Siege of Orgrimmar Fight-Specific Tips (Part 3/4)

So, remember what I said last time about the second wing not being strategically complex? Say good bye to that, because here in wing 3, the fights are entirely about their unique mechanics. This section will test your raid's ability to preform under seriously unusual conditions.

[Updated: Added Heroic section and a note about Spectral Guise to Thok.]

• Malkorok
• Spoils of Pandaria
• Thok the Bloodthirsty

Siege of Orgrimmar Fight-Specific Tips (Part 2/4)

Welcome to the second wing. Here's where Blizzard starts to turn up the heat. These fights aren't strategically complex, (except maybe H Shamans,) but they do demand a decent level of raid awareness and output.

• Galakras
• Iron Juggernaut
• Kor'kron Dark Shamans
• General Nazgrim

Siege of Orgrimmar Fight-Specific Tips (Part 1/4)

Hey, everybody. Since my fight-specific tips series was so popular in Throne of Thunder, I thought I'd do it again for Siege. I'll be breaking these down along the Flex/LFR groupings, but all my tips are primarily for normal-mode, with some heroic notes on the fights I have done.

• Immerseus
• Fallen Protectors
• Norushen
• Sha of Pride

[5.4] Discipline Healing Basics

Penance: It's what's for breakfast.

Remember last week when I promised a Discipline basics post? Well, here we are.

Contents

1. Gearing
2. Enchants
3. Gems
4. Glyphs
5. Talents
6. Rotation
7. Buffs

[5.4] Discipline Healing Changes

Hey, everyone, long time no see. I fell into a bit of a rut, and, well, as you can see, I haven't been writing. But anyway, I'm back for 5.4, and it's one hell of a patch.

In case you've been healing all along, here's a quick rundown of what's changed. On the other hand, if you're new to Disc, I should have a new Discipline Basics guide up next week.

Throne of Thunder Fight-Specific Tips (Part 3 of 4)

Eye sea how you died there?

Welcome to the "experimental stuff" wing, where most fights are no longer about everyone independently doing their own thing correctly, and increasingly about coordinating as a group to handle mechanics that no single person can deal with alone. Don't worry, that's actually a good thing; get the mechanics right and it's hard to miss the output checks.

Throne of Thunder Fight-Specific Tips (Part 2 of 4)

Hit 5 koopas with one
shell to get a 1-up!

Whoops! This was meant to be up last week, but it looks like I failed to hit the Publish button. I guess it's convenient though; I should probably give my guild time to clear Iron Qon-Lei Shen before I go advising about them. I'm just gonna push back parts 2 though 4 by a week.

Throne of Thunder Fight-Specific Tips (Part 1 of 4)

This fight is fun for Atonement.

So, a short warning before we begin. I have not been Shadow since two weeks before 5.2. So while I claim to know some things about DPS, I may be missing the shadowy elephant in the room on some or all fights. My Atonement DPS advice should be pretty sound though.

Atonement DPS Guide - Basics

Penance: It's what's for breakfast.

Due to a series of buffs, nerfs to mainstream Disc healing, and the t14 4-piece bonus, Atonement healing is now a competitive raiding spec. It's not really DPS, and it's not really healing. It's the first true hybrid spec. This guide outlines an approach to Atonement focusing on dealing maximum possible DPS.

Contents

1. Gearing
2. Enchants
3. Gems
4. Glyphs
5. Talents
6. Rotation
7. Buffs

Lolsmite First Impressions

As I mentioned last week, something caused almost all of the healers in my guild to quit all at the same time. Because of this, I'm now Atonement spec. Soon™ I'll have a basic DPS guide for Discipline priests up. For now though, I'm still learning the basics myself.

The first thing I noticed about Lolsmite (which is what I'm going to call Disco Atonement builds) is that the DPS rotation is really simple by comparison to Shadow. I can literally do full DPS with only two buttons. One's a /castsequence macro with a timed reset to cast Solace if it's up, and Smite otherwise. The other's just a normal Penance bind. Because it requires so very little attention, I'm free to do things like not die in fight mechanics and watch HP bars in case I need to cast a real heal.

Shadow Priest Level 90 Talents

So, unless you've been living under a rock, I'm sure everyone knows that priests got a new set of talents when we hit level 90. This talent tier has a host of problems and intricacies that any good priest needs to be aware of. Today, I'm going to analyze the level 90 talents from a Shadow perspective.

[MoP] Shadow DPS Guide - Basics

So, I'm sure you were all expecting this post a month ago when 5.0 hit. Well, better late than never. Here's a Shadow basics post, updated for patch 5.0.

• Freshly updated for level 90!

Shadow Priest Glyphs [Mists]

Prime glyphs are gone.

With Mists less than two months away (and no recent Shadow changes), I think it's high time to start theorycrafting for Shadow in 5.0. One of the big things that'll strike right when 5.0 drops is the new glyph set. We'll probably need to buy mostly all-new glyphs, as a lot of the old item IDs no longer refer to valid glyphs. Unlike before, it's hard or impossible to say what will be the best ahead of time. Very few glyphs, if any, offer any sort of damage increase, and the ones that do are extremely situational and minor. Probably, the "correct" glyphs will vary on a per-fight basis, and we'll need to swap glyphs between every encounter. To that end, you may want to buy and learn more than just what you plan to use immediately.

Introductory Raids in Mists

Great news on the PvE front, regarding the launch of Mists of Pandaria! There will be zero raids available at launch. You may be thinking, "How is that great news??" Well, in today's post, I'll tell you why.

"[We might] delay opening Mogu’shan Vaults until a week or so after the expansion’s release, similar to how we’ve always handled the start of the PvP season, just to give players a little time to reach level 90 along with their friends and get acclimated to Pandaria’s new 5-player dungeons, daily quests, and scenarios."

H Madness of Deathwing - Defeated!

Me, enjoying the spoils of war.

Well, we're finally done. What did we do differently? We brought one rogue. That's all it needed to fix everything. The first time we made it to phase 5 (took a few tries to get there, several people had never been to Madness before) we killed it. We went from routinely letting 1-2 bloods be absorbed per set, with the rest barely dying, to killing every last one of them effortlessly before they even made it half way in. Having a reliable, spammable, AoE 70% slow is mandatory for this fight. Do not attempt without one.

Also, we developed a complicated maneuver to permit a Shadow priest to soak an Impale, as we had some issues with our usual method. As per usual, all players other than myself vacated the melee radius just prior to the Impale. I used Fade as they were leaving to shunt any melee swings onto warlock pets (they died) and Dispersion as soon as the Impale cast began. It worked splendidly. The warlocks disagreed.

Trouble actually putting together a full raid team aside, I'm pretty happy with how we did this raiding tier. Pic related. Both of the mounts dropped (rare and heroic), and I got the heroic one. I also got [Rathrak, the Poisonous Mind (Heroic)]. [Not Caster Gear] dropped too. I'm not sure who took it, but I'm guessing it wasn't a caster.

On a related note, I will be entering a period of reduced posting until Mists of Pandaria. I will be updating once every two weeks until then. Good luck in Dragon Soul to everyone who's still progressing, and I hope to see you all in Pandaria! May all of your Elementium Fragments spawn in a nice, little, easily-cleavable pile!

Heroic Madness of Deathwing

Destroyer of Raids.

Astute readers may notice that it has been rather a long time since I wrote about H Spine. Through a combination of general apathy, summer rescheduling and Diablo III, we've been unable to field a raid until this week. Anyway, it's time to write about H Madness!

H Spine of Deathwing - Defeated!

Beta updates:

• Mass Dispel is now much cheaper, but has a 15 second cooldown (like all other dispels in the beta).
• Void Shift is now baseline (level 87), and has a 6m cooldown. Now, much like Life Grip, all priests will have a new griefing tool. Or something functionally equivalent to Lay on Hands. Depends how responsible they are.
• Related: Spectral Guise is now a talent in the survivability tier.
• Many talents (mostly healing) have had their numbers tweaked. Yawn.
• From Darkness, Comes Light - Now can accumulate two charges. Cool, fewer go to waste, and can accumulate them for burst.
• Twist of Fate - Now lasts for 10sec after damaging/healing a low health target. This should make it appreciably better than it was, as before it was dramatically weaker than the other options on the same tier. Now on add fights it may be far superior.
• Mindbender - New talent. It's another Shadowfiend with twice the mana return, but a longer cooldown.
• Shadow got a bunch of Discipline abilities. Bug maybe? The list: Borrowed Time, Meditation (25%), Rapture, Spirit Shell. If this is not a mistake, then my thoughts are twofold. One: it's nice for Disc/Shadow priests so they don't need to heal like a holy priest if they need to heal in Shadow spec. Two: Healing is now much more appealing for a Shadow priest, as you'll likely be compensated for the time spent to cast a PW:S here and there in the form of haste and mana. It is possible that PW:S might become rotational, for the boost it offers to a DoT used immediately after, particularly with the tier-14 4-piece bonus. At first glance, PW:S seems to be DPS-neutral, which means it may as well be rotational for the survivability boost.
• Glyph of Fade now grants 10% damage reduction. Cool. More survivability tools are always welcome.
• We now have preliminary tier-14 set bonuses. 2 piece: +10% Mind Flay crit. Since we still have the MFcrit-to-Shadowfiend conversion, this will be a powerful mana boost. 4 piece: +3 sec DoT durations. Not overwhelmingly powerful for single-target, but sexy-awesome for multi-DoTing. I approve.

---

So, on Thursday, we rolled in and oneshot H Spine. I was surprised; when the fight ended abruptly, I thought we still had one plate to go; it felt just that easy. Needless to say, there was much rejoicing.

What we did differently

Our tendon burst DPS has been creeping steadily upwards the entire time we've been attempting H Spine, and feeling it was no longer necessary, several other DPS and I stopped trying to get cooldowns up before we detonated the Amalgamations, and simply focused on burning it as fast as possible. One of our tendon burn phases was perilously close to not meeting the DPS requirement because of this, but it made the fight dramatically shorter. The faster Amalgamation burn also caused the tendon phases to sync up nicely with the Fiery Grips so that we didn't need to kill the Corruption to reset the timer before entering tendon phase.

Our tanks adopted a different strategy for the 5th and 6th lifts; instead of attempting to kite the bloods, they stacked near the rest of the raid and dropped as much AoE as possible. The incidental AoE from procs and the tanks themselves killed 9 bloods almost precisely when the Amalgamation got low on HP. Also, this allowed them to more reliably establish aggro on new spawns, preventing them from meleeing random people.

We had a perfect storm of good RNG luck. I got such a good string of crits once, that I did 1.4M during a single tendon phase- not counting Shadowfiend damage. Likewise, despite making no attempt to get my Shadowfiend, and despite having about half the usual time between plates, he came up for 5 of the 6 plates. Other DPS report similar uncanny levels of luck. Also, the Blood Corruption: Earth was remarkably kind to us, dropping two stacks on both tanks right off the bat, and coating the majority of the raid before the end of the fight.

So was it just RNG then?

While the RNG probably helped immensely, the fact is that the healers finished the encounter with about 60% mana each, and unused healing and mana cooldowns. RNG simply doesn't account for that. Clearly the strategy changes were enough, and the favor of the RNG gods was just icing on the cake.

We spent considerable time on H Madness that night as well. I can see why very few guilds are 7/8H; Madness does seem much easier than H Spine. On about our 5th attempt, we made it to the final phase, and wiped only because we'd never seen it before. The fight is brutal on healing, but as a DPS, it's only marginally harder than normal mode, and this coming from someone who's having to use Dispersion to soak a 1.08M damage Impale meant for the tank. If we get it down before then, I'll write up a detailed account of our strategy for next week.

Heroic Spine of Deathwing

I've decided to stop dedicating entire posts to beta updates. It seems futile. The changes are just too frequent. I may do another full beta post in a month or two when things have settled out. For now, I'll just comment on beta changes at the start of another post like I'm doing now. All priests (not merely healing specs) got a new spell called Feathers from Heaven. It's placed like Lightwell, allies can walk through it to gain a burst of speed identical to the one from Body and Soul. Also, Shadow's spirit-to-hit conversion is back, and Vampiric Touch restores 15% max mana over its duration. This means we'll not have mana issues when multi-DoTing for a change.

---

I have been fighting this for entirely too long.

So, the guild has been stuck on H Spine of Deathwing for a few weeks now. The last remaining hurdle for us to overcome is surviving the third plate, as the bloods are spawning so quickly that they can neither be safely tanked, nor destroyed. This post is going to be a combination of tricks I've learned to help shadow priests, as well as a request for advice if anyone knows what I can improve.

Tendon Burst

I already wrote a post over at Shadowpriest.com on this topic, but that was intended for regular Spine. On Heroic, the damage requirement is far more strict. On 10man, with the current 15% nerf, each DPS requires 900k damage over the 18sec vulnerability window (assuming standard 2/3/5 raid comp). While quite doable, it does demand that Shadowfiend, Archangel, and Bottled Wishes be used on every tendon. While the 90sec cooldown on the latter two is available without any additional effort, Shadowfiend requires some gymnastics to activate in time.

Activating Shadowfiend basically means spamming Mind Flay to the exclusion of all else until it's time for tendon burst, and hoping it's enough. I'd say this gives me about a 19/20 chance to have Shadowfiend by the time I need it. If I were missing even a single crit buff (5% on raid, 5% on target, 3% from Focus Magic) I'd have unacceptably high odds of it failing to come up. If my haste wasn't already reforged as low as it could go, I would reforge some of it into crit to try and smooth out my Shadowfiend uptime. Note that while crit is superior to haste for the actual burst phase, it's still inferior to mastery.

Preforming the burst itself is quite simple. Summon shadowfiend, during the GCD activate Archangel and Bottled Wishes, MSp x3, MB, MSp until MB comes up again, MB, MSp until time runs out, DP instant cast at the final moment. If it's the second burn on that particular tendon, try to replace MSp casts after Shadowfiend has expired with SW:D. Obviously, if you don't yet have your 4-piece, you're simply incapable of meeting the demand.

Handling Fiery Grip

By all accounts, shadow priests are ideal to handle the grip. On normal, it was a no-brainer to assign us to grip duty. On Heroic, this can jeopardize Shadowfiend uptime. Consider telling your guild to make someone else do it. Seriously. Especially if you can't get Focus Magic. That said, despite this, I've been on grip duty on all of our attempts. Because the Corruption probably should be made to die right before the tendon burst phase (so as to prevent a grip during it), you may want to assign two people to breaking grips, both so they break faster, but also because some "overkill" damage is desirable to get its health low. We have myself and an arcane mage on grip duty.

Sealing the Deal

We've made it to the 5th plate a handful of times, and made it past that once. The trouble is, it seems that our healers can't handle the sheer flood of Bloods that spawn with 5 stacks of Degradation (which both lowers the raid's HP and increases the spawn rate of the Blood.) So we've got two strategies that we're planning to try to get us over the final hump.

The simpler of the two, we use Heroism on the first tendon burn, use burst potions, long duration cooldowns, and have the tanks and healers assist on DPS. ...except we' can't do it. We tried a few times and got it to about 7%. A little bit more gear, a little bit better class stacking (warlocks, for example, seem non-viable, and yet, we're using one,) or another 5% nerf and we could do this. That would mean that the most stacks of degradation we would ever face would be four.

The other, more realistic plan we have right now, we collect two Amalgamations for the 5th and 6th plate. We get both to low health. Detonate one, burn. Detonate the other, burn. Hope we don't wipe while burning. Heroism should compensate for the fact that no one will have time to get cooldowns back in between. Unfortunately, we've never survived long enough to try this since we thought of it.

Those Fucking Debuffs

As I just mentioned, we haven't made it past the 5th plate since I came up with the two-amalgamation idea. Why? Those fucking debuffs. Guild leadership thought it was a good idea to rotate out a stellar tank and healer for some alt tanks and healers. And Blood of Deathwing keeps detonating. So on top of our common fuck-ups regarding add aggro, or rolls, or damage control, or damage output, or- well, you get the idea, we now also have about a 50% chance to wipe via instant death because the new healer can't dispel.

Since it's not stated clearly anywhere:

Approximately 10 sec after each Corruption is killed, a random raid member receives Blood Corruption: Death, a 16 second debuff, which, if it expires, wipes the raid instantly. When dispelled (it's magic) it hops to a random raid member, keeping the same remaining duration, and it has a chance (seems about 40%) to mutate into Blood Corruption: Earth, which applies 1 stack of permanent 20% damage reduction at 8 sec remaining, and when it expires. Dispelling that (also magic) makes it hop to another raid member, but it can't turn back into Blood Corruption: Death (the Dungeon Journal is a liar; it claims that it can.)

The Death Log (Recount addon tips)

Most people use Recount (or Skada, its leading competitor.) For those that may not know, both are combat log parsers, addons that read the combat log and collect useful data from it that might otherwise be hard to find by reading the combat log manually. Both addons' primary use is for their damage meter function. They can also display a lot of other very useful information. Today, I'll be explaining how to use a severely under-used feature of Recount: the Death log.

By default, Recount shows its Damage Done meter, but it has numerous other settings that can be accessed by right-clicking on the Damage Done text in the upper-left corner of the Recount display. To access the Death log, right-click and select Deaths (about 40% of the way down the list). This will bring up a count of how many times people have died.

Alone, this is not very useful. Once someone has died, however, you can click on the bar for them. This brings up a detail window, displaying more information on what caused the death (you can get details on other Recount settings too, for example, a breakdown of which attacks caused the damage for Damage Done.)

Click for a bigger version.

In the Death Details window, you'll see a listing of all times that player has died since you cleared your Recount data, in reverse chronological order (most recent on top.) On the right, the actual details for the selected death are shown. You can change which details to show, but by default, it will include all incoming damage and heals on them, and the actual moment of death, for up to 10sec before they died. This is extremely useful. You can see, for example, which healers healed a tank that died in the moments leading up to the tank's death, or what sorts of damage someone took. Without this information, you'd have to just try again and hope for the best. With it, you might learn that a certain DoT must be dispelled, or a specific spell must be interrupted, and can try again forewarned, and therefore, forearmed.

Lastly, for a quick at-a-glance summary, you can bring up a graph of the person's HP made from the data shown in the Death Details window by clicking on the Show Graph button in the lower-right. The Death Graph can be used to quickly see whether to blame the healers or not. If they went from full-to-dead in less than about 2 seconds, then it's not reasonable to think any healer could have responded. Similarly, if they were receiving a lot of heals, but died anyway, there's still nothing more the healers could have done.

One common complaint I hear from new healers is that they get blamed for any and all deaths (even when, as the healer, they know there was no way for them to fix some of the deaths.) By proper use of the Death log, you can not only figure out what went wrong on your wipes, so as to fix it, but you will also begin to see that in most cases the healers are not why someone died. I hope that eventually blaming the healer won't be the default stance for anyone who dies, and fewer new healers will be scared away from the role.

Shadow Priest Trinkets [4.3]

Trinkets. Love 'em, hate 'em, gotta have 'em. Alongside weapon and set bonus, trinkets are some of the most important things you can equip. So which ones do you wear? Below I'll list some commonly-available trinkets for the 4.3 shadow priest, and how good they are. Note: these are listed in ascending order of desirability for Ultraxion (because that's easy to simulate.) I'll try to note when a trinket preforms unusually on other fights, but I probably won't have any solid numbers to back it up.

Bottled Wishes - 2.43
Purchased for VP. Easy to come by, but probably not worth it, when compared to other items you could spend VP on. Macroing it to AA and macroing it to SF leads to the highest sustained DPS output, but it's still quite low compared to other trinkets. Preforms quite well amazingly on the Spine of Deathwing tendons, due to being a controllable on-use trinket. Best-in-slot for that fight, followed closely by the PvP spellpower-use trinkets.
Source: Valor points.


Necromantic Focus - 2.56
This is a very reliable, boring trinket that may as well grant a static 390 mastery rating. Not as good as it sounds. Worse yet, it only triggers off periodic spell damage, meaning it will drop off during your burst-phase. Pity; that's exactly when this trinket would otherwise have shined.
Source: Baleroc (Firelands).


Darkmoon Card: Volcano - 2.98
Created by scribes, this could either be the easiest trinket to obtain, or the most difficult, depending on your financial situation, and the markets on your server. Watching for its proc and intentionally refreshing DoTs during that time adds about 50 DPS.
Source: Crafted (Inscription).
Proc: 30% on spell damage, 45 sec ICD.
Proc damage: 1378.39 + 0.1151sp. (Crit: x1.50)


Insignia of the Corrupted Mind - 2.75 / 3.10 / 3.49
A decent trinket, to be sure. It would be better if, by the time you'll be finding this, you weren't already hitting the 30% haste mark. Haste over this is of lessened value, but dropping haste to account for this trinket isn't a damage gain either. Only the heroic version of this trinket is strong enough to warrant re-casting VT specially to take advantage of it.
Source: Yor'sahj the Unsleeping.
Proc: 15% on damage, 110 sec ICD.


Foul Gift of the Demon Lord - 3.14
Easily obtained from 5mans, this trinket is a good starter trinket for any shadow priest. The value listed here is assuming no proc gaming, with good gaming, the value is even higher. Notably, the use-effect, despite being nearly-worthless on its own, can trigger other procs with each pulse, including Spellweaving, the extremely-potent AoE proc granted by the aspect of magic during the Madness encounter.
Source: Mannoroth (Heroic Well of Eternity).
Proc: 15% on spell damage or healing, 45 sec ICD.


Cunning of the Cruel - ? / 3.61 / ?
This trinket was very hard for me to find solid numbers for, due to the fact that I don't have one. As such, I've only listed the normal-mode version here. This trinket preforms quite respectably on single-target, and may scale better than other trinkets to AoE fights.
Source: 1.8% drop from Dragon Soul bosses without a loot chest.
Proc: 15% on spell damage, 25 sec ICD.
Proc damage:  9368.5 + 1.57765sp. (Crit: x2.00)


Will of Unbinding - 3.42 / 3.87 / 4.35
Simple, boring, and undeniably good. By every trinket list I've seen, this will be either your best or second-best trinket. Grab it and never let go.
Source: Spine of Deathwing.



Variable Pulse Lightning Capacitor - 3.93 / 5.39
This trinket doesn't do what its tooltip says. Through in-game testing, I found that the normal-mode version deals +2122 damage per charge over the tooltip damage, and I'm assuming that the heroic version does the same. Based on that assumption, I came to the values you see here.
Source: Ragnaros (Firelands).
Proc: 100% on magic crit, gain Electrical Charge; 20% per charge on gain charge. 2.5 sec ICD.
Proc damage: 3247 (heroic: 5423) per charge. (Crit: x1.50) Does NOT scale to spellpower.