Random Question Thread

[Tricen]

What should a mages first valor point purchase be? I don't raid that often, so I'm pretty much in buyables and blues.

[Viq]

Probably Soul Casket -> T11 chest -> ring if I had to do it over again.

[Tricen]

This is my armory for reference http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...pintaxt/simple

[Viq]

Yeah, you'll want to replace the Witching Hourglass with Soul Casket when you can. Then T11 chest and legs are roughly the same upgrade for you, so order doesn't matter that much.

[Norellicus]

How close am I to tanking trollroics and raids? Armory has bear gear.

Also, resto gear has me up to 85k mana, 1200 haste, 2200 combat regen, and 5900 sp; how far does that get me? This is just from passively gearing up with JP and random heroic drops.

Edit: I'm more concerned with tanking since that's the only role I've seen the CTA in so far but I want to know when I can comfortably step in as a healer if absolutely needed.

[aurik]

Biggest thing entering raiding is really your mana pool. You want to be approaching 100k as resto druid as you enter raiding. Taking 2/3 furor instead of 2/3 Genesis in your spec will help you there, thats an extra 8k mana or so.

[Norellicus]

Okay so seeing as I just tanked BH 10 last night without batting an eye and am about to hit exalted Therazane, I'm going to hazard a guess that my gear is good enough to step into raids...but I'm probably going to have to organize my own pug because it seems like guild is pretty barren lately, so what's the best progression order and are there any addons that folks can recommend to make the task easier?

[Liseth]

Okay so seeing as I just tanked BH 10 last night without batting an eye and am about to hit exalted Therazane, I'm going to hazard a guess that my gear is good enough to step into raids...but I'm probably going to have to organize my own pug because it seems like guild is pretty barren lately, so what's the best progression order and are there any addons that folks can recommend to make the task easier?

Probably Magmaw. Then Conclave in ToFW. Good luck.

[Tajin]

magmaw - halfus / conclave - omnotron - maloriak - atra/twin drakes

[Kaylia]

Tanking is more about knowing when to uses your cooldown then having gears. Your mitigation doesn't seem to scale with gears as well as healing did for healers or damage for dps.

[Norellicus]

Yeah I know, and I know it was BH; just saying, it wasn't ever an apparent burden to heal me over the other tank and my health never seemed to drop alarmingly fast, so I think it should be ok. Bears have 2 (arguably 3, if 20% is enough for a respectable CD) cooldowns of their own which should get them through a 5 minute fight, and that's not counting healer CDs or others.

[Arcana]

I see you gemming alot of agility as a bear, dont get me wrong agility is good, but im sure theres places where stamina or stam + agi or stam + mastery is going to come in alot handier, more stamina = more vengeance = more ap for savage defense.

If you're serious about going bear tanking, get the VP boots cheap & the crafted epics as well.

One thing to note, baradin hold is never a difficult thing to tank, most of the damage is steady and at an interval and very rarely is there a burst that might kill you, but bosses like halfus and magmaw can easily change it, miss an interrupt get hit 2-3 times in a row without dodges and its a nightmare.

[Norellicus]

Gear shown right now is dps >_>

[Guitarman]

any idea what the general honor gain is from winning a bg? Wondering if it's easier to do bg and hope my side wins, or just spam heroics and convert the JP.

[SamanosukeShiva]

depending on performance but average 300 honor ish for me per win

[The Stig]

If your faction seems to suck or you get rotten luck and you're a tank, spam heroics and convert to JP.

***

<I'm a DK tank>

Nef, 10 man, we managed to get to Phase 3 four times last night. Due to that and unfortunately we seem to have a lot of accidents in Phase 2, I did not get much practice overall kiting the adds in Phase 3. I watched and examined a few videos beforehand but still managed to screw up on my part.

First attempt: First shadow blaze didn't res all the bones, so I hanged near it, but also close to the raid, I died pretty soon
Second: Managed to round up all the bones, but I was kiting way too quick around the edge (walking backwards). My assigned healer couldn't keep up with me anyway and I died
Third: Again shadow blaze did not res all the bones, causing 2 of them to randomly run inside the raid as I couldn't see
Fourth: Managed to round up all the adds first try and kited them around the edge. I resetted it once successfully but by then the Shadowblaze was coming in very fast. We got Nef to 15% before I died. I read on Tankspot and seen on various videos it's possible to reset twice before it becomes difficult due to lots of fire.

It's easy to see from the videos what to do but when it came to actually doing it I found it very hard to time/look out for Shadowblaze. The adds clog up my vision and I was unable to move away on time sometimes.

Leader tells me to move about 1 or 0.5s before the cooldown of Shadowblaze finishes (as suggested by DBM).

After the raid I went to Curse to see if DBM got updated and found that DBM has indeed been updated yesterday, and in the change log it suggests it has improved timings for Shadowblaze.

Any further advice how I should kite the adds and when I should move? We turn/position Nef accordingly so his tail is always facing me but when things got hectic I kited faster and not enough for the spinning of Nef to keep up.

My problem seems to be that while I can move I'm not sure how much to move without moving too much or too little since the fire kinda spreads/follows as well. If I move backwards I seem to move too slow. If I turn around and run my assigned healer yells at me. Although after the raid when we were chilling someone pointed out to me I could strafe, which I totally forgotten about, as I was strafing when I was turning Onyxia. Should that work here too with the large amount of adds on me?

Last thing, I also read that by the time I get 2 resets in it'll be difficult to keep resetting due to either lots of fire or the hecticness, so in this case it's better to just run like hell while a mage comes over and frost novas and people reapply CCs while Nef dies. Is this a good idea? We got 2 priests so I planned to have a little game of life gripping to buy some time because at that point I can safely say they probably won't reset due to my lack of practice/skill here and I should have plenty of threat, so I can run them across the raid with little worry.

In preparation for the next raid I am doing the following:

Making/Buying 20 or so Frost Grenades
Dropping 2 spare points in my spec that I can live without to Spec into 2x Desecration. I will begin Plague Striking after 2 resets, or 1 if it gets messy anyway

[Viq]

Strafing will help a lot. Honestly, 2 resets isn't that hard. We have a Paladin on adds in that phase, and he gets 2 resets every time unless our main tank spaces out and doesn't rotate Nef. As for your problem with the adds not all waking up initially, have your main tank point Nef's head at the stack of adds. If the meteor thing doesn't wake them all up, his breath will right after. Then you're good to go.

[Kaylia]

Any further advice how I should kite the adds and when I should move? We turn/position Nef accordingly so his tail is always facing me but when things got hectic I kited faster and not enough for the spinning of Nef to keep up.

Kiting the adds is a pain in the ass. I remember thinking it would be easy since the concept is so simple, but in practice...it turned out to be a little harder. If you managed to reset them once, you should be fine, but here is a few pointer that might help.

#1 Ask the adds tank to make a perfect stack. When you're learning, the difference is gigantic in p3. Of course, it won't always happen, but make sure he understand that it is important.

#2 Pull Nef to one side, and have the whole group stack toward the exterior. With this positioning, you have a little more than half a circle to kite them, and the raid will never be bothered with fire (or you with breaths/tail).

#3 You need to keep adds at a distance equivalent to 3 flames patches to be safe. The skeletons will often get healed when they are standing next to a flame, and since the fire spread, anything less than 3is risky

#4 For movement, I usually watch DBM timers until it reach 2 sec. After that, I turn around and run (strafing is better, but the adds don't hit that hard and you don't want to miss the fire). After it's done, I stun the adds (never stun/slow them when nef is about to cast a flame obviously), and repeat ~13-14sec later. I can usually drop 5 fires around the circles, then I cut through the middle (2 or 3 more flames). Near the end, around 20% hp on nef, you might want to ignore the fire and just keep them stuned/slowed and avoid as much damages as you can. It's just a matter of surviving a few more seconds at this points.

#5 Adds reset aggro when they wake up, so always have a taunt ready if they arent reseted at the same time ( can be a pain in the ass). In the worst case, you can have your rogue or hunter misdirect them back to you.



[edit]
I wouldnt have nef's head pointed at the adds ever. Breath is a lot of damage, and the faster you move it to the side, the sooner dps can start pushing it. If adds didnt all wake up, just place yourself inbetween the raid and the remaining adds. This way, you can easily grab them once the fire spread out, and you can start kiting clockwise/counterclockwise from there (the direction of the kiting doesnt matter, just make sure your healer is ready to go either way).

[The Stig]

Alright, I'll go rewatch the vids but unfortunately I cannot judge from the vids compared to in-game of how far I need to actually move. In-game, if I move too little I get shouted at. If I move too much, I get shouted at. It seems as they are focusing on dpsing/healing me, but my focus is getting the adds out of the flame.

I did not strafe at the time as I was too busy in panic trying to do it properly, so moving backwards seems to be too slow.

Kaylia: As you said you move at the 2s timer, I moved, backwards, none strafe, at 0.5, hence that was too slow/late and I was bathing in flame anyway. Will see this Sunday.

Does Nef always shoot Shadowblaze at the adds? That's what it felt like but I wasn't incredibly sure.

The only other trouble I'm having is the people complaining to me it's not hard and why I'm failing lol.

Actually, thinking about it, I'm minorly frustrated that I spent the 2 days leading up to Nef reading about it and watching videos, forming my own ideas/thoughts on how I should handle things, only for it to be completely overwritten once inside the raid because the "more experienced" guys watched the videos too and tell me exactly what to do rather than have my input lol



Also, so 2 resets is reasonable, and 3 is hard/impossible? I just chatted to one guy now and told him of my respec plan (because I lose nothing of importance by respeccing into desecration, for this fight) and he does not seem to understand that after 2 resets it should be fine just slowing them and buying time while Nef is finished off.

EDIT: found some kiting only vids. Will examine them in depth.

[Liseth]

<I'm a DK tank>

I didn't even need to read anymore about this after I read that you were a DK and I mean that in a good way, because I'm also a DK and one of the main tanks for my guild. Can I ask what class is tanking Nef? Because to be perfectly honest you would be more suited to tanking Nef than the adds. A Warrior or Pally would be able to handle the adds a little better than we would. Now I'm not saying that it's impossible to do as a DK, I just think it would be much better for you to tank Nef assuming the person tanking Nef now has a shield. For a DK if you have Mirror of Broken Images (with AMS) you'll never be without a cooldown for crackles making us one of the better choices for tanking Nef. Maybe talk your guild into swapping you out with the other tank for Nef? Again I'm not going to say it's impossible for a DK to kite adds, but it's really not a good idea since you're constantly moving. How often can you Death Strike while kiting the adds?