Roxanne Flowers

Don't leave a butt print impression in the door when you do go. It would be rude.

If you aren't logging out inside an Inn or a capital city, blame yourself if you get ganked on a PvP server. "I'm not real good with Cause & Effect. Why is that?"

Whenever I have to wait at a dock for a boat to arrive or leave, that's when I pull out my fishing rod and fish. I certainly don't "need" the vendor bait fish that I catch, but I certainly do want the skill points that accrue from doing this. By fishing during the few minutes that would otherwise be "wasted time" just standing around doing nothing, I've been able to slowly raise my fishing skill on all of my characters. And by doing it only while waiting for boats, I'm not stuck "grinding" fishing skill for long stretches at a time (which gets mind numbing in a hurry). So it turns into "a little here, a little there" and it all adds up over time. Once I get to my destination, I'll cook and vendor bait the fish I caught so they don't clog up my inventory. Special fish, like Firefin Snappers, get mailed off to my Alchemist for conversion into reagents.

Elune's Spirit Guide (21/25/5 Night Elf Priest) An experimental Discipline/Holy/Shadow spec for Night Elf Priests who want to maximize support for their Starshards racial spell. "May the stars guide you." Disclaimers: I played World of Warcraft in the 2005-2007 time frame before moving on to other games, so I do have experience with playing all 8 Alliance classes to Level 50 or so a decade ago. I played on a PvE server then and I'm playing on Darrowshire now, since PvP does not interest me. This is not intended to be a bleeding edge DPS optimized raiding Priest spec that will put everything else to shame. If anything, it is intended to be a viable DPM efficient Priest spec to be played for FUN as a soloist and in 5 man groups in PvE content. That means that I'm looking at a build for leveling more than I am for raiding. I have been lurking these forums for weeks already, and am well aware of the "Play Shadow!" exhortations that have been made repeatedly for leveling builds, particularly for those who are interested in speeding through to 60. I am not interested in speed running to 60 and will be taking my time to enjoy the game, therefore I have no problem with "being slower" than alternative build strategies in terms of XP per hour. The primary purpose of this build is to explore the possibility of a potential off-meta spec which I have not seen anyone show (enough) interest in (yet) to post an actual build for. This post is basically an answer to a question of mine ... which is that IF you were going to design a build to support use of Starshards as your primary damaging attack spell, then HOW would you go about selecting Talents to support that objective? Since Starshards is a Night Elf Priest only racial spell, this question is only relevant to Players interested in playing Night Elf Priests (who seem to be a decided minority of Alliance Priests, for somewhat obvious reasons of hardened Conventional Wisdom). I have to wonder if Night Elf Discipline/Holy Priests are even rarer than Moonkin Druids ... and if so, that notion only increases my desire to follow through on this experiment so as to share my conclusions and experiences with this community. I also know that the prevailing opinion for Mages is "lol arcane" and that what I'm presenting here is in many ways a functional "Arcane Missiles by Priest" sort of build strategy by alternative means, which no doubt plenty of people will look askance at. The preceding thread where I began this exploration can be found HERE. Level 60 Priest (21/25/5) http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bVgGc00oZcEzI00VZx Discipline (21 points) Wand Specialization - Rank 5/5 Increases your damage with Wands by 25%. Silent Resolve - Rank 5/5 Reduces the threat generated by your spells by 20%. Improved Power Word: Fortitude - Rank 2/2 Increases the effect of your Power Word: Fortitude and Prayer of Fortitude spells by 30%. Improved Power Word: Shield - Rank 3/3 Increases the damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield by 15%. Martyrdom - Rank 2/2 Gives you a 100% chance to gain the Focused Casting effect that lasts for 6 sec after being the victim of a melee or ranged critical strike. The Focused Casting effect prevents you from losing casting time when taking damage and increases resistance to Interrupt effects by 20%. Meditation - Rank 3/3 Allows 15% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting. Divine Spirit - Rank 1/1 Holy power infuses the target, increasing their Spirit by 17 for 30 min. Holy (25 points) Improved Renew - Rank 3/3 Increases the amount healed by your Renew spell by 15%. Holy Specialization - Rank 5/5 Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy spells by 5%. Spell Warding - Rank 5/5 Reduces all spell damage taken by 10%. Holy Nova - Rank 1/1 Causes an explosion of holy light around the caster, causing 28 to 33 Holy damage to all enemy targets within 10 yards and healing all party members within 10 yards for 52 to 61. These effects cause no threat. Blessed Recovery - Rank 3/3 After being struck by a melee or ranged critical hit, heal 25% of the damage taken over 6 sec. Inspiration - Rank 3/3 Increases your target's armor by 25% for 15 sec after getting a critical effect from your Flash Heal, Heal, Greater Heal, or Prayer of Healing spell. Spiritual Guidance - Rank 5/5 Increases spell damage and healing by up to 25% of your total Spirit. Shadow (5 points) Spirit Tap - Rank 5/5 Gives you a 100% chance to gain a 100% bonus to your Spirit after killing a target that yields experience. For the duration, your Mana will regenerate at a 50% rate while casting. Lasts 15 sec. Perhaps the most unusual point for this build is that crits are intended to be meaningless for damage spells, but useful for healing spells and Wand use ... which feels somewhat b(l)izzarro on its face, since usually crit chance is something you want to invest in rather than work around. I say that because in a Starshards build, your primary damage sources are going to be Shadow Word: Pain, Starshards and your Wand, of which only your Wand can crit ... meaning no crits from either Shadow or Arcane damage spells when using a normal spell rotation. Shadow Word: Pain is a DoT and therefore cannot crit, and Starshards is a channeled spell which also cannot crit. Holy spells can score crits, but in a Starshards build you're rarely going to be using Smite past Level 10 or equipping a Wand (whichever comes first), and Holy Fire would only really be useful as an opening attack, since once combat commences it's just going to be use of Starshards and/or Wand so as to maximize Damage Per Mana throughput and Holy Fire just isn't as efficient at that as Starshards is unless your target has Arcane Resistances (since Holy is unresisted). Where healing is concerned, since a Starshards build isn't locked into Shadowform you'll be able to swing role as an "off-main" or solo healer when circumstances call for it. However, looking at the Holy tree talents, I'm struck by something that seems almost perverse in the returns on investment given the rest of a build spec oriented around Starshards. It seems to me that by planning to use a combination of Flash Heal plus Renew rather than primarily Heal and/or Greater Heal, the investment priorities for talents shift like so: Flash Heal plus Renew Improved Renew 3/3 Holy Specialization 5/5 Inspiration 3/3 = 11 talent points Heal and/or Greater Heal Healing Focus 2/2 Holy Specialization 5/5 Divine Fury 5/5 Inspiration 3/3 Improved Healing 3/3 = 18 talent points Now most builds aim for putting 5 talents into Divine Fury to reduce the casting time of Heal and Greater Heal down from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds, which is definitely prudent, and also follow up with including Healing Focus to prevent casting pushback should Power Word: Shield not be up. But Divine Fury doesn't modify the casting time of Flash Heal (1.5 seconds) or Renew (Instant), and likewise Improved Healing doesn't reduce the mana cost of either Flash Heal or Renew. Healing Focus and Divine Fury are 7 talent points combined just by themselves, which when you've only got 25 points to spend in Holy (5 of which are going to Spiritual Guidance, leaving only 20 to play with) that's not exactly cheap. And to top it all off, as a Starshards build, you're going to be wanting to go for Spirit and Spell Damage on your gear rather than Healing and Critical Chance, so spending a lot of talent points on buffing up your Greater Heal when you won't have Spiritual Healing in tier 6 just doesn't seem all that efficient to me in terms of talent points. Now in the build you see here, you can see that I've essentially "skipped" on the Heal/Greater Heal talent support option to instead favor use of Flash Heal plus Renew so as to reallocate those talent points into Spell Warding and Blessed Recovery. My rationale for this is relatively simple in that I'm designing this build for use as a solo leveling build where I'll need to have reserve options so as to be able to persevere when my Power Word: Shield bubble gets popped. My thinking is that the short casting time of Flash Heal (1.5 seconds) combined with Martyrdom dramatically mitigates the need/priority for Healing Focus, while Renew derives no benefit from Healing Focus at all. If I was planning on using Holy Fire and Smite as my primary damage dealing spells for a main healing spec, then Divine Fury (and everything that flows from it) would be a lot more valuable to me because I'd be able to make use of the offense and defense gains the talent offers. But because that's not what I'm angling towards, the return on investment when going in that direction would seem to be reduced in a Starshards build, showing once again how if you really want to support Starshards as an offensive spell you really do need to start rethinking more than a few things. Due to that difference from the "ordinary" I'm looking at using my talent points in the Holy tree to bolster my defensive protections to better leverage Martyrdom than would otherwise be typical. There is one point that I would like to correct from Fisher's excellent Priest Leveling Guide concerning Starshards though ... At the time of this posting, the 30 second cooldown time is not accurate for Darrowshire (or any of the Elysium managed servers, I'd expect) running on 1.12 game mechanics. Starshards can be chain cast successively so long as you have mana, with the full mana cost being paid at the start of the spell casting. This means that after 5 seconds of channeling you will ALWAYS get a "full" mana recovery tick from Spirit (albeit at combat value rather than non-combat), even without having any talent points in Meditation, unlike Mind Flay. Although I can't demonstrably prove it yet, I'm starting to wonder if the combination of Divine Spirit, Spiritual Guidance and loading up as much +Spirit and Spell Damage gear as possible would yield not only a favorable Damage Per Mana comparison with Shadow when including talents but also a competitive Damage Per Second yield such that a Starshards build would be capable of sustaining damage output/throughput onto target for a much longer stretch of time given similar starting mana pools. Indeed, I even have to wonder if it might be possible for a "properly" built and equipped Starshards build to be capable of casting Starshards indefintely due to sheer mana efficiency. This would then create what amounts to a self-sufficient "pressure" build as opposed to the more common "spike" build seen with a lot of other strategies and which would apply a steady rather than RNGesus influenced Threat Per Second generation which in turn makes life MUCH easier for the aggro magnets you team up with. So this is where the ... experiment ... with optimally supporting Starshards as a Night Elf Priest has led me. The nice thing as far as I'm concerned is that the build spec isn't so ridiculously tight that variations on the theme get precluded. In Discipline, if you want Inner Focus and/or Mental Agility, you can reshuffle some talent points in order to get it. In Holy, if you really want to go for Divine Fury and Improved Healing instead of Spell Warding and Blessed Recovery ... you can. That means that what I'm presenting here is less of a cookie cutter and more of a How To concerning the opportunities and synergies that are available when building to support Starshards as your primary damage spell. The sum total of all of these disparate parts would appear to create a most unusual combination ... of an Arcane Night Elf Priest who is extremely mana efficient at producing sustained damage pressure on a single target, and with some ability to apply damage to multiple targets simultaneously. The irony of course being that this is a Priest build instead of a Mage build, and Night Elves are hardly renowned for their ... aptitude ... for the Arcane, having turned away from their arcane studies after the Sundering in a bid for survival. And yet, here is a build that combines Arcane, Holy and Shadow together in what feels (to me) like a rather viable balance in, of all things, a Priest. And once I further "evolved" the build from the Elune's Disciple spec into the form that I'm presenting to you here, the name once again just manifested itself before me. This is a talent build that (probably) only someone who allowed themselves to bathe in the light of Elune could love and follow on the Darrowshire server. Fortunately, that's where still I am, standing for the Goddess in the place between the Shadow and the Light. /pray /cast Starshards

Okay, so I have a hypothesis for what's going on with the Wand damage tooltip display, but it requires suspension of disbelief in Wrong™. So there's different caclulations going on in different places for different things, is the explainer I can come up with. Obviously I haven't exactly got a wide variety of cases to choose from in my data sample, but the following notion is congruent with the results. For Wand minimum damage, take the actual weapon minimum damage and then "normalize" the Spell Power over 10 seconds (DoT behavior precedent) while also factoring in weapon speed. You wind up with something that looks like: Base Weapon Minimum Damage + (Spell Power / Weapon Speed / 10) = Minimum Damage displayed on Character screen (drop fractions) Plugging in the values known, we get the following: Gravestone Scepter: 30 + (36/1.5/10) = 30 + 2.4 = 32 Consecrated Wand: 20 + (35/1.2/10) = 20 + 2.92 = 22 As shown above, the Gravestone Scepter and Consecrated Wand show that they have a damage output of 32-60 and 22-41 respectively, so the minimum damage matches observation (assuming the character sheet calculations are correct in the first place). For Wand maximum damage, do something almost exactly the same as the minimum damage, except drop the weapon speed divisor, like so: Base Weapon Maximum Damage + (Spell Power / 10) = Maximum Damage displayed on Character screen (drop fractions) Plugging in the values known, we get the following: Gravestone Scepter: 57 + (36/10) = 57 + 3.6 = 60 Consecrated Wand: 38 + (35/10) = 38 + 3.5 = 41 As shown above, the Gravestone Scepter and Consecrated Wand show that they have a damage output of 32-60 and 22-41 respectively, so the maximum damage matches observation (assuming the character sheet calculations are correct in the first place). So that makes sense of the 32-60 and 22-41 displays for damage, but doesn't make any sense out of the hover tooltips showing 1-24 +36 and 1-6 +35. In this case, I'm reasonably sure the cause is bad/lazy programming on Blizzard's part. The two Wands shown have minimum damages of 30 and 20 respectively, but the Spell Power being added exceeds both of these values (36 and 35 respectively). The mousehover tooltip must be doing something absurd, like SUBTRACTING 36 from 30 as well as subtracting 35 from 20 ... getting a negative number ... and then just assigning a value of 1 to the minimum damage if Spell Power exceeds the base minimum damage of the Wand. This ought to then be why both Wands show a minimum damage of 1 in both hover tooltips. Even when factoring in the 32-60 and 22-41 displayed damage values, 32<36 and 22<35, so in both cases the minimum damage in the hover tooltip winds up being 1. The maximum damage calculation must then also be similarly compromised/borked/poorly implemented (presumably by Blizzard). In this case, we can confirm that the game is simply working backwards from the maximum damage display of 60 and 41, straight SUBTRACTING the Spell Power and then using the result as the maximum damage value in the hover tooltip. Thus ... 60-36=24 for the 1-24 +36 display ... and 41-25=6 for the 1-6 +35 display. Which is just ... Whacktastic ... on multiple levels.

So my Night Elf Priest just reached Level 34 (yay!). I went to train and respec and then after switching into a 0/25/0 build to completely fill out 5/5 Spiritual Guidance, I went to go and look at my Wand damage in the character screen and found ... well ... this ... ... and I was just like ... "Wait, what?" How is having +36 Spell Power (from 144 Spirit divided by 4 equals 36 thanks to Spiritual Guidance) winding up SUBTRACTING damage off my Wand? Why is it that 30-57 damage turns into 1-24 +36 damage when Spell Power gets added in ... especially since that calculates out to being 37-60 damage (1+36 to 24+36), but then the Damage display is showing 32-60 instead of 37-60. What kind of math is going on behind the tooltip calculator shown here? And then, just to do a cross-comparison, I tossed in a different Wand that I'd just gotten off the Worgen in the Woods quest (since I hadn't disenchanted or sold it yet), and it seemed even weirder. Okay, I get that the 25% of Spirit as Spell Power calculation is an Integer based calculation (144/4=36.0 vs 143/4=35.75=35 for the display) ... but Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is going on with the damage calculation for the Consecrated Wand? 1-6 +35 winds up being 36-41 damage, not the 20-38 damage advertised on the item, but then the Damage display shows 22-41 instead of 36-41 so ... HUH?? There has got to be some legacy vanilla source that figured this out over a decade ago. Anyone know where to find it?

No.

Nightfall procs off Corruption AND Drain Life. If you're going all the way down to Nightfall in the Affliction tree, and you're wanting to PvP, then it would be prudent to spend 5 talent points on Improved Corruption to reduce the casting time for Corruption from 2 seconds down to Instant cast. Considering that Drain Life falls under the heading of Tracers Work Both Ways™ as far as telegraphing your location AND what you're doing to everyone nearby (an important consideration in Battleground PvP) and the relatively obvious conclusion is that if you're looking to proc Nightfall in PvP, use "Instant" cast Corruption to proc Nightfall for you, not Drain Life. Things are different (slightly) in 1v1 PvP and Dueling, but even then, you really aren't well served by channeling a spell for 5 seconds if your opponent has any kind of interrupt/stun type of ability, for what I would hope should be self-servingly obvious reasons.

This is going to be another one of my (series?) of self-indulgent off-meta spec theorycrafting builds optimized for something other than producing yet another cookie cutter of highest damage output in the shortest amount of time. In this case, I'm looking to cross-pollinate my experiences with using Starshards (on a Night Elf Priest) as a primary damage output spell to what ought to be the Mage equivalent in Arcane Missiles. Specifically, I'm looking towards a specific spell rotation to enable what I think might be an overlooked possibility ... which might have been what Blizzard was intending for us to discover with the Arcane talent spec to maximize its mana efficiency, thereby enabling additional options when it comes to down ranking of spells to save mana for long duration PvE fights. If all of this sounds too Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to you for comfort, feel free to ignore everything that follows below about using Damage Per Mana spell rotations. So the first thing I've learned from playing a Starshards oriented build is that having a casting time interval of longer than 5 seconds is VERY advantageous to builds relying on heavy Spirit investment, mainly because the amount of mana recovered beyond the 5 Second Rule is considerable, particularly after 2-3 recovery ticks. This results in a much lower net mana cost over time than chain casting an alternative spell with a much shorter casting time (1.5-3.5 seconds, for example) where you never 'escape" from the 5 Second Rule for spell casting. In this regard, Arcane Missiles is ALMOST THERE at a 5 second channel duration, but not quite. The second thing I've learned from using a Starshards oriented Priest build, where the emphasis is on Spirit rather than on MP/5 for mana recovery, is that casting time spells charge their mana cost at the END of the spell casting, while channeled spells charge their mana cost at the BEGINNING of the spell casting. This means that, in the case of a Priest, casting Holy Fire (3.5 second casting time, no projectile flight time, 10 second DoT) immediately followed by Starshards (6 second channeling) is EXTREMELY friendly to the 5 Second Rule of mana recovery from Spirit, since the two spells can be cast practically back to back and the mana costs for both spells happen very nearly simultaneously. This yields a performance in which a LOT of time spent casting spells is happening outside of the 5 Second Rule. In fact, my usual "go to" rotation on my Priest is to Power Word: Shield/Holy Fire/Starshards/Starshards and then either repeat or switch to Wand to finish. Even without 3/3 Meditation, with a Spirit heavy build, I'm seeing a LOT of mana recovery on my Priest using this spell rotation, such that downtime is substantially mitigated. Now I'm wondering if something similar was the design intent for Arcane specs to take advantage of the inter(re)action between Arcane Missiles and the 5 Second Rule to make an Arcane heavy spec relatively mana efficient on net compared to the alternatives of simply spamming Frostbolt/Scorch/Fireball without ever getting out from under the 5 Second Rule. Specifically, I'm looking at a rotation of either Fireball/(wait for impact)/Arcane Missiles/(repeat), Scorch/Arcane Missiles/(repeat) or Frostbolt/(wait for impact)/Arcane Missiles/(repeat). Waiting for the combined casting time plus projectile flight time to target will EASILY allow for exiting from the 5 Second Rule during the rotation at the end of the Arcane Missiles channeling meaning that mana is being recovered from Spirit at full value during the casting time spent on either Fireball, Scorch or Frostbolt. The casting time for a Fireball/(wait for impact)/Arcane Missiles/(repeat) casting would be 3-3.5 seconds (plus projectile flight time) plus 5 seconds of channeling, with all of the mana costs happening "around" the flight time of the projectile. The reason for waiting to begin channeling Arcane Missiles is in case Arcane Concentration procs and you get a clearcasting rebate on Arcane Missiles, which will then maximize the mana recovery from Spirit during the rotation quite dramatically. Obviously this means that the intended rotation will be "faster" at shorter ranges, due to projectile flight time, but no matter what the minimum time between launches of Fireballs will be 8 seconds (3+5) minimum, meaning no loss/clipping of Fireball burn DoT damage, even at melee range with no projectile flight time spent. The casting time for Scorch/Arcane Missiles/(repeat) would be 1.5 seconds plus 5 seconds for a total of 6.5 seconds, with all of the mana costs happening back to back and thus making it possible to gain a "full" mana recovery tick from Spirit when casting a follow up repeat Scorch. The casting time for a Frostbolt/(wait for impact)/Arcane Missiles/(repeat) casting would be 2.5-3 seconds (plus projectile flight time) plus 5 seconds of channeling, with all of the mana costs happening "around" the flight time of the projectile. The reason for waiting to begin channeling Arcane Missiles is in case Arcane Concentration procs and you get a clearcasting rebate on Arcane Missiles, which will then maximize the mana recovery from Spirit during the rotation quite dramatically. Obviously this means that the intended rotation will be "faster" at shorter ranges, due to projectile flight time, but no matter what the minimum time between launches of Fostbolts will be 7.5 seconds (2.5+5) minimum, which once again gets your Mage out from under the 5 Second Rule. Now, where things start getting interesting with this is when you start getting into talent specs. If building an Arcane/Fire spec, one option that quickly becomes apparent is investing in both Improved Arcane Missiles and Burning Soul so as to maximize your resistance to pushback while casting your spells. And if you're going 31 talent points deep into Arcane and at least 12 points deep into Fire, you might as well orient your build around use of Scorch, for fast casting, rather than around use of Fireball. Speculatively speaking, I'd be looking at doing something like this as an Arcane/Fire "battle mage" sort of build that is designed to resist pushback: 33/18/0 This gives you not only Arcane Power for "die in a double meteor strike" 3 Minute Mage performance using back to back double castings of (super juked) Pyroblast for impressive spike damage potential against a single target ... while also maximizes the power of Scorch through investments in Impact, Ignite, Incinerate and Improved Scorch, in addition to including Burning Soul and Pyroblast. Both Arcane Power and Presence of Mind have 3 minute cooldowns, which works out nicely with a spell like Pyroblast (go figure, eh?). This is a build that would be good for solo leveling where you can use a rotation of Scorch/Arcane Missiles/(repeat) in a way that yields at least 1 "full" mana recovery tick from Spirit every 6 seconds due to the 6.5 second rotation cycle for casting it while being highly resistant to pushback on spellcasting and which is able to make full use of any fire damage DoTs that get applied to the target without clipping their duration(s) with overwrites. So long as you're not fighting Fire Immune (or heavily Fire Resistant) enemies, this doesn't look like it would be that bad of an option in a PvE setting. If building an Arcane/Frost spec, the obvious option is to angle for Shatter in the Frost tree so as to maximize the critical hit potential of your spells. In the context of a Frostbolt/(wait for impact)/Arcane Missiles/(repeat) spell rotation, this then means that investment in Frostbite becomes necessary in order to "set up" the benefits of Shatter, and furthermore that investment in Permafrost rather than in Ice Shards actually might have some merit. That's because between the Frost Bolt flight time, the Arcane Missiles channeling time and the casting time for a follow up Frost Bolt (and its flight time) it's easy to start reaching 8-10 seconds worth of time between Frostbolt impacts on target to refresh any Chill effects on movement reduction. If you're wanting to keep things Chilled (as opposed to Frozen) for the entire spell rotation, investing in Permafrost would be prudent to avoid any gaps in duration coverage. The result winds up looking something like this and has a bit more "wiggle room" for moving talents around to suit personal preferences: 31/0/20 The downside to this build is that it doesn't have any pushback protection during the Frostbolt portion of its spell rotation cycle, but that's mitigated by use of Cone of Cold and Frost Nova in order to continue to play Keep Away from targets to kite them. This build also makes possible two different methods of AoE beatdown ... either using Frost Nova on a herd to Freeze them and then apply "crit happy" Arcane Explosions (generating damage at almost a 1:1 damage per mana spent ratio PER TARGET when critically hitting for +50% damage at max rank before even including any spell power bonuses) to everything present until killed at close but still out of melee range ... or ... using "standard" Frost AoE farming strategies of using Frost Nova on a herd to Freeze them, step away from melee range, blink to open range, turn around and cast Blizzard (which does NOT critically hit anything ever!) from a distance to whittle things down while they trudge slowly towards you. Additionally, a mix of these strategies would also be possible, where the rotation then becomes herd/Frost Nova/couple steps/Arcane Explosion/Blink/Blizzard and then reassess what needs to happen next (if anything) to mop up the stragglers. Although it's hardly exact, 2-3 Arcane Explosions effectively equal the damage and mana costs of 1 Blizzard at any given Level. Have a look ... Level 22 Arcane Explosion Rank 2 = 57-64 Arcane damage for 120 mana (85.5-96 Arcane damage on critical hits) Level 20 Blizzard Rank 1 = 200 Frost damage over 8 seconds for 320 mana (does not ever critically hit) Level 54 Arcane Explosion Rank 6 = 243-264 Arcane damage for 390 mana (364.5-396 Arcane damage on critical hits) Level 52 Blizzard Rank Rank 5 = 936 Frost damage over 8 seconds for 1160 mana (does not ever critically hit) Level 60 Blizzard Rank Rank 6 = 1192 Frost damage over 8 seconds for 1400 mana (does not ever critically hit) Without critical hits, Arcane Explosion scales poorly in relation to Blizzard in terms of damage production per mana spent before including spell power into the equation. At Level 20-22, the damage per mana ratio is approximately 1:2 and 2:3 (against a single target) for Arcane Explosion and Blizzard respectively when neither spell crits. But critical hits markedly improve Arcane Explosion's damage per mana ratio up to 3:4 (against a single target), which is rather dramatic, especially if you can "guarantee" that a target will be Frozen for (up to) +59% chance to critically hit (+6 from Improved Arcane Explosion, +3 from Arcane Instability and +50 from Shatter on Frozen targets). Comparing the damage per mana against a single target when using Rank 6 of Arcane Explosion and Blizzard, the ratios look more like 2:3 for Arcane Explosion and 5:6 for Blizzard before including spell power into the equation when neither spell critically hits. But again, critical hits markedly improve Arcane Explosion's damage per mana ratio up to 39:40 ... which is just barely shy of being 1:1. So the "real power" of Arcane Explosion (not to mention its mana efficiency) lies in its potential to critically hit, and with Shatter offering +50% chance to critically hit Frozen targets, it becomes a relatively simple 1-2 combo of pairing Frost Nova with Arcane Explosion to unleash this power in an Shatter spec build. At the same time, the option to Blink/Blizzard still remains available, granting additional opportunities and AoE strategies of engagement. The loss of a single talent point from Permafrost yields a loss of 3% of movement slowing (72% instead of 75% on Blizzard use, or 47% instead of 50% on Frostbolts) which should hardly be noticeable, as well as a loss of 1 second of Chill effect duration (+2 seconds instead of +3 seconds) which ought to be within the parameters of durations needed by the build. A 2+2=4 second Chill duration ought to be perfectly workable for Blizzard, since every hit reapplies the movement speed debuff. Likewise a 7+2=9 second Chill duration on Frostbolt Rank 5, increasing to a 9+2 second Chill duration on Frostbolt Ranks 8+ ought to be adequate for a spell rotation lasting 8-9 seconds long (depending on projectile flight time and Player impatience) ought to be quite adequate for the intended purpose. The overall intent of the Arcane/Frost build using a Frostbolt/(wait for impact)/Arcane Missiles/(repeat) spell rotation is to use Frostbite procs to enable extreme damage volleys from Arcane Missiles while simultaneously maximizing the mana recovery from Spirit offered by the rotation of spells. In this context, Frostbite procs (5 seconds) are essentially entirely "spent" on making Shatter available to Arcane Missiles (5 second channel) rather than to follow on Frostbolt spells while at the same time optimizing for kiting potential thanks to Permafrost and making for an extremely efficient mana recovery from Spirit performance possible. This sort of theorycrafting makes me wonder if these sorts of spell rotations are what Blizzard's Devs had in mind (over a decade ago) when they formulated the Arcane spec in the fashion that they did, where the design intent was to "mix" the spellcasting schools so as to yield an efficient use of mana on net through deliberate "weaving" of spellcasting around the 5 Second Rule. Of course, we now know that the Players essentially REJECTED that approach in favor of simpler strategies to just repeat spam a single spell endlessly (Scorch, Frostbolt, Shadowbolt, etc.) in order to achieve the maximum production of damage in the shortest amount of time expended, so as to satisfy the Need For Speed when running through content. So even if this winds up being a sort of "dead end" in terms of theorycrafting, it's still fun to meander through the "what if" scenarios of attempting to do something as odd as build a Mage for Spirit instead of Intellect (say wha?) and structure your gameplay strategies around producing maximum damage for minimum (net over time) mana spent, rather than structuring around maximum damage for minimum time spent.

Let me guess. You're not playing on Darrowshire, are you?

HAX?

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?quests=4.-261#0-3+1+2 Class quests at Levels 1, 10, 50 and 60.

Haven't actually tried it out in actual gameplay yet, so everything is pure theory at this point. But my Mage is Level 33 and as soon as I hit Level 34 and return from the "field" to train I'll be using a respec to switch into the 31/18/2 spec plan but look like a 12/13/0 build at Level 34. Once I have something to report from that experience, I'll post it here.

In PvP, channeling ANY spell for longer than 3 seconds is just asking to be horribly maimed. Next question.

If you use the CastModifier addon, you could do something where do set conditionals on what the macro does depending on which Form you're in. So basically something like this: Bear Form macro /cast [stance:0] Bear Form; [stance:2] Aquatic Form; [stance:3] Cat Form; [stance:4] Travel Form; [stance:5] Moonkin Form What this does is when you're in (basic) Caster Form it'll shift you in to Bear Form (or edit for Dire Bear Form once you reach that level). If you're already in Bear Form, the macro does nothing. If you're in any of the other Forms, it'll CANCEL that other Form to return you to Caster Form. That way, spamming the "correct" button for any form will only toggle that particular Form ON but won't toggle it OFF. If you want to toggle a Form OFF, simply hit any of the OTHER Forms than the one that you're in (so any of the "wrong" Forms) to cancel your current Form and return to Caster Form. After that, you just wash/rinse/repeat to shuffle through all the other Form macros to do the same thing. Aquatic Form macro /cast [stance:0] Aquatic Form; [stance:1] Bear Form; [stance:3] Cat Form; [stance:4] Travel Form; [stance:5] Moonkin Form Cat Form macro /cast [stance:0] Cat Form; [stance:1] Bear Form; [stance:2] Aquatic Form; [stance:4] Travel Form; [stance:5] Moonkin Form Travel Form macro /cast [stance:0] Travel Form; [stance:1] Bear Form; [stance:2] Aquatic Form; [stance:3] Cat Form; [stance:5] Moonkin Form Moonkin Form macro /cast [stance:0] Moonkin Form; [stance:1] Bear Form; [stance:2] Aquatic Form; [stance:3] Cat Form; [stance:4] Travel Form Click once to turn on. Click multiple times and it'll stay on. Click something ELSE to turn a Form off. This means that if you're wanting to CHANGE Forms, simply double click the the keybind for the Form you want to change TO and have done with it, and if you triple click (or more) you won't be shifted out of the Form you wanted to be in. If you want to be in Caster Form, simply click ONCE on any Form other than the one you're in to cancel/toggle off your current Form.

The biggest and best thing that you can possibly do when switching from clicking to button mashing is to formulate a COMMON keybind muscle memory "language" that you'll use for all of your characters. Put the same "kinds" of spells into the same hotbar slots on every character, so that you don't have to "relearn" where everything is and everything goes on each and every character you play. If you're playing only ONE character, that makes your job of doing this easier. If you're playing EIGHT characters in parallel for a single faction, you need to keep in mind the "constraints" that each class has in terms of organizing spells and hotbar slots for them. There's also the "logistical" overhead of standardizing where you put your fingers on your keyboard and mouse, since the less movement/look down you need to do the more responsive your actions will be. As an example of what I'm talking about, a lot of games default the character movement keys to the W-A-S-D set. I quickly discovered that using W-A-S-D put my left hand in a bad position for being able to reach the number (1-0) and function (F1-F12) keys on my keyboard. Using W-A-S-D I could only reach as far as the number 5 key with my index finger before needing to contort my left hand to reach any further while using the W key to keep moving forwards. It also "crammed" my left hand too far to the left (and low) on my keyboard, rendering the reach of my pinky and ring fingers on my left hand relatively useless, while at the same time leaving too many keys to the right beyond easy reach. To put it mildly, using W-A-S-D for movement was decidedly substandard for me, particularly since I use an Apple Keyboard. So my solution to the problem of better hand placement for movement control was to change the W-A-S-D mapping to instead be W-E-R-D ... which essentially "flipped" which keys to press (most of the time) to be at the top (WER) rather than underneath (ASD) so as to keep the fingers of my left hand in a more "natural" relaxed curl above the keyboard. It also moved my left hand "1 key to the right" such that now I can stretch to reach the number 6 and F5 keys with my left index finger easily instead of being limited only being able to reach the number 5 and F4 keys easily with my left index finger. The shift to W-E-R-D also opened up the Q-A combination for use as either Throttle Up/Throttle Down in games that use movement throttles, or use as Autorun/Run/Walk toggling in ground based games like World of Warcraft. The ~/` key in the top left is my go-to programmed target selection bind for things like Target Nearest Enemy and I do a pinky finger stretch to reach it and the ESC key in the top left of the keyboard. I use E for Forward and D for backwards movement, while W and R and the left/right Strafing movement controls. Turning is done by use of mouse mainly, with Shift+W and Shift+R as the keyboard backups for turning if I don't have my right hand on my mouse. When resting my left hand on my keyboard, on the Apple Keyboard (as on many computer keyboards) there is a raised "bump" on the F key to give you tactile feedback to know that your index finger of your left hand is on the correct key (so you can type without looking at your hands with confidence). When I'm playing any MMORPG, my left hand will (now) just naturally come to rest on the W (ring finger), E (middle finger), F (index finger) keys (my pinky finger "hovers" in the air not touching anything or rests on the A key) and with my thumb on the spacebar. The raised bump on the F key under my index finger then gives me the necessary location/positioning feedback for the placement of my left hand on the keyboard ... and then everything after that is just muscle memory. After that, it's just a matter of setting up my hotbars (ALL OF THEM) to be bound to combinations of 1 through = and F1 through F12 and then repeating that for Shift+ and Control+ combos to be able to make use of all *60* hotbar slots and have them map to my keybinds. A substantial number of those keybinds are ones that I wind up not using from the keyboard (for various reasons) and I'll commonly click those instead (things like Eagle Eye or Feed Pet and so on) but I've got them all mapped to my keyboard "just in case" and then it's just a matter of learning the muscle memory movements to reach that particular bind. It can be a project of an afternoon to set all of this up, and if you change the "natural" hand position you're using on your keyboard like I have (from WASD to WERD) then there will be a period of about a week or so where you'll basically be "retraining" your muscle memory reflexes to interface properly with the new control schema, but eventually you'll adapt to it and it'll just become second nature.

Speed of the Internet is NOT a constant.

This is not an exploit. This is a clever use of available game mechanics.

This is something I've seen on my Arcane Missiles firing Mage and on my Starshards dropping Priest as well. There seems to be a "lag" of some sort in applying the damage to target. When you use the spell, the target will INSTANTLY notice and (when solo) aggro onto you, even before any damage ticks land on the target. Then the first damage tick seems to take longer than you would expect to actually show up on your game client. I'm presuming that this is because of the "round trip" network latency gets combined with actual "server lag" for needing to process what's happening. So my ping to server is typically in the range of 130-150ms, meaning that a "round trip" from me to server and then back to me is going to be roughly ~300ms (or so). Add in the delay for having the server process whatever I'm doing so as to issue commands back to my game client and I'm looking at maybe another ~100-200ms, yielding an up to ~500ms delay in the "reporting" of resolution of periodic damage on my game client. I'm presuming that this is why it will OFTEN appear that the last damage tick of Arcane Missiles or Starshards (or Mindflay) will occur AFTER the channeling of the spell has ostensibly been completed as far as my game client is concerned. I start channeling and then have to WAIT for the animation/damage of the FIRST damage tick to actually appear on my client ... even though my target responds INSTANTLY to being attacked (from my perspective) even before any damage lands on them. Similarly, when I finish channeling I ALSO have to WAIT for the animation/damage of the LAST damage tick to actually appear on my client ... even though my channeling of the spell is over and done already. Often times, the delay after finishing to channel a damage spell for the last damage tick to land is ... approximately 0.5 to 1 second ... and if I immediately start chain casting into another channeling (of the same spell) then that last damage tick from the first casting will seemingly "never land" and instead get overwritten by the second channeling cast. Because of this ... peculiar behavior ... that I'm seeing reasonably consistently on my game client, I've gotten into the habit of WAITING for the last damage tick to land on my target before starting to channel the same spell again, so as to avoid that overwrite of the last damage tick. The alternative to that is to alternate between using a channeled spell and a casting time spell (even if the casting time is Instant) so as to "give enough subjective time" for the last damage tick of the channel to finally (at long last) land on the target before starting a new channeling of a damage over time spell. Unfortunately, that kind of alternating rotation of spellcasting isn't exactly something you can do easily/conveniently on a Shadow Priest, simply due to the lack of other spells you can alternate with Mind Flay. There's Mind Blast, of course, but it has a cooldown, so you can't consistently "weave" Mind Blast between channeling Mind Flay in a 1:1 sort of way. You could use your Wand, of course, but you'd want to do so in such a way as to fire only a SINGLE shot from your Wand, so as to produce a rotation of Mind Flay/Wand Once on repeat, which would then let you do a rotation of Mind Blast/Mind Flay/Wand Once/Mind Flay and then repeat. If your Wand has a 2.00 (or higher) speed, that would then allow Mind Blast to completely cooldown during the 3+2+3=8 second casting rotation interval before returning to Mind Blast without needing to spend any talent points in Improved Mind Blast.

FTFY

Honestly ... it depends on the mix of people you're running with. Mages should still be tripping over their robes for you to be their buff $DEITY even if the raid is on farm status, so there's that at least.

Fury Warrior "outsources" survivability to the Healer to a greater degree than the Protection Warrior. Remember the Team Wipe Mantra. On balance, a Fury Warrior will require more HPS (healing per second) than a Protection Warrior will. If there is sufficient healing capacity to make a Fury Warrior tanking "work" then the overall scheme works by letting the Warrior "shirk" their responsibility to reduce incoming damage taken and throws that (added) burden onto another Player ... which is "great" for the Fury Warrior ... but not so great for anyone tasked with supporting them. It's basically a Shell Game for being able to withstand the incoming (I'm not going to bother, so you do it for me) ... which is perfectly fine when assuming that your support has Infinite Resources™ to support you with ... designed to make the Fury Warrior look good on Meters while overlooking the COST of deploying the strategy in terms of additional logistics needed to be provided by others. Seen in "granular" individualistic terms, the Fury Warrior might come out "ahead" on Meters compared to the Protection Warrior, but that's looking at things in isolation/in a vacuum ... rather than looking at the larger picture of integrating teams/raids together in terms of logistics. Yeah, the Fury Warrior may generate more Threat Per Second ... but they're also REQUIRING their Healer to generate more (healing) Threat Per Second as well, while also requiring their Healer to spend more mana and time casting, draining more resources and lowering the margin of reserves OUTSIDE the Fury Warrior. If the logistics of doing so is NOT a bottleneck, then sure ... you can do it, because you can do it. If the logistical support of doing that IS a bottleneck, then you've just traded one problem for another ... namely Threat Generated Per Second for Mana Recovered Per Second, essentially.

And there you have it, straight from the donkey's braying. Dwarf Shamans is an END OF THE WORLD EVENT.