From our mag kill tonight

http://img403.imageshack.us/my.php?image=magdpsrh8.jpg

1. combat daggers
2. combat swords
3. fury/prot
4. shadow
5. fire
6. feral
7. fire

After reading this thread since its inception, I have to ask one vital question. How do you do 800+ dps and not pull aggro? This has become increasingly obvious to me as other shadow priests are putting out insane numbers without a single active threat wipe.

I find myself having to throttle starting at around 600 dps even with salv and full shadow affinity. Do our tanks just suck or is there some trick for tanks to put out more TPS?

Edit: We have warrior tanks btw. And it isn't just me, all the casters as well as dps warriors feel this way too.

Unfortunately it needs to be said, get better tanks. Our warrior tanks seem to sustain about 750tps if they are taking big enough hits to keep the rage flowing in, this means with salvation you can do 900dps before taking agro. Factor in a little bit of lead time, threat reduction talents, and 1 time abilities like soul shatter and invis, and 1000+ dps is not impossible.

Gotta remember that for ranged, you need to go well above the tanks threat to pull aggro off. For sustained dps this should never happen assuming no threat wipes are happening. A ranged dps'er pulling aggro is typically due to huge string of crits or the tank getting a few misses/dodges etc. in a row and threat generation slows as a result. Both can easy to prevent.

Melee dps could pull aggro off the tank easier since the threshold is lower. Infact the most common class I see that do pull aggro off tanks are dps warriors. Rogues have it easy with vanish/feint.

Assuming you're not standing right next to the mob or trying to commit suicide some other way, get better tanks pretty much sums it up.

In what type of situations are you pulling aggro off of your tanks? Are we talkng trash pulls in Karazhan or a raid boss ?

This week on Doom Lord Kazzak we had a mage sustain 1248 DPS and not pull aggro, if you're having aggro problems on a burn fight like that it helps to set up a misdirect rotation between the hunters. It's what we do atleast and it allows ours casters to go all out within a few seconds, granted the warrior tanking new what he was doing in terms of fast threat generation, but the misdirects gave a nice lead.

First Gruul kill tonight, forgot to take SS of damage meters.

We had a few dry runs, then wiped at 1% after we had respawns during the fight, and an ogre ran in the raid raping everyone, then proceeded to kill him the next pull.

The tank died at around 15%, then he ran around killing a few DPS until a feral druid grabbed him back and held aggro on the rest of the fight.

Damage was:
Fire mage with shadowpriest/moonkin druid and really good gear.
Hunter
Affliction Warlock (died at 20% and got BR'd)
Shadow Priest (died at 20% and got BR'd)

We had a rather poor raid for the fight, 8 healers + one balance/resto druid who almost always heals who we had DPS for the fight, and the DPS consisted of at least 3 feral druid DPSing. The top DPS were the top players pretty much who have the best gear and min/max the most.

Everyone used elixirs/oils at the least, and a few popped flasks.

I was particularly disappointed by the DPS our melees dealt out, feral druids beat out our fury warrior/dagger rogue/arms warrior quite handily.

Second Gruul kill yesterday. This was the nerfed version of him, and he bugged this time too. No hateful strikes, and only one shatter.

http://www.axemen.org/raids/gruul/22.03.07/Gruul/

Since people were asking earlier in this thread about elemental DPS.... We had an elemental shaman on our raid tonight too, although after our forays there pre-nerf, we decided to go with tranquil air (yes we did have salvation also) in his group, and put our top threat folks there because we were concerned about threat issues.

7 minutes 18 seconds.

1) Warlock (42/1/18)
2) Rogue
3) Shadow Priest
4) Elemental Shaman
5) Warlock
6) Rogue
7) Mage (arcane/frost)
8) Rogue

I and the #2 rogue were flasked (flask accounts for ~40k of my damage), the other warlocks weren't (and I was able to do a damage curse, they weren't.) Not sure about the shaman, but I think he was. The shadow priest wasn't. Mage at #7 would've done far better but forgot to re-equip his weapon (with oil) after the previous wipe; he also wasn't flasked.

Damage was low across the board -- this was only our second night on him (first night was pre-nerf) and I know I have about a million ways I could do better on the fight (timing dots, trinkets better, tighter movement, etc.) which should easily add another 50k or so to my damage, maybe more.



Full meters for the curious: http://www.frivolity.com/wow/gruul-dps-20070323.jpg

Most of the folks at 10 and under probably had no elixirs/oils on at all. I know the fire mage at #10 didn't. But the warlock at #9 did (but no flask.)

Hunter at 16 and mage at 13 died early. Other hunters didn't have most of the group buffs other than themselves (grouped with a shaman, but not sure whether they had totems or not reliably.)


One issue we've had with shadow priests and elemental shaman is the whole paladin class buffing system, especially on a very spread out fight like Gruul, and dealing with most of them wanting Wisdom except the ones DPS'ing, and us with only two paladins in the raid.

For me, sustaining high dps without pulling aggro is darn near impossible without Blessing of Salvation. I'm so glad we have paladins now - before I'd just lay some DoTs, shadow bolt a few times, and twiddle my thumbs as my threat dips below the tank's again.

For the Gruul kill, I didn't start DPS until I got into position, and by the time our MT had ~3 Sunders up. I DPSed nonstop till 50%, and Soulshattered when our shamans burned Bloodlust.

Deetee, what mod is that? I'd be interested in putting that up on our site, that looks like a lot of useful info to analyze post-fight.

WoWWebstats, there's a link at the bottom of the page.

I am specifically talking about gruul. We had our first ever tries yesterday, and since everyone wanted him down, we used quite a lot of consumables to up our dps. We never really had a problem with aggro before, but then again we had never needed to do quite the dps burn like gruul before, having never done Naxx (due mostly to guild drama and burnout while we were on Twin Emps). Therefore, I can't really say that our tank is bad or not. He's been our tank for ages, and he's done very well for us since Molten Core.

It was just frustrating to see the tank's TPS hover at around 500-600 when I know that on full burn I'm doing at least 700 tps. Then again, it could be due to the fact that we've never done the encounter before and the tank did have some troubles with cave-in later in the fight. I'm very interested to see what happens on Sunday when we try Gruul again.

And just think, when everyone is in Tier 6 and your tank has another 500 shield block value, he'll be putting out 525-625 tps!

Until or if you get enough paladins to cover everything, just have them 15min buff the most wanted buff and the instant before the pull 5min buff the other is what we do. Most fights generally don't last much past 5min in TBC and if they do, blessings are low mana cost as well as if they are in a group with shadow priests, the paladins should be full mana anyways and can just rebuff it midfight.

I just ask the non-kings Pally to give me a 5 min salvation on the pull. That's all I need.

If you're lucky enough to have a shaman in your caster group, have him drop tranquil air for the first 30-60 sec or so. That'll help even more, then he can switch to Wrath of Air. Our normal group is pretty optimized with me, 2 mages, ele shammy and a warlock. Usually he lays down tranquil for the first minute, and will use lust after the 2nd shatter after the mages invis. This along with a good tank and misdirects up from hunters gives us a nice cushion in threat that we spend the rest of the fight making up.

Couldn't agree more. I haven't had too much trouble pushing max DPS (SW: D / MB on cooldown) with VT/VE always up -- at least the 700TPS you're expecting. BoS is a must, however.

Also, if you aren't already, having a Shaman with the MT is extremely helpful. WF alone is a noticeable TPS boost.

Gruul, March 18
Gruul, March 21

Here are our two Gruul kills, the first being from before the hotfix and with every single person in the raid flasked and potted to the gills. We squeaked in a kill (or squealed, in the case of our MT, "Keep me up, oh god, keep me up, keep me up, oh god") with the MT dying at 6% and the OT picking him up for the last chunk.

I was pondering what I could do to catch up to the 4th place warlock (not so much on the March 21 kill, since I died at 40%), then I realized he had been on Curse of Agony whereas the other warlock and I had been on Shadows/Elements the whole time.

If Curse of Agony is half of your DPS I am shocked. It's no more than 20% for me, which would put you at 12th or so.

It's not. I've never even used it in a raid as I usually have a utility curse to worry about instead. I was just puzzling over what exactly he was doing that put him 40k ahead of me, then I realized he did 42k with CoA, whereas I was doing 0 with CoS.

oh, oops! I had accidentally looked at the link from the 21st and thought it was the 18th, didn't bother looking at other one. Yeah, that'll make it up.

What really surprises me on that log is how few shadow bolts (only 14?) the 4th place affliction lock is shown as casting (and he isn't using drain life either). Adding up the expected cast times (1.5 seconds for each DoT application, 2.5 for bolt) I only get about 150 seconds of actual time spent dpsing for him, vs. about 200 seconds for you. Could the the combat log be missing something due to limited range?

I had a similar suspicion when reviewing our warlocks on Gruul:
http://morwen.150m.com/wws-20070321-2115/c-wrl.html
This was with 150 yard range (default setting for the DBM addons) and I just could not reasonably believe that the other warlocks were only throwing half as many bolts unless it was a range issue.