Tag: raiding

Mage Stat Priority in 4.0

Posted on by Gazimoff

For many of us, January marks the beginning of Cataclysm raiding. It’s time to start getting those gear upgrades from heroic dungeons, digging out those gems and finishing everything off with a nice coat of enchants. This can be fairly expensive, so it’s worth doing properly rather than wasting money on mistakes.

I’m hearing that the minimum DPS you want to be doing is around 10k sustained while raidbuffed. This isn’t just the burn phase either – you need to be able to provide decent damage output during your recover phase as well. But how do you make sure that the gear you pick is good for you? As an example, there are four cloth headpieces available at iLevel 346, all with the same base stats. Which would be the best for your spec?

I’ve put together a handy list for all three mage specs to give you an idea of what gear to look for and what gems and enchants to pick out. This mage stat priority list should help you focus on what’s important while letting you comfortably shard what’s not essential.

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Casual Is Not A Dirty Word

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back when I was a kid, being called a geek was a crude insult thrown around by those unwilling to accept that people didn’t share their interests and hobbies. Nowadays it’s worn as a badge of honour. I’m not saying that you’ll see me standing on the top of a mountain with my shirt torn off, shouting “I AM GEEK” into the wind, but you get the idea.

I can see the same thing happening within gaming culture. The terms “casual” and “social” are thrown around with a sneer in the voice. After all, social gamers aren’t real gamers, are they? Casual gamers just don’t play games properly? Unless you’re playing the game in the style of a seasoned professional, you must be doing it wrong, right?

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Mage Tier 11 Preview

Posted on by Gazimoff

With the new Cataclysm raids comes a new set of armour for Mages to drool over. The Firelord’s Vestments have certainly won praise for their looks, but how does it stack up as a fully-fledged dungeon set? Will the complete outfit be worn by most mages, or will the bare minimum be used?

Firstly, it’s worth putting things in perspective. We’re three weeks away from the release of the next expansion. It’s going to take at least two weeks after that to get levelled up and geared up to enter raids – going through normal dungeons to get ready for heroic 5-mans, then using the gear from that to prepare yourself for raiding. By early January most raiding guild should be back in the saddle following the Christmas break. As a result, a lot of this will remain theory for a good few months.

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The Back Seat Guild Leader

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ever get the feeling that you’re standing at a crossroads, looking down at the various prongs of a Morton’s Fork? It’s a position that an increasing number of players are finding themselves in during the run up to Cataclysm, and I don’t think I’m an exception to that. And like many people, my thoughts at the moment run to guilds, friends and forward planning.

Like all decisions of this ilk, it’s long and complicated and involved. So rather than doing my usual stint of dispensing advice, I’ve decided to post this to solicit some instead. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this conundrum – maybe you can help me work out how to tackle it or have experiences of your own that can help.

Anyhow, pull up a chair. This may take some time…

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A Socially Aware Warcraft?

Posted on by Gazimoff

When I think of MMOs, I generally think of games that are rick in social interaction. Alongside the gigantic world and the rich environments are dedicated tools specifically designed to help players interact with each other.

But although Warcraft has developed socially with the inclusion of Real ID and Facebook integration, it’s mainly designed to connect networks together. And while the new Guild Management interfaces provide even greater control, they only enhance the existing social experiences. The in-game Calendar has helped, but only as far as co-ordinating events.

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Getting the Guild Appeal

Posted on by Gazimoff


I don’t know if I’ve talked much about it, but a while back I was searching for a new raiding guild. I was lucky at the time – one guild came from a recommendation and responded to me making enquiries in trade chat, while the other was a guild that I had real-life friends in. For me, they were easy choices.

This might not be relevant any more – after all many raid guilds are in a holding pattern until Cataclysm comes out. Several are taking a summer break, while others have shut down completely. Others are struggling with membership, either having to recruit to keep raiding, or in just retaining their existing members. It’s summer, there are some fantastic new games out and the choice between the same grind and the big shiny is an easy choice to make.

One thing I have noticed is that there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of new raiders out there looking for a spot. But often I hear complaints about having to gear up new recruits, or help them learn the fights, or similar. And it becomes a chore, and guild progress fades, and you’re dealing with discontented raiders. And the last thing you want is for the thing you’ve built together to implode, but you can feel it on the horizon. I don’t think it has to be that way though, although I think as raid guilds we’re our own worst enemy sometimes. Let me explain.

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Clearing My Head

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ugh, things have come to a head lately. I’ve been logging on, doing my thing and generally making my own fun. But for some reason something has been feeling amiss, like I’m dancing round the edge of a crater. I’ve been trying to work out what it is and it’s been driving me bananas.

I think I’ve finally worked out what it is. I think I need to leave my guild.

I think I also need to explain why I’ve got this crazy thought in my head. After all, they’re a great bunch of people and I know some of them in Real Life. They’re funny, entertaining and generally don’t do anything to annoy me. The Asshole Quotient seems to be exceedingly low.

I’ve also got a collection of alts on the same server that look after eachother – a mage, a priest and a warlock. I have a Paladin tank approaching 80 and a Fury warrior and tree languishing in the doldrums of early Outland.

So why would I look such a gift horse in the mouth?

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The Pre-Raid Credit Check

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a rash of this going on in the Trade channel on almost every single server I know of. You’ve probably seen it yourself – the type of person that asks for ridiculously high requirements purely in order to join a raid. It’s either that or they ask a laundry list of questions that they expect you to know the answer to. Just as an example, here’s a screencap of one that came up the other day, along with my reply.

In this example, it’s as if the raid leader is screaming out “I have no brain! Feed me an arbitrary set of numbers and I’ll only invite you if they’re big enough!” There’s absolutely no guarantee that the numbers you get will be any indication of a raid member’s performance. Hell, I’ve even seen PuGs of players fully decked out in tier 10 wipe repeatedly on Marrowgar. But in case it still feels like it’s plausible let me break it down for you.

First up, a lot of people have two specs. Apart from getting an achievement from it, there’s also the huge versatility benefit it gives hybrids. On the flipside, there are classes (rogues, mages, hunters and warlocks as an example) that can do nothing but DPS. What do you want from me, bandage spec? Isn’t it better to say what you need rather than ask superfluous questions?

Secondly, Gearscore. You probably know that I think Gearscore is crap, and for a fair reason. I can be wearing PVP gear and get a high Gearscore. I could be wearing +MP5 healer gear and get a high Gearscore. I could be holding a tanking one-hander and get a high Gearscore. Get the idea? It’s no indication that the gear I’ve chosen is right for my class or spec, doesn’t take into account any gems or enchants (or even if those gems/enchants are the right choices) and can generally be fooled. Putting your faith in an arbitrary number in this way is stupid, and if someone takes advantage of you as a result then quite frankly you deserve it.

Thirdly there’s the issue around single target DPS. The trouble is, it’s not a finite value for some classes due to the heavy influence of random number generation. It means that rather than having a fixed value that you can reliably put out, your DPS will hover around a point. Over the number of attempts you make, the distribution of your DPS will form a bell curve.

I could give you any figure on that bell curve and it’d be a valid answer because you weren’t specific. The real joke is that you only get this smooth curve after doing thousands of attempts against the same target in the same gear. Imagine doing a thousand target dummy tests – you’d be there all week! The spread of the curve can be about 1.6k DPS, which is a huge margin between top and bottom. Tachyon’s been doing some heavy maths on this, so it’s worth looking at his figures.

Finally, here’s my most important point out of all of this. It’s Vault of Archavon for crying out loud! You know, the one with the easy loot piñatas! You walk in there, you roflstomp, you walk out again! No challenge, no difficulty, ten minutes and you’re done! Why the hell you need all this information to form a raid for the easiest dungeon going is beyond me. If it were ICC then maybe I could understand.. ish. For VoA, it’s waaay over the top.

Of course, I wouldn’t be little Gnomey Smarty-pants if I didn’t have a better way of doing it. It requires a little bit of brain power and a little bit of understanding other classes gear requirements, but it means you can be a lot more flexible about who you invite. It also means that you can help eachother out a bit – understand gear choices and maybe learn a little about other classes.

Starting a group to VoA 25-man. I need a few healers and some DPS. Meet me by the central Dalaran fountain for a quick gear check.

That way you actually meet people, you get to look at their gear choices properly and you can make informed decisions about who to have in your raid. Get away from the reliance on arbitrary numbers and take a look at the characters you’re going to be bringing with you.

Scorched Fingers

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier on in the week I put up an article about going back to my old fire spec on my mage. It was basically a brain dump – this is what I’m doing, this is how it works, this is what I remember. Unfortunately, mid dumpage I got something wrong.

To be fair, it isn’t just me that has trouble with how Improved Scorch works – there seems to be a whole rash of confusion out there. Luckily though, there are some great resources as well to help put people on the Right Path.

Now, I can imagine that some of you are thinking “But Gaz, how can you get something like this wrong? You’ve been playing the class for five years, surely you should know something as basic as this?”. And it’d be a fair criticism. I’m just glad to have readers who will point out when I get something wrong so that I can go back and correct it.

Getting back to Improved Scorch, the devil is in the detail. The tooltip is as follows:

Increases your chance to critically hit with Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt by an additional 3% and your damaging Scorch spells have a 100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 5% and lasts 30 sec.

Wait, what?

Let’s break it down. The first part of Improved Scorch is a passive bonus that you get to your Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt spells. For fire mages, this means that your Fireball has an extra 3% chance to crit, making Hot Streak more likely. Worth having.

The second part of Improved Scorch is the vulnerability debuff that you apply on targets when you cast Scorch. This debuff makes spells 5% more likely to crit against them. This debuff acts independently of the passive bonus and benefits the entire raid.

That’s not the end of it though. The Scorch debuff doesn’t stack with Winter’s Chill, so if you’re raiding with a frost mage it can lead to complications where one debuff prevents the other from being applied. It also doesn’t stack with Improved Shadow Bolt, although crucially this debuff will overwrite Improved Scorch.I think that the difference in behaviour is due to it being hotfixed rather than implemented by design.

It’s managing this 5% spell crit chance debuff that’s the biggest difficulty with this spell, especially once you scale up to 25-man raiding. It’s also the source of a lot of confusion which isn’t helped by having an unclear tooltip, as well as different behaviours for resolving debuff conflicts.

Historically you’d resolve all this by having discussions within your raidgroup, but with so much raid content being tackled by Pug groups these days a slicker solution is needed. As a kind of stop-gap I’m having a look at what addons like Power Auras can do to help. Longer term, I can’t help but feel that this is somethign Blizzard need to fix.

Maybe Cataclysm will hold the answers? Let’s hope we don’t have to wait long to find out.

The Flaming Boomerang

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ever since patch 3.3.3 was released I’ve been thinking of switching back to my Fire spec. It made me  feel nostalgic about the early days of Warcraft, where I originally levelled as a fire mage. I only deviated from this spec for parts of both Molten Core and Naxxramas, sticking with fire throughout Burning Crusade. When I started raiding in Wrath I only went to Arcane due to the hitcap benefits. The spec then received an almighty buff, propelling it to become the must-have raiding spec for nearly all mages. I’d been stuck as Arcane ever since.

As a result my fire spec has been largely abandoned until earlier this week when I decided that I had to change. There’s only so much I can take of going through the same instances as the same character casting the same spells until something snaps inside. Not wanting to go all medieval on my keyboard, I dusted off my old fire spec and went down to the target dummies to practice.

The first challenge to face is gearing – even though +hit gear is thrown at you so that you can comfortably make the Arcane hitcap, it’s not quite sufficient to reach the 446 that a fire mage needs. Luckily I’d kept back Dying Curse for just such an occasion. Couple that with the fact that I usually raid with a Draenei for Heroic Presence plus either a shadow priest for Misery or a balance druid for Improved Faerie Fire, and all I have to reach is a manageable 342 hitrating.

The next trick to master is keeping up a solid set of debuffs. The fire spec is slightly more complex than an arcane one in that Living Bomb always needs to be on the target. Each fire mage needs to cast their own Living Bomb, making debuff watching that little bit trickier if you’re not the only one in the party. Once you’ve got that down, you can happily Fireball away at the target until Hot Streak procs. When Hot Streak goes off, cast your instant-cast Pyroblast then go back to Fireballing. Just make sure that Living Bomb is constantly on the target.

The complication sets in when working out Improved Scorch. Even if you’ve got other effects in your group to provide the critical strike chance by 5%, you’ll still want to apply it for the 3% crit chance buff to your Fireballs. This one works slightly differently though in that one mage can apply the debuff for all the others in the group. This means that you need to coordinate with others about who will apply the debuff. Luckily the chance of encountering another fire mage in a raid is fairly rare, so you can usually apply anyway. Again, like with Living Bomb, this always needs to be applied on the target.

UPDATE: The above paragraph is wrong. Have a look at this article for an update on Improved Scorch

There are various tricks you can use to alert yourself to various spell procs as well as tracking when debuffs need to be applied, and I’ll be talking about some related addons in the near future.

Things can get even more complicated when you start looking at converting gear from an Arcane spec focus to a Fire spec focus. The reason being that haste benefits Arcane mages tremendously – the more haste they have, the more spells they can cast. For a fire mage with Burnout and Hot Streak, crit strike rating has more of a part to play. Not only do you deal more damage from your spell critical strikes, but you have an increased chance to trigger Hot Streak as your chance to crit increases. For me it’s not currently clear if haste is the better stat to go for above crit for fire mages, but it’s something I’m looking at closely.

At the end of the day though it doesn’t matter to me as long as I’m having fun, and going back to Fire is something that’s hitting all the right nostalgia buttons for me. I’ve also been able to “prove” it’s a viable raiding spec after managing to pull aggro during phase 2 of Lady Deathwhisper and topping the damage and DPS meters on Saurfang. These are inconsequential though, as long as I can cackle like a maniac while smacking my buttons.