Seekers and Loremasters

As the realization dawned that I was finally going to get my violet protodrake this year (damn your sinister squashling!) I finally managed to set myself on the path to completing the Loremaster achievement. This I had wanted to do for a long time, for the following reason:

• I always loved the old quest chains (even though some just seem to send you everywhere for little reward)
• Some of the quest rewards are awesome (faerie drake pet, fun and useful)
• Loremaster is still actually pretty tough, because of the time investment required
• You get Seeker (and likely Explorer) while completing it
• You get the classic dungeon achievements done
• All of this will be changed or gone after Cataclysm, so I wanted to have it done before release

Now, as I am writing this, I have completed Loremaster of Kalimdor and Outland. I have about 20 quests in Northrend left, and less than 200 in Eastern Kingdoms (even though I hardly touched the place). These are some of my observations:

Questing is hard and slow

Even if you use WoWHead and have done all these quests before (on various toons) it is easy to miss quests or forget where to go and what to do. An easy fix is to install some form of Tourguide or Questhelper and simply skip the quests you already did. Don’t forget to turn on your tracking for low-level quests after every login, or you will be left wondering why you can’t seem to find any quests.

Also, it helps to turn on tracking for the Loremaster of Kalimdor and Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms (and perhaps Seeker), because it gives you a  visual total of what you’ve accomplished. I found it very rewarding to creep up a few quests, and later find out I broke another hundred quests done.

Make a plan

Many quests are miles apart; the easiest way to go about it is to start at a racial starting area, complete all quests in that and the adjacent zone, and follow the breadcrumbs until you get to level 30′ish zones (like Stranglethorn Vale, Desolace or Alterac Mountains. These areas are usually places where quests from different races merge together and they all join into one single questing super-highway. Once you hit that point, go to another starting area. That way, you basically sweep everything up that you see until you hit the “center”, and take it from there.

Don’t be picky

Get all PvP quests, dungeon quests and raid quests you find, since most count. Remember that for repeatable quests, only the first one counts (which can be hard at times as the old world did not turn repeatable quests into a blue exclamation mark by default). Many quests also start in dungeons, such as the unsent letter from VonCleef in Deadmines, or the Heart of Hakkar. Easy turnins for some rewards and another notch in your questing belt.

A lot of quests that were a pain in the ass before are now much easier, and you will need them to hit the magical 700 (especially in Kalimdor for Alliance).

Another great way of getting some quests done (especially for Seeker) is to do the holiday events when they arrive. Hunting for Elders during Midsummer is a truckload of quests to do for XP or profit, while the same is true for candy buckets during Hallow’s End.

Remember well that this achievement takes time; I spent an average of an hour per day (before raids for instance) doing classic quests and about 4-6 hours in the weekend for nearly four weeks. The last 200 or so quests will take me another 2 weeks easily. Take your time, don’t try to finish it all in a week.

In the end, you can look forward to the following:

• (Name) the Seeker
• Loremaster (Name)
• Completed many (if not all) classic dungeons and raids
• Exalted with all faction cities (and thus access to their mounts)
• Easy access to Exalted with Cenarion Circle, Argent Dawn and Timbermaw Hold
• Close to completing 25 Exalted reputations
• Close to (or at) completing What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
• Being a player with extensive knowledge on lore, dungeons and quests in WoW

Now, that does seem worth it, doesn’t it?

More Harharhar on the PTR

Things are heating up on the PTR as we are reaching the release of patch 3.3. And we, little Shades in the back, are actually standing to get quite a bit of improvement. If these things come true, we can expect to see ourselves right back towards the top of the DPS lists again. Here’s a summary:

• Shadowform will allow Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch to benefit from Haste – it will reduce the duration and the time between dot ticks by your haste %.
• Improved Devouring Plague will deal 10%/20%/30% of its total periodic damage instantly upon casting – doubled from 5%/10%/15%.
• Vampiric Embrace will be a 30-minute buff on ourselves instead of a debuff on opponents. It cannot be dispelled.
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain renamed to Glyph of Mind Flay.
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain will now restore 1% of your base mana per periodic damage tick.
• Glyph of Shadow will now grant 30% of your Spirit to spellpower instead of 10%.

In short, Haste will now provide scaling for us; but not quite linear. You see, it makes our DoTs tick faster and thus deal more damage. However, this also means a short DoT duration, more recasts and thus a lot more mana use. Especially Shades at around the 1K-1100 Haste (the Haste specialists) will find themselves drained quicker and may need to scale down on their Haste ratings. The change to the glyph of Shadow Word: Pain (mana restore per tick) seems to be a way to assist high-haste Shadowpriests a bit in this.

The changes to Devouring Plague and VE are PvP buffs, designed to let us live longer as well as provide more burst damage. Technically the VE change is a buff on us, and should provide healing from all damage done, regardless to what creature, but somehow I have the idea that there will be trouble in this department. It should give the same amount of healing, but in the change from debuff to buff I can see something going wrong. In any case it will save us global cooldowns, which means more DPS.

Things do look good, very good.

A short glance at 3.3.0

Interrupting the radio silence for a short update on what 3.3.0 brings for us. There’s not too much there so far, but MMO-Champion released some set bonuses and the armor set looks for a few of the Tier 10. Ours are…interesting.

2 Pieces (Damage): (Updated) The critical strike chance of your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells is increased by 5%.

4 Pieces (Damage): (Updated) Reduces the channel duration and period of your Mind Flay spell by 0.5 seconds.

So what does this mean for us? Well, we’re going to get a hell of a lot more damage out of our main DoTs, because their chance to crit has been increased. And, as each crit is 100% additional damage, this is quite a bit. I have been stacking up on crit for quite a while myself and am currently at about 30-40% raidbuffed. Now, assuming Tier 10 hasn’t got the +Hit fetish our T9 had, that we may like to have 2pT8 and 2pT9.

The 4-piece bonus makes life easier on us; by shortening MF by 0.5 seconds, we need less Haste to get 2 Mind Flays in between Mind Blasts, and that was all we were really using Haste for anyway.

Another change: Mind Flay will be 30 yards base range. Goodbye MF Glyph in PvE! It will now suddenly be an awesome long-range nuke in PvP, since it will outstrip almost anything (except Hunters I guess).

Edit: As posted by Molgan, this blue post shows the ideas for Haste and Shadowpriests in 3.3. Mind however, that this is only a test. But if it improves our scaling, it can’t be bad in any way.

My little Dot Timer

Sparked by a post at Hots&Dots concerning ForteXorcist, I began to wonder what qualities the perfect Dot Timer addon would need to have to fit to Shadowpriests and our needs during raids. Below is what I have come up with so far, feel free to add your own thoughts and I will see what can be included. I am not looking into making a barebones setup – I’d like to see if we can design the “Vuhdo” of Dot Timers.

Premise

A Dot Timer addon tracks the DoTs that we have running on our targets, allowing us precision timing on what we DoT and when. Current examples include DoTimer, ForteXorcist and custom Power Auras.

• Multi-target to support multi-dotting – the addon would have to neatly group the various targets and display our debuffs on them, so that in a multi-dotting situation we can track them across various targets.
• Current target priority – our debuffs on the current target need to be most prominently displayed, since that is most important to us at that time.
• Cooldown monitor – to track cooldowns on our Shadow and Discipline spells.
• Misery warning – there should be a display or warning showing when Misery is on our target
• Shadow Weaving warning – there should be a display or warning showing how many stacks we have, with perhaps a visual cue when we are at the magic “5″.
• Tracking bars – the DoT duration should be displayed as a bar, shortening as the duration runs out. There should be some sort of “ping” or “flash” on the bar indicating when the damage ticks happen, to assist in for instance clipping Mind Flays.
• Grouping - the bars should be sorted by mob, and within each group the bars should be sorted by “time remaining” as a default.
• Tracking timers – on or next to each bar there should be a timer, which counts in full seconds until the DoT reaches the last 2 seconds, when the display should include tens of seconds.
• Icon – For most, the spell icon next to the bar should be enough to identify the spell; an option for including the spell name would be handy though.
• Re-targeting – Vuhdo has an option called “private tanks”, where we can store specific people we want to watch while healing. If the name of the target on which we have DoTs is targetable, it eases targeting multiple mobs.
• Targets and DoTs should be properly removed from the list when dead or expired – a problem which often occurs with DoTimer is that the timer continues even if the mob is dead or the DoT has been dispelled, which does not help us.
• Customization – the bars’ color, texture and size should be changeable, and the timers should be easy to move and lock without complicated menus.

An example of what such a bar grouping would look like, I made a simple visio picture describing the idea:

Work in Progress – more will be added as more ideas are sparked!

Natarumah’s DPS Redux

A while ago I commented on how I seemed to lack competitive DPS compared to the rest of my 25-man raid, and I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly was causing it. I wagered on the choice between stacking Crit or Haste, pondered the possibility of a large amount of partial resists, and believed my gear to be quite up to snuff.

At that time, I barely scratched at the 4K DPS, performing a machine-gun style of DPS which would make a cardiologist alarmed at my condition. As time went on, it also made me quite sad, because it made me question my spot in the raid and whether I brought in something valuable enough to warrant it.

Shadowpriests across the world wonder where their DPS is off to, and there was even an article at WoWinsider dedicated to it.

Now it’s a few months later; I had some upgrades, and I have been focusing mostly on Crit instead of Haste. I still carry 350-400 Haste rating, but I am now rocking about 900 Crit rating (I am hovering at the 30% mark self-buffed), but also a lot more Spellpower. During the raids I paid a lot of attention to absolutely not dropping my DoTs off the boss, even though that cannot be helped some times (thanks a lot, Faction Champions! Bastards).

On Onyxia, where the full force of Mind Sear can come into play, I am doing around 5.8K DPS, with 5.2K on fights with a moderate amount of adds (Gormok the Impaler as an example). On fights where there is a lot of confusion I am at around 4.2-4.4K which I still find moderately acceptable.

I have noticed a few things (about myself as well) which greatly influence my DPS, and which may help you as well:

• Relax before the raid; I take a short walk to clear my mind and breathe in some fresh air. It gets me less worried and cluttered so I can raid with full focus.
• Keep your trigger finger flexed; don’t hammer your keys to DPS – I noticed it caused me quite some discomfort over the course of a four-hour raid, making me slower. Relaxing and slowing down on the keys actually made my spells no slower, so why cramp myself up needlessly?
• Hit > Spellpower > Crit; I found that indeed a large amount of Crit not only made my DPS go up, it also allowed my DoTs to tick harder when moving, cushioning my DPS loss a bit. Also, my partial resists went from 3.5% average to only 1.5%-2%, which also means less damage loss.
• Barebones UI; I am using an extremely simple UI with basically buttons, Unitframes, Vuhdo, Skada and chat to keep my FPS at a tolerable level. When doing TotGC 25 I still have nasty fps drops, it has settled down to the point where I can raid in peace.
• All flesh must be eaten; in order to get my gear upgraded I did a lot of daily heroics, 10man Ulduar, 25man Ulduar, 10man Onyxia, 25man Onyxia, 10man TotC (and Heroic) and 25man TotC (and Heroic). I ate everything. I got my upgrades from everywhere. You can’t afford to just go for Best in Slot items, if it’s an upgrade I am eating it.
• Keep it cool; raiding for hours makes my laptop hot enough to bake an egg on. It will take some time to save up for a new PC with good cooling, but until then I set up a fan to blow fresh air past the back of the laptop. Now the weather’s cooling down again, my PC functions better and for a longer time.

In short, any or all of these things contributed to my DPS feeling more competitive, me more productive and saving my general sanity. Yes, my DPS is still 1K short of our top DPS (and sometimes a bit more) but I am less concerned with being the best as I am with not being the worst. I am Human too, and while my ego is not especially large, it shrinks when I am at the minimum level to be considered for Heroic modes.

Here’s to hoping we get some good scaling and awesome new abilities in Cataclysm!