Increasing raid DPS via uncommon 'support builds' - Page 2

Boevis · 09/03/06, 4:44 AM

Originally Posted by Lateralus

I think the druid would add around 97% of a rogue's damage, assuming LOTP on 4 people really is a 12% total DPS increase (I'm not a math person so I couldn't back it up with anything) and the druid is geared to the teeth as is the rogue (Druid DPS used 720 and Rogue used 840, not exact but pretty good ballparks.)

Couldn't tell you a thing about shadow priests.

Gear doesn't currently exist to allow druids to exceed 650 DPS except in short fights where the burst gained from Powershifting with a Weaponswap to a slow 2-hander with crusader (read 1 min fights)

james · 09/03/06, 4:58 AM

Is this a coded "Please tell my guild to let me respec shadow" thread? See a lot of those on the EU forums...

I think if 20% of your raid DPS comes from warlocks, assuming 100% of their damage comes shadow damage, it will increase your raid DPS by 3%. In practise, it's probably not that much and it probably isn't :(

Having seen the recent Nightfall and Annihilator threads, there is an alternative way of boosting raid DPS...

The Nightfall thread had a lot of Theorycraft in it. It only costs 1 debuff slot (as opposed to a shadow priest) and it's probably best given to your hybrid tanks (14 in protection) who you don't see much DPS from anyway (they're probably keeping up Thunderclap if your guild doesn't have a Thunderfury).

Nightfall will proc between 2 and 4 times per minute, lasting 5s per proc although these procs can overwrite each other. You're probably looking at between 10 and 20s per minute. Assuming 45% of your DPS comes from casters and that there are no special spikes (i.e. saving fire blasts for procs), it's about a 1.5 to 3% damage increase, minus the DPS your warrior loses...

Weighing in at 2 debuff slots, there is a dual wield combo of Annihilator and Bashguuder. Now I don't know a lot about these weapons except from what I've read. Bashguuder's proc is said to be 100% sustainable in an offhand slot and it lasts 30s. Annihilator's proc lasts 45s so allows for a bit of room for changing weapons when all stacks are applied. HOWEVER, the procs do benefit all warriors, rogues and hunters - so probably around 55% of your raid DPS. So what does 1200 armor less mean?

For a mob with 4k base armor (minus sunders), it would increase your melee DPS by about 19%. This about a 10% increase in raid DPS over just using sunder.
For a mob with 8k base armor (minus sunders), it would increase your melee DPS by about 11.6%, raid DPS by 6.4%.
For a mob with 12k base armor (minus sunders), it would increase your melee DPS by about 8.3%, raid DPS by 4.6%.

I honestly don't know how much armor a raid boss has... If you don't want to have a warrior in blues, you could also use Faerie Fire and a Curse of Recklessness (it's pretty much the same armor reduction). Or you could use all 5... for a mob with 5K armor, it's an increase for melee DPS of 38% over just sunder. For a mob with 8k armor, this is a 21% increase in melee DPS. For a mob with 12k armor, this is a 17.8% increase in melee DPS.

Astelliar · 09/03/06, 5:11 AM

I wish I could explain some things about other hybrid DPS 'support' roles (ie feral druids), but my area of expertise is slightly tilted towards shadow priests.

The idea of having a priest collect just shadow weaving for the raid and dump the rest of the points elsewhere (namely meditation and divine fury in the holy tree) is fine. As long as your support DPS priest has divine fury his hps output will be stronger (greater heal and heal hps gains more effect from divine fury than spiritual healing). If you're going to make a shadow priest full time, keep in mind that Naxxramas is starting to become a little unfriendly for shadow priests. There's a few fights such as Heigan, Gothik, Maexxna, *maybe Faerlina* where Shadow priests can keep up, but the rest of the fights require high sustained dps for a long time. With terribly scaling mind flay -- and the fact that if they did want to bump up the dps dramatically they'd have to spend it on an expensive mind blast -- and the limited 24 yard range (Razuvious, anub rekhan, cocoon dpsing, etc) makes them very unversatile.

I say you should give that 20 point in shadow tree for SW build a go, though, I myself tend to forget that Shadow Weaving was moved down and is in a more hybrid location. As it is now 31 shadow specs are inclined for raiding environments (with certain talents), and as raiding environments are not friendly towards shadow priests and sustainability, you will only be bringing them for fairly low DPS and a bit of vampiric embrace, nothing more nothing less.

Judia · 09/03/06, 5:12 AM

I feel I must have the strangest guild in the world.
I simply cant convince any of our priests to spec shadow weaving, after 2/3 weeks they always return to holy/balance.

Bolche · 09/03/06, 5:18 AM

In our guild (BWL clean, Razu down, working on C'Thun P2), we have :
- two shadow priests (both with 31 in shadow)
- a tank/healer druid (0/30/21)
- a healer/tank druid (0/20/31)

- Priest : I don't think a priest loses much of its healing ability by specing shadow. By specing holy/disc, a priest mainly gains a better mana efficency, but there no "must-have" in these trees. But a shadow priest in a healing set is a good healer. The main issue with shadow priest is the dps gear, since they have to share it with two other classes. One multi-class items, our mages/warlock usualy rand the first time it drops, then its mage/wl/mage/wl/.... So its pretty hard for the priests to get excellent dps gear, they have to stuff mainly with ZG/AQ gear, or items mages/lock don't want anymore. Still, they prove to be efficent DDs, and if they never reach the top of the damage meter, they take a good rank in it. And shadow weaving is a huge dps increase if you have a warlock-heavy raid. In our raid, the DD looks like :
1) rogues ~ mages > 2) warlocks >> 3) hunts >> 4) under-stuffed vindict paladins and other jokes
but where there is a shadow priest dpsing in the raid, it looks like :
1) rogues ~ mages ~ warlocks >> 2) hunts ~ shadow priest >> 3) under-stuffed vindict paladins and other jokes
So definitly a good dps increase
And if we are short on healers, they wear there T1/T2 and heal.

- Druid : we once had a cat spec druid, but even with very good epic stuff, it was pretty low on dps stats. And LOTP is, imo, not that great. Of course 3% crit is good, but we had a lot of trouble seting up groups for it, since rogues already require imp. BS from war, TSA from hunter, and sometimes some a paly or warlock for surviability.
So this druid respec. tank/heal, and now gives good utility to the raid, as a good off-tank, or even MT for ZG/AQ, and still a capable healer with an instant and an innervate.

- As for hemo rogue, the debuff they put (+7 dmg), has limited charges (30), so it is usualy not worth loosing a combat rogue for an hemo one.

Skav · 09/03/06, 5:41 AM

I did some simulations on my patchwerk playground study : http://www.skav.org/theorycraft/warl..._patchwerk.php

Got an impressive +50% damage for warlocks with shadow weaving + approximated infinite healing. So in theory, yes it is a pretty big boost to warlock DPS.

In real raids however, warlocks are imp bitches, shadow priests go OOM pretty fast, and eat 4 debuffs. It would be a very nice boost to a warlock-heavy guild though.

Exewut · 09/03/06, 6:34 AM

Originally Posted by james

For a mob with 4k base armor (minus sunders), it would increase your melee DPS by about 19%. This about a 10% increase in raid DPS over just using sunder.
For a mob with 8k base armor (minus sunders), it would increase your melee DPS by about 11.6%, raid DPS by 6.4%.
For a mob with 12k base armor (minus sunders), it would increase your melee DPS by about 8.3%, raid DPS by 4.6%.

I honestly don't know how much armor a raid boss has... If you don't want to have a warrior in blues, you could also use Faerie Fire and a Curse of Recklessness (it's pretty much the same armor reduction). Or you could use all 5... for a mob with 5K armor, it's an increase for melee DPS of 38% over just sunder. For a mob with 8k armor, this is a 21% increase in melee DPS. For a mob with 12k armor, this is a 17.8% increase in melee DPS.

as far as addons tell me 3.5k (that is after sunders I believe)

Melissande · 09/03/06, 7:59 AM

Being a shadow priest, I must warn you of a few problems. Bascally it requires a high amount of will, as it will make you some envy.

Mages/warlocks will get angry because of loot problems
Some priest/druids will be jealous
shamans may have loot problems too (say Nef's mace)

Some other classes may prefer a "healbot support priest", as they won't see the benefits of shadow and many people see priests as support bots. So politics are the main obstacle to the shadow tree.

Technically speaking, since the priest review, provided you take the talent to regen 15% while under 5 sec, the talent not to get interrupted and the talent to get a free spell every 3 minutes (whose cooldown marries extremely well with devouring plague). It means 16 point in disc/holy. Add another 2 for imp stamina buff.

And then you can get up to 33 in shadow, you won't miss any key talent.

• Shalas · 09/03/06, 9:38 AM

You'd be missing the two most important talents. Meditation, Divine Fury and Improved Healing are really the only three talents that significantly improve a Preist's healing, which only leaves 20 free points for a priest who wants to heal well (huge compared to some classes, but not enough to spec shadow and still heal well).

spronk · 09/03/06, 10:06 AM

Originally Posted by Judia

I feel I must have the strangest guild in the world.
I simply cant convince any of our priests to spec shadow weaving, after 2/3 weeks they always return to holy/balance.

as mentioned above the change to heal/gheal2 from 3 secs to 2.5 secs is an absolutely huge talent, and to get this plus meditation (a necessary talent when healing) makes it impossible to go 31 into shadow. i tried to go shadow on my priest before i switched toons, i just found myself hating how gimped i felt in healing (most disc/holy talents arent that useful at high end 8/8 t2 or better, but meditation, inspiration, and imp healing really are).

in naxx procing inspiration and tossing out fairly large gheals is a regular necessity. shadow priests simply gimp themselves too much to do this, so they end up as gimped healers. they are gimped DPS on most fights due to length of fights (all fights are 6-10 mins long). So while they may be happy, they are lowering raid overall DPS.

If your an old raiding guild and everyone is in full tier2 or higher, its not that big a deal. For a undergeared raid though it has problems when gear that would help mage/lock DPS from bwl/aq go to shadow priests.

To be honest theres a better balance, which is Power Infusion priests. They can spec disc/holy to be offensive while still picking up the important healing talents (insp, med, imp heal), PI themselves while soloing/PVP, PI mages or themselves in raids, and still be uber healers. Nobody even has to know how they are spec'd and they will still be uber healers. They will still be picking up offset gear for a damage set and all the drama that comes with that of course, but healers do deserve a second set of damage gear unless the guild is on call 24x7 to help them farm.

Kalman · 09/03/06, 12:03 PM

From the rogue perspective, if they're looking at ~1k unbuffed and have a 2.8 or slower mainhand weapon, having them go hemo won't hurt raid DPS. It probably won't help it much, but it won't hurt you either, and that rogue will have some nice tricks for other situations (double evasion on Razuvious, CP generation for stunlocks is improved, Prep, Ghostly Strike and some other avoidance tanking talents such that they make a better offtank if required, etc.).

DeeNogger · 09/03/06, 9:25 PM

so other than TSA hunters, basically everyone is saying that its not work using feral/moon/shadow/hemo ?

• Shalas · 09/03/06, 9:34 PM

Originally Posted by DeeNogger

so other than TSA hunters, basically everyone is saying that its not work using feral/moon/shadow/hemo ?

Other than that TSA isn't an offspec or "support" build, yes.

zomgitsnev · 09/04/06, 3:48 AM

When you get to the point (Start of naxx i guess) that your rogues are geared enough to hit 2k AP without consumables, speccing Hemo will give comparable damage to a Combat swords build, and won't be too much under a combat daggers build. We have a very melee heavy raid setup, and the added damage is certainley noticable over a long fight. I wouldn't recommend Hemo to guilds doing MC/BWL or even AQ, but to those with a couple of bosses down in Naxx, looking to up their DPS a little, I'd say go for it.

Farstrider · 09/04/06, 4:27 AM

Originally Posted by LadyVex.

Anyways just felt like adding that. Some people seem to have some really interesting hunter misconceptions.

Given the struggles that hunters and warlocks are having making it into raid composition for Naxx I'd say the real hunter dps problems have only just started - i.e. they weren't such an issue in BWL/AQ. I wouldn't say it's a misconception just info that's only become an issue in the last couple of months.

It's safe to say Blizz have realised this given the lack of any hunter talent info for TBC.