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:

Fire mages -> Frost mages -> Warlocks -> 2 handed warriors -> Hunters -> Rogues -> Dual wield warriors

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!

Wouldnt most warriors/rogues in that tier of end game (Naxx) have at least +10skill by now?

Fire Mages -> Rogues -> DPS Warriors -> Frost Mages -> Hunters -> Warlocks

Warlocks should be dead last, Loatheb is a nightmare for them.

Could someone explain why Loatheb is bad for Warlocks?

I imagine you're talking about them not able to self heal?

Wouldn't that change rather dramatically with a Shadow Priest (or 2) in the raid?

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.

You still glance, just for full damage.

Anyway, DPS warriors do significantly more damage than any class (barring the fire mage that gets the ignite roll) so they should be ahead of rogues.

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.

Before people start the warlock nonsense again:



(reposted from the sustained dps thread. Im not going to bother reposting all the additional comments again here - go read the other thread)

Loatheb is not patchwerk ^^

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.

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.