I was doing a bit of WoW Insider reading this morning while I ate breakfast and I happened to see this article about probable changes to Warlords of Draenor racial abilities. Mixed in with all the news about nerfs and buffs was a tidbit about what is happening for Night Elves racials:

Night elves see a bonus to Quickness that adds a 2% passive buff to movement speed and a completely new racial, Touch of Elune, which adds 1% haste at night and 1% crit during the day. Shadowmeld is unchanged.

I was trying to come up with something pithy about a buff that changes based on time of day and how that would be a pain to try to get haste breakpoints correct, but the first comment I read said it so very concisely:

I think raid leaders should be able to make whoever came up with Touch of Elune take a drink whenever someone asks them if they can move the raid forward or backward an hour to get the better buff. Let the true min/maxing begin!

Let me just take a moment and be thankful that I am part of the Horde, and all raids I lead are Horde raids.

Lifeblood, Berserking, Elemental Mastery

So, I am an idiot.

Here's Kuan's Chain Lightning macro. It's set this way so I don't blow a substantial percentage of the Berserking buff waiting on the GCD of an instant cast (proc'd by the Elemental Mastery). Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst are similarly macro'd.

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/castsequence [combat] reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Chain Lightning

I totally spaced on how Lifeblood was a 20s buff of 480 haste with a 2m cooldown.

Berserking is still a 3m cooldown.

Elemental Mastery is 3m too, but subject to Feedback, which reduces its cooldown by 3 seconds every time.

I messed with putting the sequence with Lifeblood in between there, and tried it on a heroic dummy just to watch the result, and was unpleased. That setup really doesn't work too well, since the cast sequence will "stick" on the spell that isn't on cooldown.

So, I'm going to unwind the cast sequence. It'll blow a portion the Berserking at first pull but it won't really matter, the GCD is also hastened.

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Lifeblood
/cast Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Chain Lightning


Threat Redux

Ghostcrawler Revisits Threat
Helloooo! This is a surprising and rather large change!

The TL:DR version of that link is that tanks should worry about survival not threat. They are massively bumping the amount of threat generated while in tanking mode (blood presence, bear form, etc.).

Pertinent quotes:
"We’ve gotten over the concept that threat needs to be a major part of PvE gameplay. We have therefore decided to buff tank threat generation in a hotfix this week to where it’s generally not a major consideration. We expect the community to gradually stop using threat-tracking mods as players realize they don’t need them."
So, this week(a week from now?) there will be a hotfix:
"Hotfix: The threat generated by classes in their tanking mode has been increased from three times damage done to five times damage done."

There are longer term plans to change threat and survivability, but those are not things that can be applied in a hotfix.

For example, the next content patch will likely have a change to the way vengeance works to buff the speed at which it stacks. That will make tank swaps a little smoother, so the new tank doesn't have to worry about both popping cooldowns and putting out enough threat so that the old tank (with their full vengeance stack) doesn't pull off them immediately.

There are also some plans to potentially change pallies, warriors, and druids to have a active survival mechanic similar to how blood DKs have with death strike. However, the plans for that seemed hazy and not something that would happen in the near or even medium future.

I'm excited that threat will be buffed. It's not hard to keep threat now, but the first 20 seconds can be hairy if I dodged an attack and don't have a lot of vengeance when I drop my first runestrike. Especially if there is an enrage timer and people are going balls to the wall with dps. Now, as others will point out, if they haven't already, these threat changes won't fix anything if you've got misbehaving raiders. No threat buffs are going to save the situation if someone jumps the gun and pulls before the tank or is dpsing the wrong add. But these changes will smooth things out.

I admit to some shock that Blizzard thinks they are or will be buffing threat enough to curtail the use of threat trackers. Perhaps I've been prioritizing survival over threat for a while now, but the top dps are usually not that far behind me in threat if we start on the boss at the same time. Perhaps I'm only remembering the first 30 seconds of the fight? I'll look during the raid tonight. Either way, to expect that threat trackers are obsolete means that there is never the smallest chance that a dps can pull off of a tank, even in the first few GCDs of the fight. It's a noble goal, but I'm not sure it will ever be realized. Though I'll happily eat these words if it does come to pass.

Ele Shaman Glyphs

We bailed out of work early on a promise of Ulduar hard modes raiding. But of course that did not materialize. So as I waited to see what happened, I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to reexamine Kuanchichi's glyphs.

Now Kuan has been doing some relatively craptacular dps in the ICC raids Darkfall has been running. I had been running with Flametongue Weapon, Flame Shock (note the tooltip here doesn't match what it was, which is that Flame Shock ticks could crit) and Totem of Wrath ever since Kuan lost his Tier 8 2-piece bonus. After comparing some raid log analyses of Kuan's damage with Hellshot's, whose was much higher, I decided I would swap out the Flametongue Weapon for Lightning Bolt, which scaled better, and had a bigger effect as Kuan's haste goes up.

Then, this week, Patch 3.3.3 dropped. In the Patch Notes (note for later: this is not a permalink), it calls out:

Flame Shock: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes and is affected by spell haste.

Since there was nothing in the notes about Shaman glyphs, I figured: well gee, that sure renders the Flame Shock glyph useless; I'd better swap that out. I was thinking, Lava.

But look at that tooltip again! Imagine my surprise when I logged in to see: Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Flame Shock damage by 60%. Whoa! Lava Burst is stuck on that 8 second cooldown, and I am thinking that 10% of spell power once every 8 seconds probably wasn't a good trade for at least 6 ticks (depending on haste and whether I ever pick up piece #4 of the Tier 10 gear) that will crit 1-3 times. Well, gee. Maybe it is. I wasn't sure. But considering it, I am thinking both of these are better than the Totem of Wrath which is, basically, an extra 84 spell power.

I looked at the Spell Coefficients page on Wowwiki and decided whoever designed this at Blizzard oughta be fired. How can they possibly maintain that code, what good is spellpower...

I went to the Thunder Bluff target dummy to try it out. 5300 with Totem of Wrath Glyph. 5800 with Glyph of Lava. I think I'll stick with Glyph of Lava this week and see what a difference it makes with raid buffs.

OMG troll shaman macros

So shaman talents are all about the 3 minute cooldown of the "buff this tree". Using these effectively is augmentedcomplicated by playing a Troll with the Berserking racial, which is right on up there with "combat regen" as the best racial in the original game.

Elemental.
Blizzard has chosen, again, to rework Elemental Mastery. Pre 3.1, it gave a 30-second or so buff to Critical Spell chance with a 3 minute cooldown. As such I macro'd it along with Berserking (which is also a 3-minute cooldown) in to Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning:
#showtooltip Lightning Bolt
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lightning Bolt
But now in 3.1, Ele Mastery has been changed to a pure Elemental perversion of Nature's Swiftness (NS), a spell for restoration Druids and Shaman to insta-cast the next Nature spell. The new Ele Mastery does that for Shaman damage spells, with a 15-second crit buff. So first of all, it needs to go in front of Lava Burst. Or does it? Back to that in a minute.

Just because the spell is now insta-cast doesn't mean it's off the 1.5 second GCD. And Berserking is only a 10-second haste buff. I for one am really not feeling like sitting here watching the spell button spinners count down the GCD for 15% of the time Berserking is up. So that macro up there, which is guaranteed to waste 15% of the Berserking buff, has got to go.

So. Thinking about it, one way to make sure I'm not doing that, is to use a cast sequence:
#showtooltip Lightning Bolt
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/castsequence Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lightning Bolt
Even if I do this with multiple macros, like Lava Burst and Lightning Bolt, this is what will happen (not counting any haste, lag, or spell travel time):
Ele Mastery (0) -> LvB (0) -> LB (2.0) -> Berserk (2.0) -> LB (4.0) -> LB (6.0) -> LvB
(ok, lag will mean I can't get more than 3 LBs in there although IN theory more can fit.)

Let's go back to the question of adding the Ele Mastery in front of Lava Burst. What will this do? It will mean the damage is dealt at the beginning of the GCD for the spell, instead of at the end, which will make a difference once every 3 minutes under two possible conditions:

• Flame Shock almost expiring
  
• boss is about to die in 2 seconds and I want an extra 10K damage in my WWS!!!

Other than that, it means I've possibly used 10% of the crit chance buff time (the GCD, again) casting a spell that's going to crit anyhow. ("Possibly?" well during the 15 seconds of the Ele Mastery buff there will be one Lava Burst and maybe two. If Ele Master procs off a Lava Burst macro, I will always have two.) OTOH if all the macros don't have a castsequence I could get into some sort of mess.

Hmm, "some sort of mess" isn't very quantitative. My thought is that such a "mess" is possible anyhow since they are cast sequences across multiple macros. Anyhow here they are, and I can either mull over whether to use the Lava Burst macro, or try it against a target dummy, or get four tolerant friends to hit some dungeons with me. Kuan has been mostly hanging out in the target dummy area all week.
#showtooltip Lava Burst
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/castsequence reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lava Burst

#showtooltip Lightning Bolt
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/castsequence reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lightning Bolt

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/castsequence reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/castsequence reset=4 Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt
I am sad that I lose nuking the error message spam off this last one. But it's too long otherwise, and getting this to do the right thing is more important than nuking all the red spam I don't read until I'm trying to figure out why the spells stopped coming and glance at it to see a stun/silence/oom message.

Restoration.
Since I haven't played with a lot of points in the Restoration tree in many many months, and never enough to Main Heal Heroics at level, I needed to evaluate everything for the macros. Actually I went resto first, when messing with them.

The macros follow a lot of this same reasoning above, but here in healer-land the considerations are slightly different, since the effects of Ele Mastery from a Resto perspective are split between NS and Tidal Force (TF). However TF is a 20 second buff, and I want it to proc whenever it can. The problem to solve is that I still don't want Berserking wasted, waiting for an NS 1.5 second GCD.

Anyhow here they are.
#showtooltip Healing Wave
/stopmacro [nocombat]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Tidal Force
/castsequence Nature's Swiftness, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Healing Wave

#showtooltip Chain Heal
/stopmacro [nocombat]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Tidal Force
/castsequence Nature's Swiftness, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Chain Heal

#showtooltip Lesser Healing Wave
/stopmacro [nocombat]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Tidal Force
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lesser Healing Wave
I'll be popping these into Kuan's macros when I log in next, and moving buttons around. These will only be testable by running instances, as there isn't much damage the training dummies do back.

It's not 4 anymore.

Habits are quite strong, and on Kuan I've had Earth Shock hotkeyed to 4 as long as I've HAD Earth Shock, which is roughly 37 months now.

He's also had 6,7,8 being Heal, Lesser Heal, Chain Heal, well, ever since he's had Chain Heal, which is probably 36 months now.

But as of hitting level 75, Kuan has gotten Lava Burst (which by the way has the lamest entry in Wowwiki ever as of this writing, perhaps I will take the time to fix). So I spent last night moving buttons around, and trying out different arrangements. And the above button placements do not make any sense any more, so after some fussing, I ended up with these.



Playing in Violet Hold (which struck me as super easy), and also against Arugal, what I finally settled on was not quite a cast sequence, but an opening fight sequence and the rest is as-cooldowns-dictate. If pulling (i.e. outdoor questing), open with Lightning Bolt, then Flame Shock, Lava Burst, Lightning (Chain if CC isn't an issue), Lightning Bolt, Lightning (Chain if CC isn't an issue), repeat since Lava Burst unless CDs run out, then Flame Shock again. I didn't really see many things last that long. that didn't work so well on Arugal becuase of some immunity mechanic I have not researched.

However that niggled in the back of my head, so I went to the Elitist Jerks forums and looked at what they had to say. And after a lot of debate on how to fit 3 casts with 8 second cooldowns in a 16.5 second window and what haste would make it possible, the conclusion of the thread I was readying was screw sequences, just remember spell priorities (Flame shock > Lava Burst > Chain Lightning > Lightning Bolt) and try to keep as much as could be on cooldown (or dot ticks). If more than 6 seconds left on Flame Shock and you were moving (so instant casts only), cast Earth Shock.

Meanwhile, Earth Shock isn't 4 anymore, it's reversed spots with Flame Shock. And Frost Shock is 6 instead of Heal. I'll be hitting the wrong buttons for a while, I can tell.

EDIT (the next day): turns out I was misremembering about the heal keys. I found a screenshot of a Hakkar raid from Oct 2006 (yes, that's about how far I've gotten uploading the screenshots):

half-way there

Kuan and Viljo are now 75. Kuan has Lava Burst, Viljo has Frostfire Bolt (and has re-spec'd), and both have spent a wee bit of time at the training dummies in Orgrimmar checking out cast sequencing changes and, of course, the animation.

Kuan now has a problem that other shamans have been whining about since the WotLK beta, namely working out the max DPS cast sequence when the Chain Lightning has a 3.5 sec cool down, the Shocks have a 5-6 second cool down depending on talents, and Lava Burst has an 8 second cooldown, and of course they are all subject to the global cooldown.

Gahhh. Possibly it's time to glance through the EJ shaman forums. Or, I can just do some damned math.

Frostfire

So I did some research. And it looks like the top dps spec for mage at 80 is: 0/53/18 At least according to the most recent Elitist Jerks post on mage theory crafting.

It's an actual elementalist build! Or at least as close to elemental as you can get with the current talent trees. I guess it's really a deep fire build with a bit of frost talents thrown on top to make frostfire bolt even more powerful.

From looking at the talents and reading a bit, it looks like frostfire bolt will do less damage than fireball, but will have god-like crits. I foresee that Viljo will have to get a bit faster with the invis/ice block. Or, heh, maybe the tanks can actually build enough threat.

Viljo and Teltanara's Talents at 80

Viljo:
Fire build. Not sure if I like all the places I've put points, but it's a decent guide for now.

Arcane build.

Fire with both Focus Magic and Icy Veins

Teltanara:
Holy build with Guardian Sprit.

Holy Build without Guardian Spirit, instead putting the last point into Inspiration.

Enough disc to get Improved Divine Spirit.

Long time No see

I've been so busy I haven't updated this in a while. The 3.0 patch dropped! All those achievements... that Kuan has done... and has no credit for.

So, first things first, got the 3-4 map points that were missed taken care of. Then a bunch of other random stuff. Then, some methodicals, Classic Dungeonmaster, and only one BF run away from Outland Dungeonmaster.

Raiding wise, shaman is fully nerfed. Eeyan does way better than Kuan, to my bitter disappointment...
and those of many others. Here are some links for future reference:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12065154535&sid=1
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10951965318&sid=2000&pageNo=1

Blue promises to have a serious look at it... before next expansion. But agrees ele shaman tree + coefficient nerf needs to be looked at, and will... sometime before the next expansion. Great.

I spec'd Tylara, still prot, but haven't really played her much. Paladin has changed so much I have to learn how again. Ikoli still remains unspec'd, I have no idea how to spec a 50-something healy priest. But she needs to be healy, she will play with Clara's death knight after next week.

Ikoli is also 75 inscription now. She's got a long way to go, but that's OK. She can learn the daily minor glyphs. Her first one was some hunter one.

respec'ing Eeyan

Eeyan's DPS is ass even though he's now all in epics. My new Dominos UI lets the theorycraft through and I discovered Ghostly Strike, once all the bonuses are added in, is less damage than I'd thought from the tooltip.

bah. Here is his new spec, dropping all the Subtlety points. I know, people will yell at me about lack of weapon spec but I still don't primarily raid him, and still find myself using Riposte even in Heroics.

about those PANTS!!!

I am still doing the Pants Dance.

I should go to bed. OMG I have been annoyed forever that T4 legs were a skirt, and even more annoyed that Kuan was in a skirt.

/dance

So about the re-gem. T4 pants are +20 spell hit. T5 +14 spell hit, +20 crit. What I basically did was say screw it: I pulled the Veiled Noble Topaz out of his boots, the only red socket Kuan has, and replaced it with the Runed Crimson Spinel which is the other quest reward for getting the Heroic Magisters' Terrace Key. Then, in the new yellow socket in the T5 pants I put Great Dawnstone.

So the bottom line, gem-wise, is that +5 dmg +4 spell hit has been replaced with +12 dmg, +8 spell hit. Not so shabby.

But enough sitting here typing. I need to dance more. Must focus on what's important: no more skirt, on my beautiful male troll! Then, to bed.

On to Magtheridon

After a long hiatus from playing, Kuanchichi and Viljo signed on last night, poked around Alterac Valley, and were displeased as Horde still can't reliably win AV on our battlegroup. Our guild chat was talking about possible Mag attempts, so we then dragooned some guildies, to come run Heroic Arcatraz with us.

We ended up with three officers in the party as they are geared enough for the challenge, and off we went, to wipe til repairs on Vereketh the Unbound. We finally decided fuckit, it was stupid this fight was so hard, I mean seriously why, and worked our way through the rest of the instance.

There were some deaths and wipes in there, it was like playing a normal instance in the normal game, before acquiring Tier 4+ level epics. All in all the run was 2.5 hours or so. But we downed the rest of the bosses, they weren't nearly that difficult, and keeping the oversized gnome alive wasn't so hard either.

Now there is only one Trial of the Naaru quest left: Magtheridon. We really wanted to have that quest in our log, before the guild downed Mag.

Meanwhile, Kuan apparently got an upgrade to one of the only two blue pieces of gear he retains. Harbinger dropped this crazy blue trinket that looks designed for Ele Shaman: [Shiffar's Nexus-Horn]. Kuan grabbed it, and I went websurfing to compare it to [Xi'ri's Gift] which is what he has. I found a thread in the druid forums talking about it. Even with the hidden (possibly 45 second?) cooldown, the new trinket appears to proc often enough to beat the rep trinket hands down: one in 5 crits, which for Kuan will mean roughly every 15 or so LB casts, or 25 or so other spells. That is more than every 2 mins, and it's passive which frees up another button. So Kuan has the badged trinket to use for burst damage as a frontload on bloodlust or berserk, and the passive one to just boost DPS.

I will try it today and see. If the procs put the badged trinket on cooldown, then I will stick with [Xi'ri's Gift] for more control. If the two effects can stack, well, I win perhaps. However perhaps not, I was noticing Kuan bumping up against the 130% threat ceiling quite a bit last night...

Respec sooner than I thought

I got around to logging in Kuanchichi last night and ran around Dustwallow beating on level 39 and 40 mobs with 2H axe and mace. It took abotu 10 mins before I noticed the blank buttons, and then that Blizzard had succumbed to the massive shaman outcry and zero'd out the shaman specs.

Here's what I've done so far. I started working out the numbers and mana benefit from Unrelenting Storm and comparing them to what the 2.3 changes yielded... because in a raid situation Kuan's problem is he runs out of mana quite rapidly in long fights.

• 5 points in Unrelenting Storm assuming 400 Intellect yields 40mp5 which is 480 mana per minute.

• The mana spring totem went from 12 mp2 to 20 mp2, which yields 240 mana per minute. So right there I free up 2 points.

• The change to Water Shield worked out to 204 mana per globe, which was renewed every minute, so a minimum of 612 mana per minute.

• And of course, the damage nerf to Lightning Bolt was also a mana nerf, so it uses less mana.

Now, the question is, what is more important. The expensive Totem of Wrath, that grants party members +3% spell hit and crit? or the insta-cast Nature spell every 3 mins? I am inclined to the latter, since I've used it a lot in oshit situations in Heroics and Kara, tank health is dropping and healer is silenced o shit! I am sure the guild casters would rather see the totem. If the totem was a clear win (in terms of group damage output) over using a Searing to cast fireballs, that'd be an easier call. But Searing wins against any mob without fire resist.


Gee, a lot of WoWwiki on this stuff is stubs. I should fill it in

enhance

I wonder how viable this build would be...

Kuanchichi and mana regen

Preamble: At about level 40, I realized that with the acquisition of a decent lesser heal, having points in a faster healing wave was a waste for the elemental-spec'd Kuanchichi. So I respec'd.

Kuan has only respec'd once since then, that I paid gold for. That was when I decided the proc rate on Lightning Overload was ass, and put the points in the resto tree.

...

Anyhow, last night Kuan got the spiffy epic belt of goodness. Now he had in his bags for use with healy gear, the Uvuros Hide Cinch, which has better +heals even than the Wave-song Girdle, and mp5 as well, but is inferior in all other aspects. This got me calculating, as Kuan's mana regen is very poor for his healy outfit, and actually not so great for his caster-dmg gear either. so, i'd lose +3 to heals but gain a little over 1% crit, which means over 100 casts i would have gained probably 350 points healed...

I talked to Wendy about this and Clara too, and they are all 'Screw that! Mana regen! Doesn't Shaman have a mana-regen-while-casting-talent? Why are you not using that!' So I looked, and it's 'Unrelenting Storm,' tier 5 in the ele tree! What a good thing for Kuan, although I bet all the resto-shamans out there hate the placement. Meanwhile... I'd put it out of my mind recently, but Kuan has the tier 4 talent 'Eye of the Storm', which triggers 6 seconds of Focused Casting on a not-spell crit. I've been thinking it was a waste of 3 points, as to get any use of the talent Kuan has to initiate immediately a Lightning Bolt cast after drawing aggro, which is just plain stupid. I'd just put them there to get lower in the tree, and was undecided on what to do to fix this stupidity. But now I shall move them to the mana regen talent. It will be Kuan's third paid-for respec; I guess it will cost 10g.

Meanwhile, looking at his healy gear, I will see if Teltanara can get a quick enchanting skillup by putting mp5 on his healy chest. Then it will be all around goodness as Kuan will be much more viable as a caster (his non-healy belt had very little spellpower) and a healer.