Leveling as a fire mage, or how to be awesome

One of my readers, Lugnut Daffodil, has posted some very interesting questions under my previous post regarding the awesome dps that my mage does at level 60. To quote him,

1. As fire, how has survivability and mana efficiency been while leveling? I also have the full set of heirlooms and a good rotation of blues from dungeon finder rewards.

2. When did you stop using pyroblast as an opener and only use it during hot streaks procs? Or not? Do you still throw out a pyroblast with its cast time here and there?

3. When in a instance, are you AOEing a lot, or for now is it still safer/more efficient to just stay single target killer?

These are very good questions and they come at the right time because I was just going to write a post about my play style as a leveling fire mage. His questions just made this post that more relevant. I will answer them all and hopefully something extra.

I will start with the usual disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in WoW, mages or fire mages in particular. I just happen to enjoy my latest class and he happens to be a (you've guessed it) fire mage.

The funny thing about fire is that traditionally I have always been scared to play with a fire spec. In fact, I was generally confused about mages. What was the best leveling spec? Arcane? Fire? Frost? They all looked equally baffling to me. This indecision caused me to delay starting a mage up until just before patch 4.01. I did attempt one on the Horde side a long time ago but he remained at level 28 with an uncertain spec.

Patch 4.01 simplified a lot of things and allowed me to dive into this fascinating class head on. I started with a fire spec going from level 10. At 40 I dual-specced into arcane. I tried arcane for a while because I liked the way you never seem to run out of mana. Eventually, in my 50's, I decided to switch back to fire and see if some extra talents made a difference. Wow, what a difference! While arcane was never top dps, often lagging behind the 2nd or 3rd person on the damage charts, fire boosted me to the top. At 60 I'm rocking 1000 DPS and at 63 I'm pumping 1300 DPS. I do have a dirty little secret why this is possible though. But that's a story  for another time.

I love fire so much at this point that I doubt I'll ever go back to arcane. I might replace my arcane spec with frost just to see how that works but truthfully frost seems a bit lackluster just by looking at the talents.

Here's my spec at around level 60: 0/26/0. I'm shooting for something like this at level 70: 0/31/0 and something like this at level 80: 2/31/3. Sue me if that's not optimal but that's how I like to roll. What follows is a breakdown of the talents that I have picked until level 60. This spec is equally useful to me when solo questing or running a 5-man dungeon.

Tier 1
Master of Elements 2/2 - Seeing how the fire spec is a very thirsty one, this talent is important in mitigating a part of that thirst by refunding a third of the cost of any spell that crits. This will be even more valuable in Cataclysm when mana will be at a premium.
Burning Soul 2/3 - This is mostly a filler talent for me because my aim as a ranged dps class is not to get hit. It does come in handy occasionally when I pull aggro or some mob is hitting on me.
Improved Fire Blast 2/2 - Some people don't like this one much but I use my Fire Blast whenever it's off cooldown because I like instant spells. 8% extra crit is pretty huge and I think 2 points in this talent are definitely worth it.


Tier 2
Ignite 3/3 - This is one of the defining talents of a fire mage. Simply put, it causes a DOT to be applied whenever you crit with a spell. It's a fast acting DOT which is even better. It makes any critting spell 40% more powerful.
Fire Power 3/3 - Flat 3% increase in fire damage. Mandatory. Also makes your Fire Orb explode. Whatever. I can't even imagine how awesome Fire Orb will be.
Impact 2/2 - This is a tricky one. It's pretty much mandatory for several reasons. First, it can proc from any spell that deals damage (including arcane, frost or AOE spells) and it instantly resets your Fire Blast. You can, for example, cast a Fire Blast, Impact procs and then you can immediately cast another Fire Blast. That's nice. But wait, there's more. The procced Fire Blast also spreads any DOTS on the target to all additional targets in a small radius. As a bonus, it also stuns the target for a very short time, enough to give you time to escape or hit it with another spell.

Tier 3
Blast Wave 1/1 - Do yourself a favor and take this one. Blast Wave starts of as a moderate instant AOE spell with a longish cooldown but further down the tree becomes a monster. If you want to be an AOE god, get this.
Hot Streak 1/1 - Another defining talent for a fire mage. Those lame Arcane Missiles are transformed instead into an instant and free Pyroblast!!!1!oneone The catch? The proc rate is much lower. And it has a chance to happen on crits instead of just spell casting. It's ok though, once your crit chance gets high enough you'll be chucking fiery chunks of death left and right.

Tier 4
Combustion 1/1 - Get this one. I don't pretend to understand the theorycrafting behind it but suffice to say that it is a pretty good long-cooldown spell, provided that your target is already burning from a bunch of your DOTS.
Improved Hot Streak 2/2 - Mandatory. This improves on a classic by dealing with those times when your crit rate is too high to proc Hot Streak reliably. Again, I won't go into details why this is so but I read it somewhere so it must be true :)
Firestarter 1/1 - Optional but I would suggest you take it. As a fire mage, Molten Armor is up at all times so you can cast Scorch on the move whenever you feel like it. There are some tactical advantages to this and I will discuss them below.

Tier 5
Improved Flamestrike 2/2 - 2 points in this talent makes Blast Wave really shine. From a so-so ability it morphs into an awesome twofer of a spell. Whenever you hit with Blast Wave, a Flamestrike also hits the same spot. Two instant spells for the cost of one. In addition, if you're feeling freaky, you can cast another instant Flamestrike on top of the ongoing carnage.
Dragon's Breath 1/1 - Mandatory because you can't progress down the tree without this one. Some people dismiss it, claiming that it's useful mostly for PvP but I disagree. I find it very useful for AOE and it has the added bonus of stunning the mobs for 5 seconds.
Molten Fury 2/3 - I'm only putting 2 points in this talent but you can choose to fill it up if you wish, later on after you've finished filling the fire tree.


Tier 6
Critical Mass 1/3 - You'll want to fill this up eventually but this is where I stop at level 60 (or rather 59). This talent improves on some of your big nukes but it also allows Scorch and Pyroblast to weaken the target and make it more susceptible to fire damage. Its tactical uses are interesting because in a group setting I usually start off with a quick Scorch to apply this debuff, before I unload with the big guns.

You will have noticed that I left out a bunch of utility talents. It's strictly up to you if you want to pick some of those. For my style of play I consider it unnecessary. They can come in handy in certain situations and will certainly make you less squishy and more survivable but I like to go for pure dps talents 'cos that's the way I roll. The theory behind these neglected talents is fairly complicated and doesn't constitute the subject of this article.

Glyphs
At level 60 you have access to 2 out of 3 of each glyph type. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), mage glyphs are screwed up at the moment so glyphs which should have been prime are major, for example, while others are missing. Luckily for us fire mages the missing glyph doesn't concern us.

Prime
Glyph of Pyroblast - This one is, simply put, essential for a fire mage. Increases the crit chance of an already awesome spell by 5%. Holy crap!
Glyph of Cone of Cold - This is the odd one out but I've picked it for several reasons. First, as I said, glyphs are currently screwed up. This spot should have been filled with Glyph of Fireball. But hey, lacking something viable (at least until Living Bomb becomes available), I've chosen to fill this slot with something that will significantly boost one of my AOE spells. Yes, I still use Cone of Cold even as a fire mage. You'll see why below when I discuss strategy.

Major
Glyph of Fireball - This should have been a prime glyph. Since it's not, it will do just as well as a major. It gives my Fireball an extra 5% crit chance. Sweet.
Glyph of Molten Armor - This glyph is the reason why fire mages like to wear their Molten Armor day in and day out. It's because it gives you an extra 3% crit chance.

Minor
Glyph of Slow Fall - I love minor glyphs that negate the need for a reagent. I use Slow Fall all the time so this is a must for me.
Glyph of Conjuring - This works well for me because I like to conjure lots of water and Mana Gems.

Solo strategy
These days I mostly run dungeons through the dungeon finder tool. I find it efficient to quest in between queues. For solo-ing, my rotation is simple and often mobs drop very quickly. First, I start off with a Pyroblast from range, because I have all the time in the world to cast it. As soon as the Pyroblast is released, and while it's still in the air, I cast 1-2 Scorches and if the target is still alive a Fire Blast will surely finish it off. If need be, I can kite the mob while Scorching it, thanks to Firestarter.

Group strategy
I'm doing most of my destructin' in 5-man dungeons because it's fun and it allows a character to get great gear. A mage's place is at the top of the damage meters so here's how I manage to accomplish this.

Single target
Because groups are go-go-go and they seem to tear through trash like it were butter, I don't have time to cast Pyroblast. Ideally, I should be casting Fireball because it has a higher chance to proc Hot Streak for the instant Pyroblast. However, I prefer to start with Scorch for 2 reasons. First, it puts Critical Mass on the target, making it vulnerable to fire. Second, it is quick casting so I can follow up quickly with a Fire Blast, or, if the target is taking longer to die, with a Fireball. As you can see, I never start off with Pyroblast in groups because by the time it finishes casting the mob is dead. Even some bosses are more than half dead in those 3.5 seconds. I'm all about the instant spells or quick-casts. So it's Scorch > Fire Blast > Fireball.


Multiple targets
Here's where the fun begins. I simply love to AOE everything to crap as a fire mage. I haven't truly AOEed stuff before this guy. There are several spells and talents that make this great fun.

I like to start off with a Blast Wave because it's instant cast (it can be used on the move) and it also procs Flamestrike on top. I then get close and use my Dragon's Breath and Cone of Cold in quick succession. Instant spells FTW. I also have the option to cast another instant Flamestrike on top, and even a Frost Nova. All of these add up big time. By the time I'm finished with all these instant spells, even elite trash mobs should be dead or almost dead. If there's a particularly nasty group of mobs, I can also toss an engineering bomb but that's only valid if you're an engineer so it doesn't apply to everyone. I am, so it does.

The beauty of all the instant AOE spells is that they also proc Impact which means I can follow with a devastating Fire Blast on whichever mob I have targeted, but more importantly Hot Streak which means instant Pyroblast.

Bosses
I use the single target strategy, except that I start off with Mirror Image.

A word on mana efficiency
I was a bit worried at first that as a fire mage I would run out of mana after every fight. I find that this is not the case. Very seldom do I find myself low on mana. I suspect that at higher levels this will be more of a problem. There are several things that help with my mana issues.

Evocation - every mage has this. If your mana is dangerously low, use it. In fact use it if it's off cooldown and your mana is less than 70% or so.
Mana Gem - you can conjure 3 of these at a time. They are like a mana potion only on a separate cooldown. They're cheap to produce so you should use them whenever you need to top off on your mana.
Master of Elements - that's why I suggested to get this talent. Since mages crit a lot, the mana returns aren't insignificant.
Mana potion - use this in addition to the mana gem since it's on a separate cooldown. I have a ton of mana potions collected over the levels. I even use the lower level ones because why not?
Drink conjured water - if everything else fails, try to drink a little after every fight. Conjured water is pretty much free, especially if you make sure to create a few stacks as soon as you log in.
(Glyph of Conjuring helps with both Mana Gem and conjured water)
Heirloom trinkets - I have the advantage of wearing dual heirloom trinkets which give me a total of 4% mana back on each successful kill. The beauty of this is that I can cast a whole complement of AOE spells on a large group of trash mobs and have all that mana refunded because usually I'm the one dealing the killing blows.
Endless Mana Potion - as an alchemist you also have access to this awesome little doodad. Use it every chance you've got. My mage is not an alchemist but my priest is and I really appreciate this item.

In conclusion, mana is not a problem at this point. Surprisingly so, I would say.

A word on aggro
There will be times in your mage career when you will pull aggro whether you like it or not. I like to manage this in several ways.

I always try to target-assist, by selecting the tank and pressing the F key. This will select their current target and the one which should have the most aggro from the tank.

I will give the tank a few seconds to grab aggro on multiple mobs before I unleash my AOE spells. Even then, sometimes I will pull aggro, especially if the tank isn't very good. I will keep an eye out for Death & Decay or Thunderclap or Consecrate, etc. Usually that indicates that it's safe to start AOE.

When pulling aggro I will either attempt to finish the mob (which I usually do thanks to my awesome dps) or I will stop casting and move towards the tank. Also, Mana Shield and Mage Ward can do wonders and will keep you alive in many a sticky situation.

When pulling aggro on multiple mobs I can often save my butt by casting an Ice Nova to freeze them in place. I can then jump away and do one of the above.

If all else fails, use Ice Block. It has saved my skinny little ass on numerous occasions.

Phew
This has been a marathon of a post. I'll be stopping here because it's late and I need to get some shut-eye. Hopefully all the important questions have been answered about leveling as a fire mage. If not, shoot me your queries in the comments and I will answer them the best I can. Until then, stay awesome y'all apprentice fire mages!

Holy crap 1000DPS at level 60!

Truly I say to you that a character is capable of 1000 DPS at level 60! Yes, my fire-specced mage has just hit 60 and is doing 1000 DPS in Hellfire Ramparts and Blood Furnace and he's mostly decked in old-world equipment, but of course with a full set of heirlooms.

Why I find this amazing is because I've seen dps classes in level 80 heroics who are barely pushing 1000 DPS.

This, of course, is all thanks to the fire spec. I find that it does tremendous DPS and most often I'm at the very top of the damage meters.

Here's my spec at level 60, along with glyphs: 0/26/0.

Edit: By the time I finished writing this short post my mage had hit 62.

4.01 retribution paladin impressions

Patch 4.01 has been up for a while and I'm sure most retribution paladin lovers have taken their character for a spin or two. Nonetheless, here are some impressions from a layman's perspective. For those not familiar, I only play in 5-man heroics and never do raids.

I specced my post-4.01 paladin as follows: 3/2/31. It's not the most efficient build by far, just something I came up with. I'm not even 100% sure about the glyphs but they seem ok to me.

So far I've only had the chance to try out the new rotation on a training dummy and I ran a single heroic which happened to be Pit of Saron. Let me get one thing out of the way. I've heard many people say that ret has been nerfed to the ground. Well, unfortunately I didn't have my dps meter during that heroic, but I've never seen bigger hits from my paladin before.

I'm wearing the same equipment I was wearing before the patch. Yes, the stats have changed some, but overall they're in similar amounts. I was critting regularly for over 10K and once I critted for over 20K. That never happened before 4.01. Never. The most I crit was around 6K-ish. So my perception is that my damage had got a huge boost.

However - and that's a big however - when I asked if anyone had a damage meter, someone told me I was 3rd. Barf. Before 4.01 I was frequently top dps or in the top 2. So I guess my post-4.01 dps did suck.

As I said, unfortunately I only got the chance to run a single heroic ever since. I'm having too much fun leveling my mage to make time for the paladin.

In regards to the new rotation and mechanics, I kind of dig them. Holy Power (HP) is an interesting concept but it does make the paladin feel somewhat like a rogue with 3 combo points. What pisses me the most is the fact that I constantly have to stare at the top left of the screen in order to catch all 3 stacks of HP. There's very little visual cue to signify that 3 stacks are up.

I like the new Templar's Verdict and also Word of Glory. I've heard people complaining that Word of Glory is severely underpowered but again, I feel the opposite. At 3 stacks of HP it heals me for over 6K, which I feel is a decent amount considering ret is not a healing spec. But what do I know?

The 31st point, Zealotry, seemed lackluster but now since it doesn't consume the stacks of HP anymore it is slightly better.

Unfortunately Divine Storm seems to have been rendered useless. I didn't notice any noteworthy numbers coming from this ability and I've been trying to use it whenever there were more than 2 mobs. I shouldn't have picked it up in retrospect.

I definitely need to run a few more heroics before I can make up my mind on the new retribution paladin but tentatively I would say that I like it. There are a few things that need to be fixed but I think Blizzard is moving in the right direction with paladins. But don't take my word for it. I'm just an amateur.

Holy fiery balls Batman!

We are living some crazy times right now folks. Since patch 4.01 hit, everyone and their grandma has been scrambling around to make sense of the changes or to simply make as much gold from glyphs and gems as possible. Me, I'm ashamed to say that I've put aside development on my new site for a while so I can get my fill of the new goodies.

I didn't make a lot of gold compared to others but I am richer by 20K since Tuesday. Most of that is from glyphs but I was unprepared and didn't have any glyphs in stock, merely a bunch of herbs which are now mostly gone. What I regret most is that I didn't stockpile uncut epic gems, due to the failed assumption that cooldowns would be removed from epic gem transmutes. Oh well...

Moving on, I actually spent the most time leveling my new mage. I had started a new mage the previous weekend and took him to level 8, then parked him in an inn to wait for 4.01. I wanted him to be my first character to experience the new level 10 leveling... experience.

Well, color me impressed. I played him Tuesday and Wednesday, for 6-8 hours combined and he gained 14 levels, with 1 more level yesterday. That makes him level 23. Wow! This is the fastest leveling character ever!

He is obviously wearing a full set of heirlooms, including a +30 spell power enchant on his staff and dual trinkets. Nonetheless, while questing, my mage feels overpowered.

At level 10 I specced into Fire and got Pyroblast. At level 10 I was critting easily for over 300. At level 23 I'm critting often for over 500. Those heirlooms sure do help with the damage. One weird thing was that at level 10 my character screen was showing over 25% crit chance. Which is out of this world for such a low level. It might have been a glitch though because after 10 it dropped sharply and now at 23 it's around 10% which is the norm.

I could barely wait until I turned 15 so as soon as I hit that mark I jumped into my first dungeon. From there on I queued for dungeons constantly, while questing.

The first problem with my fire mage in dungeons was that people seemed to be twinked up in heirloom gear and they killed any mob before I got the chance to launch my lazy-ass Pyroblast. I attempted to compensate for this by starting to cast before the tank pulled the mob. It kinda worked but sometimes I grabbed aggro from the tank due to the huge burst damage. While Pyroblast starts at level 10 with a short casting time of about 2 seconds or so, at level 23 it now has it's usual time of 3.5 seconds.

The second problem is that although I was sure I did top damage, looking at the damage meters showed I was lackluster. WTF. I had to work really hard to stay ahead of enhancement shamans, hunters and even the tank. Word is that fire mages are overpowered in this patch. Well, unless everybody else is also overpowered, I don't see how that's possible. Sure, my mage IS overpowered for questing but that's normal when you're wearing all that twinked gear.

So by level 23 I'd been in most low level dungeons: Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns, Razorfen Kraul, Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep. I got a few blue items and things are looking good so far.

As far as my rotation, well at this point I'm trying to pre-cast Pyroblast, then follow immediately with a Fireblast, then depending if Impact or Arcane Missiles proc, I'll use those. Frost Nova is very handy when I grab aggro and I've started using Arcane Blast on multiple mobs, which is cheap to cast (and instant), to proc Arcane Missiles and Impact.

In regards to mana, up to level 20 or so my mana never dropped below 90%. I know that Blizzard gave a huge boost to mana/health regen up until level 15 or so. Still, in dungeons I haven't been mana-drained so far. I've only used Evocation twice. I was a bit bummed that they removed mage water and food but now I see that there isn't much need for them at such low levels.

I'm gonna stick to a combination of questing and dungeoning, in other words queuing up while questing. That's the fastest way to level for a DPS class IMHO. At 40 I think I'll dual-spec into Arcane. It's looking might attractive.

Operation quick-mage

Remember a couple of days ago when I was enthusing about my future fire mage in Cataclysm? Well, last night I "remembered" that I already had a mage on another server, on the Horde side. He's a level 27 Undead. I decided to hop on him, spec him fire and join a random dungeon to see how it goes.

Since I hadn't played this guy in like 2 years, all my talents were reset. I won't even detail the fire spec I picked because the talents are going to change in a few days anyway, with patch 4.01. But I got the standard stuff.

While queuing for the random dungeon, I tried to set my skill bar in order. It was cluttered with all the crap from way back when I played this guy. Back then I used all the spells in my inventory, and I was specced something weird like an arcane-fire-frost hybrid. The queue wasn't long, and I barely had time to re-arrange my spells before I entered the dungeon.

It was Razorfen Kraul. The run was longish and the funniest thing that happened was when the tank died in the bat cave from some mobs who silenced both him and the healer. I was left with 3-4 elites beating on me so I did the only thing I could: used all the abilities at my disposal to try to put as much hurt on those mobs as possible. I had no illusions of surviving that fight. I had a hairline of life left and thought I was a goner but the healer kept healing me and the other dps were banging on the mobs. Finally, incredibly, we managed to kill them all and survived!

For all practical purposes it can be considered that this is the first time I'm playing this mage. I was surprised to find out that my dps wasn't bad at all. I was in the top 3. The tank and druid did about 52 dps while I did 48-49. This in spite of my really crappy gear. The shadow priest was terrible, barely above the healer.

The only thing that I didn't dig about the mage was that I spent all of the time between battles either drinking water or Evocating.

So there goes my short mage adventure. I wanted to try him before 4.01 and then I'll probably try him again after 4.01 to see how it compares. I don't think I'll play him after that, but instead I will concentrate on my new mage. I can't wait to equip him with all those heirlooms. If my poorly geared mage managed to be among the top dps, I'm sure a fully heirloom-equipped character will be king of dps.

Very nice changes to retribution paladins in patch 4.01

Well, if you love retribution paladins and haven't yet seen this article from WoW Insider, now's your chance. I've been keeping up with Cataclysm changes, of course, but this is a very nice write-up of how the new paladin resource, Holy Power, is supposed to work.

I have to say I'm excited. There are some new spells in there which will make rotations more interesting and also give us more options depending on the fight. Patch 4.01 should hit in a couple of weeks or so and this will give everyone the opportunity to try out the new talents and mechanics before Cataclysm. Hopefully there's enough time to get used to them.

Speaking of Cataclysm, I think I'm gonna start yet another paladin on a Horde server just to level up with the new system. It's gonna be a Tauren paladin and I'm gonna spec him retribution/holy. I've long been curious as to how holy paladin healing works.

Retribution changes are looking good so far but I can't say the same about other classes that I play. Healing in particular has me worried. But that's a subject for another post.

I'm rocking a Quel'Delar and I'm loving it

A long time ago I was expressing my wish to acquire a Battered Hilt for a Quel'delar for my hunter. It proved to be a pipe dream because I stopped playing the hunter and instead found new love in my retribution paladin.

After running a ton of heroics and realizing that my dps sucked in comparison to raid-equipped players, I endeavored to improve my gear.

One day, a couple of weeks ago, I spotted a Battered Hilt in the auction house for only 6500 gold. I only hesitated 2 seconds before I bought it. On my server the hilt goes for at least 7000 gold. In fact I've only seen it once for about 7500 but most often these days it hovers around 8-9K. It follows that 6500 is a good price. After spending 20K for my tanking gear I figured 6500 was chump change.

And so I embarked upon a quest of epic proportions which culminated in Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful. I won't describe the chain itself because you can follow it starting here. It's a fairly long quest and the initial chain is followed by about 2-3 more chains. There's a lot of running around involved but the hardest part is running the 3 Icecrown instances which are the hardest 5-mans in Wrath of the Lich King.

What I find a bit weird about this chain is that it requires you to run the instances in this order: Pit of Saron > Forge of Souls > Halls of Reflection. This means that if you've never completed Forge of Souls before, you'll have to run that one first, in order to unlock Pit of Saron.

You don't have to finish Pit of Saron (unless you've never finished it before) because you can complete the required part of the quest after the first boss. Just use his hammer to smelt the saronite. Oh but wait, you'll probably still need to kill Ick and Krick because likely you won't have enough saronite and there's more of it around these two guys. In the end you should stick around and finish the dungeon with the rest of the group because that's the nice thing to do. If you're dps, I guess you can get away with dropping group. I went as tank and would have felt like a dick to abandon the group.

By the way, the whole chain can be completed on normal and I recommend it because it's easier.

In Forge of Souls you have to get to the end and kill the final boss and then use the forge behind him.

In Halls of Reflection you just need to get inside the instance whereupon the quest item (the unfinished weapon) jumps from your inventory and attacks. You'll have to defeat the blade and then loot it. The ghost of Uther the Lightbringer will be present and you can trick the blade to attack him instead, and he will kill it for you. The only problem is that likely you won't be doing enough damage to get credit for the quest. I attempted this about 5 times on my own before I gave up and found a group. A group is the easiest way to complete this quest because the blade hits very hard when it does a whirlwind attack.

Now that the hard part is over you'll have to run around some more, including a trip inside a phased version of the Sunwell.

After all this I found myself with Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful. At ilvl 251 it's simply the most powerful weapon I could have obtained outside of raids. I enchanted it with Berserking, of course.

Shortly thereafter I also upgraded my craptastic trinkets to a Darkmoon Card: Death and a Darkmoon Card: Greatness. The new weapon + enchant + 2 new trinkets gave me over 1000 dps extra.

Along with a few other upgrades, I'm now frequently top dps in most random instances. According to the dps meter I do in excess of 4K dps. I really love seeing those big numbers roll. A couple of nights ago, however, I was shamed by a particular random run in Culling of Stratholme. I ended up as the 5th member in a guild run. The other 4 were guildies and it was obvious they were uber-geared by the way they devastated that instance. Up until then I had no idea Culling of Stratholme could be run in less than 10 minutes. Not one of these guys did less than twice my dps. I could barely hit 2 spells in my rotation and the mobs would be dead.

All this effort and gold spent for a cool weapon and two levels later, at 82, it will all be for naught. One of the quests in Cataclysm awards a blue weapon that's leagues better than even today's legendary Shadowmourne. BTW, the DK tank in the Stratholme run I mentioned previously was rocking a Shadowmourne. This new Cataclysm weapon is ilvl 305 and it's called the Axe of Earthly Sundering. The stats on it are amazing and I can't help but ask myself what stats will epic weapons have.

Here's a shot of my paladin sporting his new weapon.

A little RAWR-xperiment

So I just discovered RAWR, which is to say I just discovered hot water. In case you don't know what RAWR is, it's an amazing program that you can install on your computer and which allows you to import your character from the WoW armory, including their gear and talents and then calculates a million fascinating statistics for you.

You can download RAWR here.

I read about RAWR on some random site and I decided to give it a try because I wanted to see what exactly is my retribution paladin's DPS and how I can optimize it. Actually RAWR also has this really cool feature where you can specify a rotation and find out how efficient that rotation is. You can change spells in a rotation and it updates the DPS in real time.

Sure enough, I soon discovered that my rotation was bad and quickly reordered my priorities such that now (hopefully) it is optimal. Now of course, I realize that in the case of retribution paladins we can't really talk about a "rotation" per se but rather a system of priorities.

My old "rotation" was something like this:

Crusader Strike > Divine Storm > Judge > etc
My new one is this:

Judge > Crusader Strike > Divine Storm > etc

Of course, at any point insert Hammer of Wrath > Exorcism if the first becomes available and if Art of War procs for the second.

Here's a screenshot of the rotation portion of RAWR, along with some DPS stats.


As you can see, my DPS at the time this screenshot was 3380 but with the new rotation. My old rotation, although not terrible, would have given only 3234 DPS.

I also discovered that Seal of Command is much better than Seal of Vengeance (or Corruption) when fighting 2 or more mobs, which is always the case in heroics. Since I was using SoC anyway, I'm relieved that I'm doing at least something right.

I won't go into further detail regarding RAWR but I urge anyone interested in optimizing their character, whatever class and spec it may be, to give it a try. It is a very complex program but I managed to figure out the things that were of interest to me fairly quickly.

As I write this my DPS has gone up to 3657 (according to RAWR) due to some upgrades. My biggest problem is still expertise as I only have 7 (or 35 rating). For this reason I'm enchanting and gemming for expertise on my future gear.

Quoting from wowwiki, "DPS will need a total of 6.5%, or 26 expertise, or 213 expertise rating, to avoid Dodges on yellow attacks against a raid boss." So I still have a ways to go but since I'm not fighting raid bosses I can stay a bit lower and I should be fine.

I've been running heroics like crazy with my retribution spec so I could get emblems to gear my protection spec. Now I've completed my last piece of the puzzle and in theory I should be ready to run heroics on my protection paladin. I'm holding back though. Tanking is not as easy as DPS-ing and I need more experience under my belt.

My strategy these days is to run the daily heroic as retribution and then run a normal (non-heroic) random as protection. So far the worst dungeon I've tanked (on normal) has been Pit of Saron (twice). I actually tanked the second Pit today and I did much better than the first time.

On the other hand retribution is so much fun that I've decided to get my dude some DPS gear from Triumph Emblems as well. I'm referring to the Turalyon set. I've already got the gloves and I'm working on the other pieces. I've also set my eyes on a nice libram.

One more observation about DPS. I've noticed that it varies from dungeon to dungeon. In some instances my DPS is top-notch, around its theoretical maximum. In others it is dismal. One example of crappy DPS is The Culling of Stratholme. And it's not just me. Looking at the DPS meter, it seems that everyone is performing poorly there. I don't understand why. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this.

Now I'm off to run some more heroics.

Retribution paladin rocks in 3.3.5

I've talked briefly about retribution paladins in previous posts and the gist of it was that I greatly enjoyed my ret pally in Burning Crusade, after abandoning him in classic WoW with an indeterminate spec. I'll be damned if I remember what my first spec looked like. All I know is that back then I didn't quite grasp the concepts of tank-healer-dps and as a paladin I would assume all 3 roles in 5-man dungeons.

In Burning Crusade they changed retribution a lot and the spec finally became viable for PvE. That's when I specced right into retribution and leveled my paladin to 70. From what I remember, those were fun times. I really enjoyed playing him and leveling was very quick.

The Wrath of the Lich King came and paladins had a brief period when they outshone every other class by being overpowered. During those times I leveled to about 77 as paladin and then got the notion to try as protection from there on. This also coincided with some retribution nerfs during which the change which pissed me the most occured: they added a cast timer to Exorcism. I was pissed because I always used Exorcism as a ranged opener. At that point I imagined that most likely I won't be playing my paladin as retribution again.

More recently I decided to get my prot paladin the best gear money can buy so he could start tanking heroics. The problem was that there were pieces of equipment that simply couldn't be bought or crafted so I had to run heroics in order to get emblems so I could finish equipping him so he could run more heroics. I tried some regular (non-heroic) dungeons and even though with the new gear my paladin's stats were pretty good, I didn't feel confident enough to run heroics. So I got this idea of running heroics as retribution instead.

Having decided to give retribution another try, I ended up being pleasantly surprised at how ret plays. My gear was really crappy, most of it being from leveling quests. However, since the dungeon finder allowed me to run heroics, I didn't hesitate to jump right in.

For the past week or so I've been running heroics as a retribution paladin and I'm loving it. My gear has jumped from crappy to passable and my damage from an abysmal 900 dps to a more respectable 2-2.3K. All the new gear came from drops and a few dungeon quests that I completed. I enchanted some of it (my paladin is an enchanter) but haven't gemmed it because I don't have any sockets on this shiny new gear. One piece of gear that I bought with Champion's Seals was Claymore of the Prophet which is really cheap for a ilvl 200 weapon. I didn't bother buying something like Titansteel Destroyer because I figured my stint as ret would be brief.

Little did I imagine that I would enjoy it so much. Ret pallys are beasts! Last night for example I ran a heroic (one of the Utgardes, forget which) and I was top DPS at 2.3K average. I realize that I'm still doing crappy damage relative to raid geared players but still, at least now I'm pulling my weight.

What I like most about ret is The Art of War. This little baby procs off each and every melee crit (including judgements, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm) and since with my crappy gear I have about 26% unbuffed crit, you can imagine it procs a lot, meaning instant Exorcisms or a quick heal. In fact I use Flash Heal on myself quite often during fights because I take plenty of damage as melee dps. I also use it occasionally on some wounded team member if needed or if my Exorcism is on cooldown. Yeah, I miss a GCD but there's more to a paladin than just performing his primary function.

Ret is also amazing because there are no mana problems are long as you judge whenever the cooldown is up.

Stats

Here are some quick stats. I won't detail my gear because it is perpetually changing, almost on a daily basis. I also won't talk about enchants or gems because my pieces of gear are not keepers just yet.

Health: 15,200
Attack Power: 3041 with Blessing of Might.
Hit: 224 = 6.83% (used to be more before some gear changes but >6% should be enough for heroics)
Crit: 27.5%
Expertise rating: 3 = 0.75%. Ouch!

As you can see, my biggest problem is expertise and it is actually palpable because I've had numerous mobs dodge or parry my attacks. Now of course, I try to attack from behind so parries shouldn't be a problem but still, my expertise is terrible and needs fixing. I just don't have any gear with expertise on it and the meager amount that I have comes from my racial (humans + swords).

Talents

As I write this we are in patch 3.3.5, probably the last patch before Cataclysm. Here's what my spec looks like:

6/10/55

If you don't like it, I don't care. What I love about retribution is that you can easily pick all the talents you need from the ret tree, a few essential ones from the prot tree and still have spare points to put wherever you please.

Retribution in Cataclysm

From what I've seen so far, ret pallys will change a lot in Cataclysm but in a good way. There's a new thing called Holy Power that procs whenever we deal damage and then we can unleash it (currently stacks 3 times) for various effects. It sounds all good and I can't wait to try the new and improved ret paladin.

Conclusion

What more can I say? In patch 3.3.5, as we currently stand, retribution paladins are kick-ass. There are so many things to like about the spec: massive damage, simple priority-based rotation, a cool proc that allows you to either heal yourself or deal additional damage and in general plenty of survivability, especially when leveling.

Don't take my word for it though since I'm not such a big expert. Take one out yourself for a test drive but don't be surprised if you'll start cheating on your other characters.

Lolhealz

So I ran my first Northrend dungeon today on my priest, as shadow DPS this time. Since I wasn't 70 yet and I didn't have the latest level 70 skills, I didn't want to risk making a mess of healing. Besides, DPS is so much more leisurely...

After a very long wait of about 30 minutes, I finally found myself in Utgarde Keep. We had a paladin tank and a shaman healer.

A couple of minutes into the run it became apparent that the healer was having trouble keeping the tank alive, even when fighting small groups of trash. This wasn't gonna be good. In between DPS-ing I would pop a Power Word: Shield on the tank when her health dipped really low.

The healer was also constantly running out of mana and at one point told us to slow down so she could drink. That's when the tank said "You wouldn't run out of mana so often if you'd use your mana totem". At that point it dawned on me that the healer wasn't using a single totem. I was like, WTF.

From there on, she started using the mana totem. In the words of the tank (with whom I was having a private conversation about the healer), "facepalm".

After our first wipe I decided to switch specs to holy and heal the tank myself so we were pretty much dual-healing during the rest of the run. We tried initiating a kick vote but apparently the other members weren't aware how much she sucked so they declined to kick her.

Eventually we finished the dungeon though we almost wiped at the last boss thanks to those pillars which kept the tank out of line of sight.

There's no purpose to this post except to vent a little bit and wonder how the hell is it possible for some people to be so clueless at bloody level 70. At least, that healer is now on my ignore list so I won't have to suffer her incompetence from now on.