World of Warcraft

[bender5]

I say you're incredibly lucky to have 2 elemental shamans in the raid in general. It's so hard for me to find 1 of them at all to be honest

[Squeek]

It's pretty random, but that raid ended up having 4 shaman. I've been in one that had 6, and I've been in some that just had me. It's a pretty even split between specs, which tells me that Blizzard is doing something right with Shaman. Unlike Mages, who respec for every content patch based on which tree has the highest DPS.

It's great for some fights in Naxx, like Horsemen, Patchwerk, and Thaddius. Our Fire Elemental Totem is a huge bump in DPS but Elemental Shaman can't drop it due to the overall loss in DPS for the raid. So what I do when there are 2 is to coordinate with them and have them drop their Fire Elemental while I have ToW out, and then once their Elemental dies out after 2 minutes, we switch. It makes timer fights a hell of a lot easier.

[devonin]

The totem did 2.4 and I did 2.9, so they gave me 3.2, not 5.3.

What do you mean "They gave you"

Does your guild judge the worth of raid members by their DPS output?

[Squeek]

It. Recount.

Whatever.

[bender5]

Originally Posted by devonin

Does your guild judge the worth of raid members by their DPS output?

A lot of guilds do. Recently I was offered a place in a different guild because I put out like 6k dps on a 10 man Maly pug. A guild master was in the run and he was really impressed by the numbers I put out in the regular phases and drake phase. However, this is how I look at dps.

First thing I look at is gear when I judge someone's dps.

Let's say someone is best in slot in every piece of gear, best geared he could possibly be and he puts out 4.5k dps

Then someone who is almost equally geared missing a few pieces maybe puts out like 2.8k.

A third person who is like missing probably 8 or 9 pieces, but has some really nice ones puts out like 4.2k

You look at those numbers and think of the person's worth. I would consider a person pretty worthless if you almost have every single piece of gear you want and still put out really terrible dps. Certain fights the numbers don't matter, but when it comes down to assessing a person's ability dps is a pretty good place to look.

[Squeek]

You have to factor in classes and fights too.

It's so much easier gauging DPS on a fight like Sarth or Patch or something than it is to base it on most of the Naxx bosses, because Naxx fights require a ton of movement most of the time. My DPS on Sarth when that guy pulled 4k + 2.4k = 6.4k (stupid) was 3.4k at #5. That's about what I pull on training dummies too, so that's a pretty good estimate.

My best-in-slot maximum is just around 4k dps, but I can't do that. The top raiding shaman all use Enchanting and Jewelcrafting for their two professions to get the best DPS boosts possible. The lack of JC means I have to use blue gems for my meta bonus, whereas they can use their special gems that count as blue. That's about 100sp less right there. They can do special enchants, which is another 50sp loss right there.

But, right from the start, my goal in WoW was to make a support class. I support my guild by being the only Alchemist. Sure, I get a nice bonus with my elixirs to myself, but it's nothing like Enchant/JCs get. And they can use our elixirs on top of those bonuses. I specced elemental to be a support to all the casters in the raid while providing decent damage. I'm dual-speccing resto to be a backup healer or for healing Heroics, since I have a full naxx offspec suit too.

So, just because my naxx10 average DPS is 2.9k with full Valorous, don't think I suck. I'm making the healers and the spell dps better by being there, and I bring the best raid buff ever along with me.

PS:

The naxx 10 we did had 0 melee dps. Our guild leader noticed that they're 100% worthless in naxx and only make fights more complicated, so when we started another run next time around, we made sure all the DPS were ranged. People died, but there were no wipes on any of the four quarters.

[Sir Psycho]

My threat set: 30.1k health, 21% dodge/21% parry/21% block. Hit capped, 39 expertise.
My block set: 29.9k health, 20% dodge/19% parry/ 34% block. Hit capped, 26 expertise.
My avoidance set: 28k health, 26% dodge/22% parry/22% block. Hit capped, 26 expertise.

Im missing Last Laugh, Helm of Vital Protection, Mark of Norgannon and the Barricade of Eternity. With all those, I'll be at about 49-50 expertise which means with a potion and food I'll be 5 under the cap.

[bender5]

Let me guess you're a warrior tank right?

and wouldn't you have more total avoidance with 34% block than with the more dodge and parry?

[Sir Psycho]

When you block, you still take damage. My block set is for trash.

Some people don't consider block an avoidance and Im one of those people. It's more of a mitigation than an avoidance.

My avoidance is for something like Sartharion 3d or something if my guild is feeling a little bold to have me tank him.

[bender5]

I never thought of it that way.

I guess it makes sense.

What are you using as your main hand now?

[devonin]

If he's missing Last Laugh, I assume he's using either the Red Sword of Courage or Slayer of the Lifeless.

[Solid Dreams]

I think it's interesting that you're working on getting the expertise hard cap, most of them just say get the 26 expertise and hit cap and say you'll do fine.

I have 30k/21/19/20, working on getting hit/soft expertise capped.

Hard to do it though, and not drop a ton of stamina, since I don't have access to 25 man runs.

[Sir Psycho]

Well, hard cap with expertise will actually help me considerably. My shield slam gets parried A LOT and same with a lot of my other skills. I need all the threat I can, especially with a lot of the DPS in my guild pushing about 5K+ dps on single target. With my shield slams getting parried(I crit normally for about 8k or so, with everything popped it gets to about 15 to 18k) that's a loss of about 27k threat with that one move. Not to mention my white hits, devastates, revenges and heroic strikes getting parried too.

Current weapon: Red Sword of Courage, I want Broken Promise or Last Laugh.

[devonin]

I'm still rocking the Red Sword of Courage as well, and I intend to completely bypass the Slayer of the Lifeless. Broken Promise is marginally better to me (I prefer the faster swing speed pretty much universally) so chances are reasonably good that I'm either going to go from RSOC right to Last Laugh, or I'll end up picking up some other 213 from 10-man Ulduar.

[rade0110]

Did Sarth 1D last night in a PuG run. Took us four tries. First try there were only 6 of us that didn't get hit by the first flame wall. We were pretty melee intensive so they needed to remember to move out of the way of Tenen. Second time we got Tenen down, but I as well as about 6 other dps died because we had our faces eaten by adds while doing aoe, we had him down to 6% too. The third time was just like the first and the fourth time worked. Nothing good for a mage dropped

[Sir Psycho]

Logged out in my block gear: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...lneas&n=Tessel

[Tokzic]

Originally Posted by Squeek

The naxx 10 we did had 0 melee dps. Our guild leader noticed that they're 100% worthless in naxx and only make fights more complicated, so when we started another run next time around, we made sure all the DPS were ranged. People died, but there were no wipes on any of the four quarters.

i think what you're thinking of here is "bad melee dps", not all "melee dps"

The best DPS I've seen are all Enhance Shamans, Fury Warriors, and Rogues. Melee is awesome.

[Sir Psycho]

Melee DPS is stronger than ranged DPS in my opinion. You just seem to attract the crappy ones.

[Squeek]

My point wasn't that one type is better than the other. My point was that melee DPS makes Naxx harder. Sure, good melee DPS wouldn't screw up, but it's so hard to find good players of any kind.

1) Military Quarter: Warriors + Whirlwind
2) Patchwerk - No hateful strikes on 3rd aggro
3) Grobbulus - No extra slimes
4) Heigan - No melee movers during phase 1 getting diseased
5) Sapphiron - No people in narrow hitboxes getting cleaved
6) Kel - No 10-yard clustering and shared iceblocks

[tsugomaru]

A lot of melee in KT doesn't work and I have no idea why the raid designers would even design something like that. Our raids are really random. Some weeks we have 7 hunters, some weeks we have 7 elemental shamans, and then some weeks, we have 7 rogues and death knights. Can you imagine how hard it is to heal when melee gets iceblocked? The tank has to pop cooldowns if the healers want a shot at even saving them all.

~Tsugomaru