Picking up the replenishment talent Improved Soul Leech is not a DPS loss for destruction warlocks. The reason for this is the personal mana gain for you and your pet resulting in less GCDs wasted on Life Tap.

Below is the SimulationCraft result of a T8 lock with three different specs. One with Improved Soul Leech one with the points in Suppression (and corresponding gear) and one with points in Unholy Power.

Simcraft file:

On a personal note, I have dropped on of the points in Improved Soul Leech in order to pick up Soul Link for tanking Mimiron's head.

For the Protection Paladin Melee Attack Speed Slow, the talent is a regularly taken one, although non Divinity Specc'd paladins can choose to place the points elsewhere, such as in Pursuit of Justice (depending on the spec details), the Divinity spec includes this talent, as it is the most reasonable one to get after all other necessities are taken.

The Divinity Spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

For Divinity spec Protection Paladins there is no dps loss that will affect whether the attempt is a wipe or kill under most conditions, as Heart of the Crusader and Improved Blessing of Might should be supplied by the Retribution Paladin in the raid, with possible exceptions being when the ret paladin is not on the same target, for example in p4 of Mimiron. Usually this will not be an issue, as the only fight that comes to mind where the lack of an immediate 2% crit buff (since you will only have 2/3 Heart of the Crusader unless you drop down to 4/5 Divinity) could possibly be the difference between a wipe and a kill is hardmode Mimiron25. On all other fights that come to mind there should be no problem. For example, the three-pack adds on Freya are rather soft, and your dps should have no problem with it; the snaplasher should be the only mob where the dps on it do not have Heart of the Crusader from the start, but non hardmode dps really should have no problem with it. Naxx25 gear is more than sufficient for it.

I'm not even going to consider pre-ulduar fights because if the raiders have any idea how to play their class (which they should if they are reading this, hi EJ!), they should have no issue with dps.

Also, non Divinity spec prot pallies will have 3/3 Heart of the Crusader and can also spec into 5/5 Conviction and 3/3 Crusade while speccing into 2/2Judgements of the Just (Judgements of the Just provides the melee attack speed reduction), so the dps loss for them is 2% self hit/crit and 10% Exorcism damage.

The exact numerical values for the damage losses I don't know, but that's what would be difference in terms of buffs.

I am needing confirmation on mechanics.

I was under the impression that Mortal Strike and Furious Attacks stack, not together, bringing healing to 0% on the target, but to 25% (50% of 50%.)

If I am correct, are there any debuffs for healing reduction that do not stack, or stack differently than the 2 labeled above? I did check out the thread here. Only thing I could find was a listing of viable classes, not how the debuffs counteract.

Melee Crit: Feral Druid

Also works for ranged (hunters)

To expand on this, A Feral Druid outdoes a Fury Warrior in providing this buff for two reasons:

One, the Feral's version has 100% uptime (aura), whereas the Fury Warrior's is dependent on crits - that is, it is not 100% even given uninterrupted face-time with a mob, and it also requires the player to actually be on-target in the first place, which is not a given in highly mobile situations.

Two, the Feral's buff has the additional benefit of a passive heal to all raid members on each physical crit, with a 6 second ICD.

Cost-wise, neither is giving up anything to provide this buff. The additional heal effect costs 2 extra talents, but again, this does not negatively affect Feral DPS or tanking, as far as I am aware.


Jrk, I have not heard of this mechanic (multiplicative stacking of Mortal Strike and Furious attacks), but will check it out.

It is a DPS/TPS loss to take the heal part of ilotp as a Feral.

To the below: As Both, there are talents that can be taken to increase DPS or Survivability as both cat and bear. In general, you'll be losing the points from FA, which is a very minor DPS loss for cat but a sizable survivability talent for bears (if -Boss AP isn't provided by someone else). There's other talents a druid might swap around, like Swipe damage or increased healing recieved.

Rampage buff duration is 10 seconds. The uptime will be extremely close to 100%: raid-buffed crit rates can exceed 40%, so if you don't get a crit in 10 seconds of dps, there is something seriously wrong.

On a separate note, 55/8/8 is a superior DPS spec for Arms warriors at higher levels of gear. This build has no option for either commanding presence or imp demo. In addition, Arms does not have free GCDs for Sunder Armor the way fury does, so I think that for everything except trauma, you should list "Fury warrior" and not "DPS warrior", since their raid utility is far superior in terms of what they can provide without significant personal DPS sacrifice.

Physical Vulnerability (Blood Frenzy) is another buff that does not cost the Arms Warrior DPS.

The issue with Rampage is the time-on-target thing. Before the Fury Warrior lands his first crit at the start of an engagement, there is no +5% Physical Crit. If there is significant downtime (portals on Yogg as just one example), then Fury's buff uptime gets to drop a little. Whereas the Feral's is a passive aura.

Regarding short boss phases (30-45sec), would it be better having 1-2 warriors stacking sunder or having a rogue with expose?