All of the staves and daggers have spirit on them, and all of the maces have MP5 (Source). But really this is just an extension of all the rest of the loot table (caveat: not everything has been discovered, but the trend is clear). Adoriele is right that the correct solution is to make spirit better for us, and Zifrelm is right that this is not likely to happen in the next few months.
What it comes down to in the end, though, is overall scaling. Not everyone has to get the same out of every stat, as long as overall scaling remains on par. Remember when they changed Feral to use rogue gear?
Well..we should all hope for some not yet discovered items. Making spirit important for us would mean either increasing the coeficient that goes to SP, or just comming up with something new in our already bloated talent tree.
By the way, sharing gear with rogues really was a necessary wack on the head. Reducing armor and stamina on the other hand was really uncalled for.
Is anyone else noticing that we are scaling badly in comparison to melee because of the movement required on most of the Ulduar fights? It seems that everytime I get a proc it's wasted. I understand that Eclipse Wrath -> Starfire is best in terms of dps for straight out nuke fights but I need to figure out something for the other fights. I hit top dps for Razorscale last week but last night on Thorim (gauntlet group) I was in the last 5 for dps and that was the theme for the night on Kologorn (adds, eyebeams), Auriaya (adds), XT (heart only 30% before switching to adds). Our guild generally looks at all boss fights or defeated bosses when looking at overall dps and I'm getting tired of comparing poorly to melee who can just sit there on the same target for 90% of the fights.
I also took out my aoe talents. We assumed single targeting would be required again but so far haven't found that to be the case. Go go blizz, aoe ftw! (not) At least this trash almost requires CC...
So you have 1 piece of t8 and you think a wrath rotation is better now? Have you read the last three pages or spent any time with wrathcalcs or rawr yet? You'll find that all three agree that a SF rotation is superior at any reasonable gear level.
edit: of course, I say this and I go play around with glyphs in rawr and see a Wrath rotation eke ahead by 15 dps in Ulduar gear. So check it for your gear and see what you get.
No, Sry you misunderstood me (maybe due to my bad english).
I want to change my Rota AS SOON AS i get my 2nd T8 Item. I would never consider to switch from Lunar to Solar w/o the second Item. I would favor the Solar Eclipse (if i had 2xT8) because i think i gives you more flexibility and possibilty in the current Ulduar Progress (at least for me).
I get 250 Haste through those Items but Zero Crit.
I could change some of theese to Items with equivalent SP/INT Stats but with Crit instead of Haste. But im not so sure wether this is worth a shot or complete BS. And i dont want to spend a progress Evening experimenting with Gear and Rotation if im completely wrong.
Forgive me if I'm not holding my breath. They won't be doing anything major in 3.1, i.e. the next several months.
In the mean time I have to deal with shitty gear that is a side grade in almost all cases. All leather has spirit, and of the cloth items that have no spirit, ALL of them have hit with the exception of a chest piece I've seen. (Obviously the gear hasn't all be discovered, but a lot of it has and what we've seen so far doesn't bode well.) And most of our tier gear has hit too.
Choosing optimized gear and doing competitive damage is important to me, and it's like Blizzard is intentionally trying to drive me batshit insane.
It's perfectly fine for Blizzard to itemize cloth without spirit, or with hit. There are likely going to be 9 people in the raid who can use cloth gear only, plus a few others who may take cloth upgrades even if they're not their native armor class. On the other hand, You should have 4 people in the raid, tops, who need caster leather, and that leather would be fairly poorly itemized for a mail/plate caster (who get very very little benefit from spirit).
Will we do better wearing the 'perfectly' itemized cloth than wearing only leather? Perhaps. But you're going to have to compete with the three cloth classes to do so, and you'll probably be holding your raid back if you do. We're balanced around wearing caster leather, with all that implies. Wearing cloth is akin to a Fury Warrior wearing leather. It's doable, but they're going to find a way to make it unpalatable. It's just not large enough of an issue yet.
No, Sry you misunderstood me (maybe due to my bad english).
I want to change my Rota AS SOON AS i get my 2nd T8 Item. I would never consider to switch from Lunar to Solar w/o the second Item. I would favor the Solar Eclipse (if i had 2xT8) because i think i gives you more flexibility and possibilty in the current Ulduar Progress (at least for me).
I get 250 Haste through those Items but Zero Crit.
I could change some of theese to Items with equivalent SP/INT Stats but with Crit instead of Haste. But im not so sure wether this is worth a shot or complete BS. And i dont want to spend a progress Evening experimenting with Gear and Rotation if im completely wrong.
I hope i made myself understandable
I see what you're saying, but if you check it out in Rawr I think you'll see that even when a wrath rotation starts to pull ahead, it's not by much. And you probably won't see any real world increase since starfire is more forgiving of lag than wrath due to the way the spell queue interacts with the global cooldown.
Originally Posted by Adoriele
It's perfectly fine for Blizzard to itemize cloth without spirit, or with hit. There are likely going to be 9 people in the raid who can use cloth gear only, plus a few others who may take cloth upgrades even if they're not their native armor class. On the other hand, You should have 4 people in the raid, tops, who need caster leather, and that leather would be fairly poorly itemized for a mail/plate caster (who get very very little benefit from spirit).
Will we do better wearing the 'perfectly' itemized cloth than wearing only leather? Perhaps. But you're going to have to compete with the three cloth classes to do so, and you'll probably be holding your raid back if you do. We're balanced around wearing caster leather, with all that implies. Wearing cloth is akin to a Fury Warrior wearing leather. It's doable, but they're going to find a way to make it unpalatable. It's just not large enough of an issue yet.
I'd prefer to see caster leather offset items be removed. Give us some sort of stat modifer to make up the difference in armor (or not, it doesn't really matter to me outside of pvp gear). That would let all* the dps casters pull from the same pool of armor and wouldn't leave druids in potentially inferior items or leaving leather stuff to rot.
*maybe not elemental shamans, but they don't want spirit items. For that matter, remove caster plate so shamans/paladins would just wear mail and druids/clothies would just wear cloth.
I'd prefer to see caster leather offset items be removed. Give us some sort of stat modifer to make up the difference in armor (or not, it doesn't really matter to me outside of pvp gear). That would let all* the dps casters pull from the same pool of armor and wouldn't leave druids in potentially inferior items or leaving leather stuff to rot.
*maybe not elemental shamans, but they don't want spirit items. For that matter, remove caster plate so shamans/paladins would just wear mail and druids/clothies would just wear cloth.
While I also like that idea from an itemization standpoint, I find it very hard to stomach. A compromise might be something similar to sunmote transmutation, in that the item drops as cloth (or leather), and can be converted in Dalaran to an item with the same stats, but a different AC. Not sure how permissible that is within the confines of iLevel, but it does tend to solve both the issue of flavor and keeping the loot tables at a manageable level.
I may be wrong, but I got a feeling of how itemization is done this time being not as a "max out sp+haste, leave other stats behind, let's raise our dps to the stars". All mana classes got nerfed on mana, we are of no exception. Now, in order to get back our regen without rebuffing healers, looks like we will need a bit of spirit on gear, while having not too much haste as before, to keep ourselves competitive against other caster classes, plus being able to recover back our current allocated mana talent points.
I am not seeing a huge dps increase from new Ulduar gear. Instead, I see a more mana-oriented gear, still with a small room to focus on one particular stat. But I do not think we will ever see our moonkins doing way too much damage than today. We will do the same damage however lasting longer. This is our improvement post mana regen nerf, on my point of view.
I may be wrong, but I got a feeling of how itemization is done this time being not as a "max out sp+haste, leave other stats behind, let's raise our dps to the stars". All mana classes got nerfed on mana, we are of no exception. Now, in order to get back our regen without rebuffing healers, looks like we will need a bit of spirit on gear, while having not too much haste as before, to keep ourselves competitive against other caster classes, plus being able to recover back our current allocated mana talent points.
I am not seeing a huge dps increase from new Ulduar gear. Instead, I see a more mana-oriented gear, still with a small room to focus on one particular stat. But I do not think we will ever see our moonkins doing way too much damage than today. We will do the same damage however lasting longer. This is our improvement post mana regen nerf, on my point of view.
Just my $.02.
If they wanted to help our mana regen crit would be a much better choice than spirit. Graylo went over the math in a blog post of his and it turns out crit is only about 2.97% behind spirit in returning mana but 433% better for dps.
Source: Gray Matter: Mana Regen: Spirit vs Crit
Should I switch out Dying Curse? or maybe do something weird like drop Illustration and use 2 hit trinkets, and do something like dropping Balance of Power and using the talent points for something like Brambles or Gale Winds?
Edit: I also picked up the [Idol of the Crying Wind] . Is it worth replacing the Starfire trinket? First thoughts is that as things are tons more mobile than they were in Naxx, I'm missing a lot of uptime on Eclipse, thus having a constant dot ticking for 1400-1500ish seems to make more sense. But if anyone has solid numbers on which would be better, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Last edited by anyakaschala : 04/23/09 at 7:44 PM.
No, you don't. You dream of a day where you can use all of the stats on a piece of gear, regardless of their name. The problem with Spirit isn't that it's not good, it's that it's not as good for us as other stats. Unfortunately, Resto druids still very much need Spirit, and it would be a step backward for Blizzard to itemize caster leather without spirit, for the same reasons that it's not a good idea to itemize caster leather with hit. You'd end up needing two full sets of gear able to drop off of bosses, where one would suffice, which leads to loot table bloat, and people cursing when Moonkin leather drops because only one person in the raid can wear it. So, either guilds would end up sharding a lot of excess gear, or the Moonkin leather would be so rare as to be non-existent for a lot of people.
The current situation, where both Trees and Moonkin can use the same gear (ignoring, for the moment, set pieces which allow more tailoring to specific needs), is much more preferable. Guilds aren't disappointed when Moonkin leather drops, and it drops frequently enough that it's not impossible to get. The issue we have now is that we need to get more out of spirit. Intensity is one way, Improved Moonkin another, and if it's not enough to balance us, Blizzard will find another way. They did it with Mages, they can figure out something for us as well.
Thats some very very good points.
But, i would like you to talk more about why we shouldn't also try to get the cloth gear? Im seeing peices dropping with awesome stats for us. Its a massive nerf to us not to take upgrades. Especially in my guild where we use dkp.
Another comment was made that alot of gear in uld is centered towards longer fights (more spirit) There seams to be absolutly no need for spirit in any of the boss's ive fought so far. currently 7down on 25man.
I admit alot of my gear has spirit on it, but i have no points in intensity so im not getting any mana back during casting.. which i alwasy am during the fight. I finish most fights near or at full mana. 90% of the time in the top 5dps/dmg done.
Is anyone else noticing that we are scaling badly in comparison to melee because of the movement required on most of the Ulduar fights? It seems that everytime I get a proc it's wasted. I understand that Eclipse Wrath -> Starfire is best in terms of dps for straight out nuke fights but I need to figure out something for the other fights. I hit top dps for Razorscale last week but last night on Thorim (gauntlet group) I was in the last 5 for dps and that was the theme for the night on Kologorn (adds, eyebeams), Auriaya (adds), XT (heart only 30% before switching to adds). Our guild generally looks at all boss fights or defeated bosses when looking at overall dps and I'm getting tired of comparing poorly to melee who can just sit there on the same target for 90% of the fights.
I also took out my aoe talents. We assumed single targeting would be required again but so far haven't found that to be the case. Go go blizz, aoe ftw! (not) At least this trash almost requires CC...
You should probably pick up Typhoon and Gale Winds. There's a lot of AoE involved in the instance, and Typhoon especially is very useful as an extra instant while moving and can hit a lot more than you might think (hits both arms and Kologarn on that fight, useful for AoEing iceblocks on Hodir and for use as an instant for when movement is needed, adds on Freya, packs in the Thorim tunnels, adds on Mimiron, etc etc). I'd suggest if you do pick up Typhoon to use the minor glyph though, as mobs bouncing around are quite annoying.
Faarque, you don't have mana problems because you don't have Typhoon and you don't have the Starfall glyph. Both increase the drain on mana by quite a significant amount if you use them a lot. I don't understand why you have 1 point in Dreamstate and don't have Force of Nature though, as FoN is one of the most powerful talents we have when used correctly.
I'm interested as to where you're seeing these awesome cloth pieces. So far I've only seen cloth items with very similar stat breakdowns to leather items, apart from some of those with hit rating (which have hit rating instead of spirit), which isn't of much interest to me because of the hit gained from other pieces of gear. Filtering through gear on wowhead returns this list which contains very few items, and only one cloth piece (which admittedly is ridiculously good).
Another random point: I'm at odds with just how many blue sockets there seem to be on gear right now, especially with a lot of those having pure spellpower bonuses. Being a jewelcrafter carries a hefty benefit due to the number of blue sockets; if there were to be an increase in the power of spirit it would also help to reduce the lead that jewelcrafting has over other professions.
Wasn't able to search for anything about this but has anyone managed to obtain the 4pc yet to test to see if the IS proc really does have a 3min CD(according to wowhead spell info)? Just would like to know if the 4pc is absolutely terrible or just bad.
I'm actually a little confused now with the nwe things that arose with moonkin raiding.
Reading in other threads i've heard of a 1MF rotation vs a 2MF rotation but actually i can't clearly understand how those two are done and what's the difference in them.
My actual dps cycle is the usual:
IS- > MF-> W till eclipse-> SF on eclipse and ICD than back to W
I usually refresh MF at the start of an Eclipse proc and let fall IS during the proc, while i refresh both when needed on the other occasion ( Eclipse on ICD or up for proccing)
From what i have read instead should i cast MF/IS only on certain times and let them fall otherwise? Should i refresh both dots when i'm trying to proc eclipse or should i only refresh MF if needed ( due to the random nature of eclipse sometimes it took me more than one full duration of MF to proc it)?
If you manage 100% uptime on your dots (which is suboptimal since you don't want to refresh during eclipse), then improved insect swarm is something like a 2.5% improvement on ~80% of your damage. 2% damage improvement overall, if again you have 100% uptime and it's purely a stand and nuke fight. In fights with movement, aoe, or other gimmicks you're going to have less than 80% of your damage be from nukes, which makes it worth an even lower amount than 2%.
Celestial focus' haste multiplies with all other sources, so it comes very close to a 3% improvement regardless of what you're casting.
I have forgotten that Celestial Focus's bonus multiplied. That indeed makes it a stronger talent. I have now respecced to take 3/3 Celestial Focus, 2/3 Improved Insect Swarm and dropped Intensity altogether. I seem to be managing with mana, even on Deconstructor, now that the kills are much smoother.
However, to be the devil's advocate, you don't need 100% uptime on your dots to take full benefit of Improved Insect Swarm.
Using IS before spamming Wrath to trigger Lunar Eclipse will give you full benefit for your Wrath casts. IS can fall off whilst you're casting Starfire during Eclipse, but it doesn't matter as it doesn't affect Starfire at all. Using two Moonfires per Eclipse cycle will result in 100% uptime. So you get full Improved Insect Swarm benefit without having to cast any DoTs during Eclipse.
Should I switch out Dying Curse? or maybe do something weird like drop Illustration and use 2 hit trinkets, and do something like dropping Balance of Power and using the talent points for something like Brambles or Gale Winds
We had Living Flame drop as well and I passed on it for two reasons
1 - Hit isn't an issue now, and with how many Ulduar items have downright silly amounts of hit on them, I think it's going to be a bigger issue not overcapping your hit than reaching the hit cap..
2 - 505 spellpower for 20 seconds every 2 minutes equals roughly 84 spellpower on average. Dying Curse's 765 spellpower for 10 seconds every 1 minute (45s internal cooldown + ~15 seconds of casting before it procs, which is probably pessimistic..) equals roughly 127 spellpower on average. The Living Flame has a slight advantage in that it's burst on demand, but that also means the average damage is even lower if you don't use it as soon as it's up.
So I picked up [Living Flame] off Razorscale last night. Currently I'm using [Dying Curse] and [Illustration of the Dragon Soul]
Should I switch out Dying Curse?
While going over hit cap is certainly starting to be an issue, it isn't that hard to find items that allow you to switch that out for alternate itemization points. (Even if the item might be theoretically "worse" when evaluated stand-alone.) Once we all have access to the full loot-table of Ulduar and have everything on farm it's a different story, but for now I think this trinket is very viable.
I find the on-demand burst of [Living Flame] to be VERY useful as an alternative to [Dying Curse]. By either (a) using it purely on-demand for fights when dps only matters at specific moments (e.g. Razorscale) or by (b) attaching it to Starfire to ensure that it is up only (or mostly) during Eclipse procs, you get maximum value (if not maximum average sp) from the extra burst.
You have to make the bonus spellpower from Living Flame work about 50% harder to make it equal in spellpower value. This is not impossible if you mix it with bloodlust, treants, and eclipse but it does take quite a bit.
I tried to do a search and came up short on how we value Eye of the Broodmother. I usually do the math on a spare sheet of paper as I am at work and excel is not always handy when I am teaching. With that being said have we come to a point in ranking it compared to dying curse, living flame, Sundial, and IoTD.
I know pre 3.1 Dying Curse and IoTD were the best. Unfortunately I only had Embrace of the spider and Dying curse. I currently have 243 hit rating with Sundial and Embrace equipped. My thoughts were to replace Sundial with Eye of the Broodmother. Not sure how they scale against each other.
Could anyone help me with equations to see the dps differences and uptimes?
I tried to do a search and came up short on how we value Eye of the Broodmother. I usually do the math on a spare sheet of paper as I am at work and excel is not always handy when I am teaching. With that being said have we come to a point in ranking it compared to dying curse, living flame, Sundial, and IoTD.
I know pre 3.1 Dying Curse and IoTD were the best. Unfortunately I only had Embrace of the spider and Dying curse. I currently have 243 hit rating with Sundial and Embrace equipped. My thoughts were to replace Sundial with Eye of the Broodmother. Not sure how they scale against each other.
Could anyone help me with equations to see the dps differences and uptimes?
When it comes to trinket questions, I suggest Rawr. I spent a lot of time working on a proper trinket derivation that takes into account multiple trinket procs, uptimes, etc. Generally speaking, the trinket list is Illustration > Ulduar-25 trinkets > Embrace/Curse.
So far we have killed 8 bosses on 25 man,but i wasn't in all the fights. Still trying to learn, clip my dots ,innervate me or a healer and br a lot.
So the mana issue isn't steady yet for my final talent spec and still use my standard talent tree.
Haven't checked owlkin frenzy to see where it procs in Ulduar yet and if its worth it.
About itemization i will try to go with 2xT8 and rest BiS with some cloths in it,even if it makes the cloth wearers not so happy.
Head: Collar of Wyrmhunter-cloth
Neck: Fiery Havoc (hard mode all will want it)
Shoulders: T8
Back: Drape of Mortal D. ( hard mode-all will want it also)
Chest: Robes of Brute- might be the BiS item, non T8 set for locks-mages Sp's also
Wrist: broodmother or the cloth with hit rating on
Waste: ancient power-cloth -tailoring or leather one if there is no need of hit
Legs: T8
Feet: Fiery havoc
Rings: Purelight and Frozen loop if hit is needed
Trinkets: Scale of fates and Flare of Heavens ( eye of broodmother from 10 man is also good)
Weapon: Staff of endlesss winter or one new dagger from yogg i think with off hand)
idol the starfire one or the IS once i test it.
Still we need to see which items can be purchased, since some are cloth and others Bis for most caster dpsers. Other than that the stats the new items in Ulduar got will make them better choice and in a while we will drop all previous ones.
Finally i think that we will need to get our crit up to 30% raid buffed since we will loose 10%, 5 from t7 set and 5% from imp.scorch. haste will be set at about 400,maybe even less,depending also on weapon/staff choices,availability.
I got 4 pieces of t8 and thought i'd do some testing of the bonus. I was just casting i.s. on two of the target dummies in ironforge and noticed that occasional the proc would refresh itself. (does this mean there is no internal cd?) Also i noticed that if it procced while i was already casting a starfire the effect would be consumed (thinking this is a bug and it should b working like a warlocks nightfall). I've noticed a lot of people saying only go with 2 pieces of t8 is this because of the believed 2 minute internal cooldown on the proc?
I got 4 pieces of t8 and thought i'd do some testing of the bonus. I was just casting i.s. on two of the target dummies in ironforge and noticed that occasional the proc would refresh itself. (does this mean there is no internal cd?) Also i noticed that if it procced while i was already casting a starfire the effect would be consumed (thinking this is a bug and it should b working like a warlocks nightfall). I've noticed a lot of people saying only go with 2 pieces of t8 is this because of the believed 2 minute internal cooldown on the proc?
Well even if it doesn't have a cooldown, the only gain you are getting is the difference in cast time between your normal starfire cast time and your GCD. Of course that is just taking into account stand and nuke parts. Someone mentioned either here or on the wow forums (I forget which I've been going over both so much lately) that it is probably their attempt at making us more moving friendly, but if it is an attempt at that its a rather poor one.
Though it is nice to find out that there isn't that ridiculous cooldown on it, and given that it was refreshing itself makes me think it has no ICD. Thanks for doing that testing.
04/23/09, 11:23 AM
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