Weekend, Part 1 (29 Jan) - JB's Big Weekend

Weekend, Part 1 (29 Jan) - JB's Big Weekend

JB's time in game fell off a bit during the week, but she expected to get things ramped back up over the weekend. Queue times were pretty rough on Friday night and JB was able to get in only one dungeon run. She opted to go with the Heroic Hour of Eternity randoms since - well, she could. These Twilight heroics offered i378 gear as well as both valor and justice points. After a 15 minute wait she got into Well of Eternity, the second of the three dungeons. JB joined a group in progress. They had downed the first boss, Peroth'am, and apparently had wiped on Queen Azshara.

The Queen can be a tricky fight, and JB had never seen it. Wild has only seen it from the perspective of a healer. There are six magi that have to be killed, two at a time. JB did her best to get the right magi targeted, and while it may have been a bit messy, we killed the six magi without losing anyone.

The final battle is almost a set piece. There are some truly awesome battles, but we get a lot of help from the npc Illidan in killing armies of winged demons, a couple of named mobs, elite Capt Varo'then, and finally the boss Mannoroth. As long as you don't do anything stupid, such as die; and as long as you stay in the moonbeams when they are up, and stay out of the fires when they drop, the fight isn't too bad even for wet behind the ears JB.

JB got no gear, though, which was disappointing. There are some nice drops to be had, but only a few, and the odds are low. Her DPS was ok. The numbers are quite high because in the Mannoroth encounter the DPS is greatly boosted by the mechanics of the fight. Wild often wondered where some of those big DPS numbers came from. Now JB can say - from me!

DPS -
#1: Mage, 70.8 dps, 33.9% of all damage
#2: Hunter, 56.9k dps, 27.2%
#3: DK tank, 28.5k dps, 13.6%
#4: JB, 24.7k dps, 11.8%
#5: Pally, 17.1k dps, 8.2% (I think this was the one they must have kicked)

Glad they kept JB around, despite her low dps. JB didn't even out dps the tank. Sigh. Need to build up that gear.

JB asks for help - and Wowhead refused my topic.

Despite her victory in the Well, JB worried over her DPS. It just wasn't good enough, even taking into account her gear level. JB wanted advice, but couldn't find a guildie shaman online to ask. So JB went to the wowhead Shaman class forums to ask questions. I had problems with my wowhead account recently, and it took more than a week for them to straighten things out. Unfortunately, things were not straightened out. Wowhead refused to post JB's topic on their forum. Peeved, JB went to the Blizzard forums, which the Wild family has all but abandoned. When it comes to getting info about WoW, Wowhead is a much better site than the official Blizzard site. I didn't have a choice, though, in this case. Here is the forum post:

"I have a raiding healer main with i390 gear. Healing is all that I do. That is, until recently, when I raised an enhancement shaman for fun. I've taken her farther than I expected to, and with i353 equipped gear she just started doing Hour of Twilight runs. I hope to build her up into a raiding alt because it's been a lot of fun so far.

However, I have no idea what kind of DPS she should be doing or what I could do to improve it other than keep getting better gear. In the three Twilight runs I've done so far, my DPS has been around 11-13k, which is usually dead last in the groups I've been in. I want to assume that the other DPSers (and the tank) are just that much better geared than I am, but it still chafes to be last.

I follow the spell priorities (SS-LL-FS-UE-LB/MS-FS).
I usually drop earth, searing, healing, and windfury totems.
I buff with +90agi food and as an alchemist I have +80agi flask.
I bloodlust toward the end of boss fights.
I drop the fire elemental generally just on the final boss.
I cast Windfury on my main hand weapon and Firetongue on my off hand.

Things that lower my DPS. Sometimes I use the maelstrom proc to heal instead of DPS. Funny that I don't always trust the healer to keep me alive, but he has the tank to worry about, so if I don't get any healing love I'll take care of myself. I'm also not that experienced in targeting. I use an assist, usually on the tank, but I still find it hard to position properly, stay in range, avoid the things I need to avoid, while still keeping track of the target. This is more an issue with multiple mobs than a single boss, of course.

I've linked my gear. Any suggestions or comment on whether I'm ok with the DPS I'm doing or not would be a great help. "

I also took my own advice and went looking for more help on the forums. Surprisingly, there was a pretty good post on the WoW forums, which, as I mentioned, I've mostly abandoned in favor of wowhead. But wowhead kept being  being snotty so the WoW forums got the nod.

I got a few responses. One was snotty, the others were actually pretty helpful and informative. Just for fun, here is a quote from the snotty one. He had plenty to say, but you'll get the drift from this snippet: "Your spec makes me wanna kick a puppy as i kill a kitten as i spit on a baby seal." Wut?

One responder in particular took the time to provide some thorough advice. One difficulty JB has is with the relationship of two spells which interact with each other - flame shock and unleash elements. The use of these two spells is also keyed to a proc called unleash flames. Without going into the technical details (technical details in a game? You bet), JB was doing it wrong, and that was likely the cause of a lot of lost DPS.

I also learned that my top end spell, called Feral Spirits, was actually a very poor spell that did very little DPS. That spell procs two spirit wolves that are really cool looking. I still should use them, but don't expect much improvement in DPS. Some of JB's talents were misplaced, as well. JB's picks weren't bad, but they weren't optimal. JB did a respec, making the suggested changes.

Another poster suggested that I try using the addon called Shock and Awe. Well, JB had tried that addon once before, quite a long time ago. It was so busy, and cluttered up the screen so bad, I couldn't make heads or tails about it. JB wanted to try it again, though, so I loaded it up for her to play with. The addon still had a very cluttered look to it, providing a whole lot more information than I really needed or could process in the middle of a battle. Not willing to give up completely, though, I picked through the addon functions and turned off pretty much everything I could. There was one feature that I really liked, though. The addon let me set a priority sequence for JB's spells, and while in combat displayed the next spell in the sequence for me to use. Playing around with that on the target dummy, JB discovered that the addon recognized when unleashed flames procced and even adjusted the spell priority to take that into account. Just like that, it solved JB's confusion about flame shock, unleashed elements, and unleashed flames.

How did all those changes work out? Coming up in Part 2.