start of TBC and didn't have to grind at all in Zangarmarsh. It appears that there is no such Zangarmarsh zone in LK, however. The lowest slew of starting quests in Dragonblight appears to be 72 required.
He mentioned he would be skipping the first zone, so he will be leveling on orange mobs.
Which is a valid choice, but the point was more as a heads up for casters who are planning on starting from the lower zones, not necessarily for that particular person.
Like I said, I skipped Hellfire completely at the start of TBC and didn't have to grind at all in Zangarmarsh. It appears that there is no such Zangarmarsh zone in LK, however. The lowest slew of starting quests in Dragonblight appears to be 72 required.
The level requirement filter for quests doesn't seem to be working properly on wowhead so I can't get a direct link, but there appears to be 2-3 dozen quests for each side available at 71. Not enough to get a full level but enough to make it worthwhile to get there quickly to avoid the crowds at the two starting zones, and supplementing it with a few instance runs (and in my case planning on AOE grinding some ghouls in dragonblight).
Blizzard's plan with Northrend is to provide two separate starting zones and spread the initial crush of people between the two. Both zones are quite large with several quest hubs. You should be able to find somewhere that isn't terribly camped to squeeze out at least a few quests.
It should also be noted that while there's a certain route the "main quest line" in each area will send you on, you can largely ignore this main quest line and head to other parts of the zone to start with, which should also help with avoiding the crowd. Though it does mean you'll miss out on some of the better quest(s) (rewards).
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
How's that again? How does Surge of Light help you AOE? Is it a case where you crit enough with Holy Nova that you get lots of instant free Flash Heals to deal with mobs beating on you? Just trying to fill in the blanks...
I personally didn't like SoL, but I haven't played around much with holy AOE damage and in any case my crit rating is very low (I think I have 7-8% crit, before talents are considered). With serial grinding I have the issue that I will usually wait until the cooldown on Holy Fire is done before casting on the next mob, so I end up tending towards a minimum of about 12 seconds between kills. When I get a crit+instasmite combo it sometimes lets me kill a mob in 1.5 seconds less than I would have otherwise, but
A) it doesn't happen that often
B) even if I change my rotation (opening with Smite on the next mob because HF and MB are still on cooldown), the 10-second cooldowns on HF and MB will tend to eventually push me back on to the natural interval
Further, while there are some cases where you gain 1.5 seconds from SoL proc, more frequently it happens that either the mob doesn't die (in which case you've only gained 0.5 seconds), or you could have killed it with SWD anyway. In these cases SoL only gains you a small amount of damage and some mana - and with this build mana regen is so large that the fact that SoL makes the spell free is basically irrelevant.
I haven't really thought about using the SoL proc to Flash Heal myself in a grinding situation - normally casting Renew on myself is better heal-per-casttime, and it's rare that I have to worry about heals per second in solo play.
In any case, your proposed build is similar to mine, except that I would move two points from SoL into Enlightenment to bring it up to 5/5.
Surge of light AOEing means running into a bunch of mobs with one targeted, and throwing all your instant smites into it as you holy nova. Then, when it goes down, you get spirit tap, and can continue aoeing at higher spell power and mana regen while throwing more smites into a secondary target.
I've tried it and it's not really that impressive of a grinding technique compared to smite spam unless the mobs are numerous/weak enough that you'd be aoeing them anyway. I got the best results on the rock shardlings from the nagrand quest where you break the rock elementals into several small rock elementals.
was thinking of Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft to do as spriest when wrath hits.
10/0/51 means by 73 i can have meditation for leveling and reduce downtime, then prolly fill up the rest of the talents in shadow after meditation/inner focus
was thinking of Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft to do as spriest when wrath hits.
10/0/51 means by 73 i can have meditation for leveling and reduce downtime, then prolly fill up the rest of the talents in shadow after meditation/inner focus
I'm guessing you have some pvp in mind with your spec? Martyrdom, Imp Fear and Silence not really that useful for levelling, Meditation for that fact isn't very useful as well since you can get most of that casting regen from Imp Spirit Tap which doesn't stack with Meditation.
11/11/08, 8:32 AM
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