No doubt many of you have read the popular thread called 'Sustained DPS' which compares the DPS different classes do on the Patchwerk encounter, and you may have noticed that other bosses, such as Loatheb, have been brought into the discussion. This caught my eye, since my guild is about to start Loatheb, and I've been trying to figure out which classes to award the fungal bloom debuff to, first. Obviously, the answer will vary from guild to guild; depending on skill, gear and faction (we're horde) but assuming nothing, I feel that fungal bloom should be given out in this order:
Dual wield warriors being placed last, since a huge proportion of their DPS comes from white attacks, most of the extra crit will be 'wasted' on them, since glancing blows and misses take priority over crits (see a post about combat mechanics if you don't know what I'm talking about). Rogues second last for a similar reason.
You are invited to post your Loatheb damage meters if you like, and perhaps compare them to your Patchwerk damage meters; but bear in mind that if your raid leader is convinced that hunters receive the largest DPS gain from fungal bloom and hence should receive the debuff first, then quite naturally, hunter DPS on Loatheb will improve more than any other class, since they were awarded fungal bloom first - a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Warlocks should be dead last, Loatheb is a nightmare for them.
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It seems that most people have a bad opinion of warlocks because they run OOM and can only lifetap a limited amount. I've seen videos where warlocks use several tricks to avoid running OOM on Loatheb, such as using 5/5 doomcaller + 2/9 plagueheart (15% cheaper shadow bolts that have a chance to heal the caster) or using shadow ward + a major rejuvenation potion instead of greater shadow protection potions - I'm not sure how effective these tricks are, but I've been told that a good lock shouldn't run OOM. Any opinions on this matter?
To Althor: When a healer lands a heal on this encounter, he gets a debuff which prevents all heals for the next minute - all heals are therefore extremely precious and only go to the MT. Furthermore, power word:shield, vampiric embrace healing etc. all count as heals and trigger the debuff.
Basically Warlocks have no significant mana regen talents or abilities that can even come close to mage's clearcasting / passive regen talents, if they can't lifetap. There's no way around that fact - they burn about the same amount of mana spamming as mages, but regain close to nothing. They have no evocation, I'm not sure about the viability of their mana stone. And on Loatheb there's no option to use mana potions either. Demonic Runes are of course a no go. So they only consumable that remains is Night Dragon's Breaths, hardly something to win you the sustained DPS cup.
And on top, Loatheb purges all curses from himself every 30 seconds (though this isn't that much of a problem if you time the curses so that they finish before each purge).
Withstaining this, a good geared lock should be able to contribute, but still, I'd say that the spore buff is indeed practically wasted on them, especially on the latter stages of the fight.
Kethgar: I was under the impression that while casting VE counts as your heal for the minute you can make use of it for up to 30 seconds (when Loatheb removes curses from himself). So sticking the Shadow Priest in the MT's group (or if you have 2 Shadow Priests, rotate them in and out when they have VE up) along with some Warlocks and the Shadow Priest will be healing the MT and providing healing to the locks for Lifetap.
A Shadow Priest doing 500 dps with Imp. VE will be able to heal everyone in his party for 4500 every minute (30 seconds worth of healing).
Now I haven't myself seen Loatheb so I'm relying upon the reports of other Shadow Priests that use VE healing on the encounter.
But it would seem to me that 4500 healing on just 1 tank is already nice. 4500 on each person in the party == very nice. Naturally it's more of a HoT than a direct heal so you'd still be wanting enough normal healers for the direct healing for each 1 minute rotation.
When we were first doing this fight all our mages flasked, so they always placed very high on the damage meters. Since we've stopped flasking the warriors have really begun to pull ahead.
We normally have 8 mages / 6-8 rogues on loatheb and although the first couple of spots are always the fire mages who get the ignites, the ones at the bottom who dont get ignites and/or innervate are way below the rogues, 160-170k to the rogues 210-235k.
Probably we are just taking too make mages, I guess 6 would be optimal and then take 8/9 rogue split into 3 seperate dps groups, as horde this is kinda tricky with shamans which is why we normally end up stacking the raid with mages rather than rogues.
The dps warriors tend to be intermingled with the rogues with hunters 10k or so less than the non igniting mages and warlocks doing about 80k the same as the melee spec shamans (23/28 ftw !)
From a warlock perspective, this fight is a nightmare due the limited options available to us, but this makes it more interesting.
DS - is a must have to get anywhere as a warlock simply for the mana restored via a sacd Felhunter or VW.
Consider using Greater Dreamless Sleep potions if mana is a real issue, although that's added downtime. I sac a VW regen 240hp per tick and keep my HP at 50% throughout the fight in order to get the most of the rejuv.
Replace a lock with another class on this fight, you only need 2. That said a class is only as good as the player behind it, warlocks can beat mages on Loatheb it just takes a lot of effort.
From a warlock perspective, this fight is a nightmare due the limited options available to us, but this makes it more interesting.
DS - is a must have to get anywhere as a warlock simply for the mana restored via a sacd Felhunter or VW.
Consider using Greater Dreamless Sleep potions if mana is a real issue, although that's added downtime. I sac a VW regen 240hp per tick and keep my HP at 50% throughout the fight in order to get the most of the rejuv.
Replace a lock with another class on this fight, you only need 2. That said a class is only as good as the player behind it, warlocks can beat mages on Loatheb it just takes a lot of effort.
Speaking as a firemage, it's really hard to use this fight as any kind of benchmark on performance. It's so very random who gets attributed the ignites, that with a bit of luck you can be 100k over number 2 in the list, or you can end up below the hunters. It's just not a good fight to be comparing classes, specially when it comes to mages. We use 4-5 firemages, and there's just no way of stabilizing performance, we can end up all over the charts.
If you read the sustained DPS topic (page 47 or so), the lock pick posted is actually from Loatheb.
Sorry I was just very suprised that warlocks could do that much on loatheb.
Are both the locks in the picture 9/21/21 ish spec with sac'd void walker? I would love for our warlocks to output that kinda dps on loatheb, would make him die a whole lot faster.
Also are you only 2 locks in raid and are doing this without CoS or 2 locks and using CoS / CoE or is there another lock giving that and using imp?
We haven't started seriously working on Loatheb yet but it seems to me that warlocks, would still be able to perform decent, depending on the amount of buffs.
Rank 4 shadow bolt already gets as much benefit from +damage as rank 10 so, while you lose significant damage from downranking, the relative difference gets smaller, the more gear and buffs you add - which can be pretty significant amounts with many guilds still flasking for this encounter. Depending of spec, they can also benefit quite significantly from added crit chance (ruin giving 200% and imp. SB being up constantly).
Also, it may just be me but JoW, BoW and BoS seem to mean that warlocks and hunters aren't nearly as gimp compared to other classes for Alliance as for Horde.
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@firemages - well there are addons (at least a guy wrote one for us, but i bet theres some out there) that count the ignite dmg and measure how much dmg you do without ignites. and then you can proably just split up the ignite dmg between the fire mages. we don't have any frost mages left, so i wouldn't know how much the difference is. but our mages win the dps meter, even with split up ignites.
our warlocks suck, although those 3 are not the ones that do the best dmg usually. none of them has DS, but they use a different potion/bandage/pot rotation from everyone else, so they can lifetap and don't have to downgrade bolts or something. we also have 2 lightwells up usually. we got 3 warlcoks for coe cos cor, but i guess 2 and no cos would do fine. generally hunters + locks haven't really performed for us on that fight (and on many other NN dps races). we just got our first hunter with 6 t3, so that might help as mana issues are their biggest problem there afaik. i am still wondering what the 2 rogues on the bottom did there. they don't have perfect gear, but the top rogue is still using perd blade (combat dagger, full dd at least, which not all have). all four warriors on top are fury, grumf 2h, the rest DW. the one MS warrior with very sucky dps is using nightfall. although a MS dude with deoi did not nearly as much dmg as fury warriors with worse gear.
we buff (fire) mages > fury warriors > combat rogues > dagger rogues > warlocks > hunters > ms warriors (those are generally using nightfall so whatever).
to me it seems that the top dps in NN is always rogues, mages and fury awrriors. the other dps classes have a really hard time to keep up with those. for loatheb i'd prolly bring 1 tank, 7 shamans, 5 priests, 1 druid, 1 warlock, 25 dw warriors, if i could. :)
@shadowpriests: a friend was just quitting wow and did the usual thing priests do - spec shadow for 1-2 weeks and see if thats more fun. i grabbed his priest and put him in MT group along with some locks, to see if that helps. the problem is, VE triggers corrupted healing. then loatheb cleans curses every 30s, so you get maybe 28s of VE every minute if you time it well. unfortunately my pal does not have much spellhit gear, so i got resists here and there, which blows really bad. plus theres the common shadow priest problem - you run oom after 3 min of just mind flaying and mind blasting. my dmg wasn't very good either, compared to other classes which actually gain a much bigger benefit from +crit. after 2-3 hours of trying that, i gave it up and just specced lightwell along with another priest, which helps the locks (and low hp casters with unlucky potions) as well.
The real problem is the latter, most Warlocks are flat out bad. I'm sorry.
I can't help but feel alot of the bad rep given to Warlocks in nax is basically do to un-creative and flat out lazy Warlocks.
Warlock DPS in itself.. is quite often dependant on how hard the Warlock wants to work for it. Sadly it's also very dependant on how many Warlocks are present, and if you have to debuff for the other classes. Nothing new here, just repeating for the sake of doing so.
We are one of the few guilds you will find around that didn't really subscribe to the whole apathetic "Warlocks are worthless in Nax" trend.. and we regularly raid with anywhere from 4-6 locks. Everything dead up to 4h.. and to be honnest, I don't think we were ever banging our heads against an encounter to the point of removing them for other classes. Yeah, I felt useless at first on a few fights, but some clever work arounds.. organization.. and out of the box thinking solved most of my problems.
Do our Warlocks take the top 3 spots on the DM? No, not really, but we beat a fair share of our frost mages, dps warriors, hunters, and on a few rare occasions.. some of the lesser geared rogs.
Sorry to get off topic.. but on the Loatheb related note.. I'd reccomend giving your locks some slots for Siphon life.. and god-forbid.. a drain life or two. Get them to downrank to R3 lifetap.. and tell them to play smartly.. and I think you will be pleasntly supprised. Siphon life, Deathcoil, and Life drain.. go even that much further on Thaddius. Are these particularly strong fights for the class? No, but far from a wasted raid spot.. and a very far stretch from being prioitized at the end of the spore rotation.
I don't have a screenie from our last Loatheb sadly, but our consistantly higher DPS lock.. beat out just about everyone but our 2 fire mages and the rogs.
Warlock DPS is about timing more than anything else. Planning consumables, gear selections, and alternate methods of sustaining yourself is what makes the class enjoyable to me. If all I had to do was show up and spam frostbolt/fireball/bloodthrist/backstab, I think I'd /emoslashwrist after a week or so of raiding.
Warlock DPS is about timing more than anything else. Planning consumables, gear selections, and alternate methods of sustaining yourself is what makes the class enjoyable to me. If all I had to do was show up and spam frostbolt/fireball/bloodthrist/backstab, I think I'd /emoslashwrist after a week or so of raiding.
You pretty much nailed it, but it's hard to get the uncreative warlocks to actually realize that.
Even on the naxx trash which is perfect for warlocks, a lot of them will just stand back and bolt things over and over because that's all they're used to.
7-800 dps from dots alone on some of the pulls there is pretty awesome
Sorry to get off topic.. but on the Loatheb related note.. I'd reccomend giving your locks some slots for Siphon life.. and god-forbid.. a drain life or two.
With 3-piece felheart I get about 60 less damage (around 600'ish), and my drain life hits for 235 per second on a mob with shadow vuln up. That's nontrivial damage and healing, when you add your other dots :)
well the locks on my screenshot were doing worse then usually. our better locks (play + gear wise) reach 150-170k, which is ok. however, they are most definitley not getting syphon life or drain life slots. :/
if you set up your own rotation, you can at least bandage once more then the normal players cycleand use a tubber early on, till when other people are using their HS, the CD is up again. given high warlock hp, you can aslo use rejuv pot or dreamless sleep instead ofa shadow prot pot. its definitley doable and you don't have to waste dps debuffs for it.
I make top 3 every time on Loatheb. Last night I missed the last crit buff and I still made 6th. Death Wish and Execute is just silly if you can manage the aggro from it. This is the one with my highest damage so far:
Order is:
Me (Fury, Crul MH Doom's Edge OH)
Fury War (ex Rank 14 Tauren with the Axes)
Fire Mage
Combat Dagger Rogue
Fury War (ex Rank 14 Orc with the Axes)
Sword Rogue
Fire Mage
Combat Dagger Rogue
Combat Dagger Rogue
Frost Mage
Our melee DPS tops this fight very consistently, unless Rust or Eba get a lot of Ignite ticks. We do buff out the tits for this one tho, lot of melee buffs (Onyxia's, Zandalar, Rend's if we have it) and the casters usually get a Flask. Last night we blazed Loatheb, Gothik AND 4 Horsemen with our Loatheb buffs, so it was worth splurging there.
'@shadowpriests: a friend was just quitting wow and did the usual thing priests do - spec shadow for 1-2 weeks and see if thats more fun. i grabbed his priest and put him in MT group along with some locks, to see if that helps. the problem is, VE triggers corrupted healing. then loatheb cleans curses every 30s, so you get maybe 28s of VE every minute if you time it well. unfortunately my pal does not have much spellhit gear, so i got resists here and there, which blows really bad. plus theres the common shadow priest problem - you run oom after 3 min of just mind flaying and mind blasting. my dmg wasn't very good either, compared to other classes which actually gain a much bigger benefit from +crit. after 2-3 hours of trying that, i gave it up and just specced lightwell along with another priest, which helps the locks (and low hp casters with unlucky potions) as well.
Well dear god if you're putting a shadow priest in at least make sure they've got the requisite gear to keep up and you're not making judgements off of dissaffected holy priests looking for a change with whatever they've got handy =P. I'm at 15% hit when specced shadow, and can contribute a solid 400dps depending on consumable use (Maybe more I havn't clocked myself recently- I'm at 600+dmg), at 30% of that returned that's 120for 5 people (plus pets if you're so inclined) for 25-30 seconds which is about 3k healing per person. I've not had a chance to work on Lotheb myself (and I'm specced holy for patchwerk qq) but theorhetically it could be an option if you have well geared shadow priests.
And I don't run oom all that quickly =P (Paladins ftw.)
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well the char has full epic shadow gear. claw of chromaggus, several pieces T2.5, firemaws clutch, green dragon gloves etc (all with the appropiate enchants). but in the end it was sitll a holy priest just picking up random spelldmg pieces and not going for shadow pve, so the hit gear was lacking big time.
09/22/06, 3:39 AM
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