Roxanne Flowers

Hardly. More like a log of experiences progressing through content using an off-meta build. So far, for leveling at least, playing as a Melee Hunter has been both quite enjoyable and also remarkably successful for me. Your mileage may vary, of course. If you're looking for raiding stats from a Melee Hunter build, it's going to be a while before I can provide anything like that. My Hunter is still only Level 32 and is currently progressing through quests in Darkshire. At the moment, my Hunter is dual wielding a pair of Glinting Steel Daggers simply because those are the best melee weapons I can obtain/craft at my Level and they get the job done in a hurry ... although they'd hardly count as BiS for raiding purposes. Additionally, as a result of (finally) reaching Level 32, I was at long last able to "travel the world" on a personal mission to Tame a whole bunch of beasts for new Pet Skills, including Screech 2, which I of course put on my Owl almost immediately. The upgrade from Screech 1 (25 Attack Power Debuff) to Screech 2 (50 Attack Power Debuff) is already making a difference in mitigation to incoming damage I have to tank as a Melee Hunter running a Survival spec. The only other stat of relevance that I can provide is that since switching to Razor Arrows at Level 25, I've only used just shy of 200 of the 1000 I'd bought over the course of 7 Levels. I basically only use my Bow to pull things at this point, which results in mobs bumrushing into my Immolation Trap (now talented for extra damage and reduced chance to be resisted) followed by the "buzzsaw" of my dual wielded Glinting Steel Daggers laying into them with Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite and Counterattack while my Owl attacks and Screeches right alongside me. The whole thing feels like a (fire+physical) DoT drain combo, given how fast the damage piles on, resulting in a sort of "you are already dead, you just haven't gotten the memo yet" type of performance.

Whatever makes for the best stat stick.

All part of the service ... ^_~ To be scrupulously fair, the Path Of Least Resistance rarely makes use of the more challenging permutations of possibilities. It's why the "simplest" answer is often the one adopted to become the Conventional Wisdom™ that everyone cites as their touchstone reference for how things "ought to be" in both games and real life. I'm not sure when the 5 Second Rule of spellcasting was "discovered" by the Players, let alone thoroughly understood and incorporated into spell rotation strategies to optimize mana recovery from Spirit. I know that it was realized at some point (by TBC perhaps?) because I remember running across a thread about it in Blizzard's official forums in the Druid section (of all things) detailing the relationship between Spirit and MP/5 stats when accounting for mana recovery while spellcasting, and that this was of particular interest to both Balance and Restoration Druids (since they were spellcaster subclasses, unlike Feral Druids, for the most part). This may have been late 2005/early 2006 when I saw this (time blurs details like this after more than a decade) but it was starting to become appreciated. The thing is, I'm the sort of person who looks at "The Box" of conventional thinking and decides to go hunting for other containers. It's what led me to the (radical?) conclusion that Starshards for Night Elf Priests might have some overlooked potential in it (in vanilla PvE) which has gone underappreciated for more than a decade, since the Conventional Wisdom is that the spell is worthless trash ... and that assumption has never been seriously challenged. Of course, the only "real" test of such an assumption is Combat, so I set out to make a build to test the theorycraft, and so far (through Level 32) it's been working just fine. That experience of playing an "Arcane Priest" (since Starshards is an Arcane school spell) then made me, as already mentioned, start wondering if the same sort of playstyle might work for an Arcane Mage too. Short answer: ... maybe? Slightly longer answer: There's enough structural differences between a Night Elf Priest using Starshards and a Mage using Arcane Missiles that it's really starting to feel like "A Horse Of A Different Color" once you finish translating the Lessons Learned from one class to another, especially since some things just don't translate all that well. Stuff like how Priests can get Spell Power from Spirit by investing 25 talent points into their Holy tree ... but Mages have NOTHING even remotely similar. Additionally, Priests have Spirit Tap which can double their Spirit for 15 seconds after making an honor/XP kill, which can "supercharge" their Spirit in some rather synergistic ways. Mages get NONE of that action. But what we have instead is Mage Armor, which lets us recover mana while casting at a pretty decent +50% rate, which is NOT peanuts. Combine that with Arcane Meditation and you're actually recovering mana way better than any other class while continuing to cast spells. The thing is, most Players look at Spirit as a "dump stat" for their characters, since the only "purpose" the attribute serves is to reduce downtime between fights and is therefore of remarkably little use DURING a fight (except for Spirit Tapping Holy spec Priests as mentioned above). Consequently, the presumption is that the One True Path to combat endurance is to have as big of a mana pool as possible and just be a complete mana HOG at spending it as quickly as possible (so as to sit down and drink all the time). Plenty has been written about gearing for MP/5 to sustain combat spellcasting and the attribute point equivalents when it comes to sustainment, but you almost never read anything about using the 5 Second Rule advantageously as a Mage to enhance mana endurance. There's plenty of advice to healers about how to use (and abuse) the 5 Second Rule so as to keep their mana bars from depleting too quickly, but really nothing comparable for (direct) damage dealers ... which makes sense if you assume that healers are conventionally thought of as being "intermittent" casters, while damage dealers are thought of as being "constant" casters who simply never stop casting spells until their target is dead. Under such a scenario, depending on your "uptime" of being able to get out from under the 5 Second Rule, Spirit as an attribute becomes more or less desirable in relation to MP/5. Which is a longwinded way of saying I'm wondering if maybe we've been "doing Arcane wrong" as Mages for a really long time now, which would then explain why the spec is derided as being (decidedly?) inferior to both Fire and Frost in common parlance and multiple guides found in this forum. After all, if you just "1 button spam" Arcane Missiles (even if they're improved) you're really not getting all that much of an advantage over doing the exact same thing with a "1 button spam" of either Firebolt, Scorch or Frostbolt. But if we start thinking of the Arcane tree as being something "larger than just itself" and start looking for synergies in places that have previously been overlooked, some interesting edge case possibilities start to emerge ... and in this case the one that I'm looking at is a Damage Per Mana metric in which Spirit can play an unusually significant part in offsetting the costs associated with spellcasting, which presumably would relieve pressure on the need to downrank spells being cast in order to achieve a necessary benchmark of endurance when chain casting spells constantly. Or to put it another way ... it's so crazy it just might work ... Only way to know for sure is to test the proposition, which I'm in the process of doing with my own Mage that I'm playing on Darrowshire.

Up to 10% chance to proc per damage spell cast as opposed to being a 10% chance to proc per hit for damage which has important implications for AoE spells (1 chance per cast instead of 1 chance per mob hit per hit).

A little more time, a couple more levels ... and a few extra questions wanting answers. So I've gotten my Night Elf Priest through Wetlands minus doing the Elite Quests (I'm deferring those to go do Duskwood and the remainder of Ashenvale before circling back for them) and have reached Level 32 on my Priest. Got to run Blackfathom Deeps and was able to DPM may through rather than playing Healbot since for some reason I was able to pull a group together which had 3 healers in it and someone else wanted to play the medic for us, so I got to toss around Holy Fire and Starshards on everything and it was beautiful. Anyway, the reason for this update post is because (as always) I've been wondering if I've gone perhaps a bit too far in my pursuit of maximal Starshards spell support in my build, and if it might be prudent to invest in some additional flexibility in my build strategy. The result is still a 21/25/5 mix of talents (because that's "obligatory" to get Divine Spirit, Spiritual Guidance and Spirit Tap) but with a slightly different structure. Level 60 Priest (21/25/5) 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 2/3 Increases the damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield by 10%. 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%. Inner Focus - Rank 1/1 When activated, reduces the Mana cost of your next spell by 100% and increases its critical effect chance by 25% if it is capable of a critical effect. 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) Healing Focus - Rank 2/2 Gives you a 70% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting any healing spell. Holy Specialization - Rank 5/5 Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy spells by 5%. Divine Fury - Rank 3/5 Reduces the casting time of your Smite, Holy Fire, Heal and Greater Heal spells by 0.3 sec. 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. Improved Healing - Rank 3/3 Reduces the Mana cost of your Lesser Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal spells by 15%. 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. The changes here from the original build plan are the inclusion of Inner Focus in Discipline (at the expense of 1 talent point from Improved Power Word: Shield) as well as dumping Improved Renew in favor of Improved Healing as well as swapping out Spell Warding for Healing Focus and 3/5 Divine Fury. Doing additional napkin math showed that the difference between 2/3 and 3/3 Improved Power Word: Shield was probably going to amount to "not much" in terms of added protection. 5% of 942 damage absorbed is only +47.1 added to the damage shield at Rank 10, and with a 0.1 spell coefficient, even with +800 spell power (just for easy numbers reference) that would be a mere +80 damage absorbed and 5% of 80 is a paltry +4 added to the damage shield (assuming the talent also applies to spell power boosting and not just the "base" value only) ... meaning that at endgame each talent point is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of being +50 damage absorbed per Rank 10 casting, which at Level 60 damage levels (versus elites) starts feeling like a rounding error versus a single hit. Certainly Nice To Have™, if you can afford the points for it, but if you can't it's not a make or break situation for a build strategy. In this case, +100 absorb instead of +150 absorb is worth the tradeoff, I'm thinking. Originally, I was also thinking that Inner Fire would be a waste on a build where the main spell to be using (Starshards) doesn't, and won't ever, crit ... meaning that the +25% chance to crit is useless if casting Inner Fire before Starshards. However, the "cast for free" aspect would still be useful in a Starshards rotation, I'm now realizing, as a way to recover LOTS of mana while continuing to cast Starshards, simply because Starshards is a 6 second duration channeled spell, meaning at least 3 ticks of full Spirit mana recovery while continuing to chain cast Starshards. This is because Starshards imposes its mana cost at the beginning of the spell, and after 6 seconds of casting the 5 Second Rule of casting has already expired, meaning that if you channel for the full 6 seconds you've already gotten in 1 mana recovery tick at full Spirit recovery rate. Cast Inner Fire and then cast Starshards again right after and you're looking at another 6-8 seconds worth of full Spirit mana recovery because you haven't spent any mana to cast spells since the FIRST casting of Starshards. Combine that with a Spirit Tap proc (if you can get it) and on a Spirit heavy build strategy like I've been talking about all along you can use Inner Fire as a sort of "backdoor" way to cast a Poor Man's Innervate™ on yourself while continuing to generate damage using Starshards. Again, using Inner Fire to augment Starshards is a less than optimal option but it is not as "worthless" an option as I'd at first assumed. There is some synergistic potential there for mana management that is worth getting ... and that's before recognizing that the Inner Fire + Prayer of Healing combination (or even Inner Fire + Greater Heal) gains significantly in value when including the +25% chance to crit (and another +5% from Holy Specialization) producing a proc from Inspiration to raise armor protection, in addition to the casting cost rebate. In aggregate, it feels like these alterations in build strategy offer more in the way of flexibility (mana management, healing utility) than they "cost" overall in terms of maximization of specialization towards extreme Damage Per Mana efficiency through use of Starshards as the primary offensive spell. It allows the build to be a better supporting role healer and adds some options and synergies that otherwise wouldn't be present. So at the present time, this is the (new and improved?) build strategy to Level to 60. Overall, it feels a bit better "balanced" than previous strategies I've posted in this thread, which all along has been about the Learning Process of figuring out what works (and why) through the experience of actually playing the game again. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bVgrs00oZbxuIc0VZx

I suppose the other advantage for SM/Ruin over DS/Ruin, in the context of this discussion, is ... SM/Ruin builds wind up using more of their spells than just Shadow Bolt ... while DS/Ruin builds wind up being somewhat of a One Trick Pony™ in terms of their casting rotations, where you can wind up casting nothing BUT Shadow Bolt. In that respect, the SM/Ruin build feels like it ought to have some other Options built into it, allowing the Warlock to deal with some edge cases more flexibly. The DS/Ruin build feels more "specialized" towards doing things in One Way and assuming that nothing will disrupt the underpinnings of that assumption sufficiently to matter. So in that respect, SM/Ruin feels more like a "hedge your bets" kind of build, while DS/Ruin is more of an "all in" alternative that works ... until it doesn't.

47 + 5 = 52 If only there were some zones with Level 50+ mobs in them somewhere in the game ... like Un'goro or Western Plague Lands ... /em sigh

Fixed that for you.

Start looting nodes to add them to the database stored on your client.

Nah. Moonkins were called OOMkins and in response the Balance Druids started calling themselves Boomkins in an attempt to counter the stereotype/insult. More crit, more BOOM. I myself had an interesting experience (back in the day over 10 years ago) running RFD with a Moonkin and having all the other spellcasters in the group commenting how they were "critting like crazy!" and that they'd never grouped with a Moonkin before and they INSISTED that I stay in Moonkin form so they could enjoy the Boomkin Aura. It's part of the reason why I'm playing as a Balance Druid now too ... to relive the Boomkin experience.

There's a reason why Balance Druids were (and often still are) called OOMkins, while fans of the playstyle prefer the term Boomkin.

Reason for (presumably Holy) Paladin is for Illumination procs on crits giving Paladins mana cost rebate on healing and/or Holy Shock use. What it really comes down to is finding group mates who have talents that give them "more" from crits than just the crits themselves. More crits, more dakka, less downtime.

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If your goal is maximum (personal) DPS then spamming Wing Clip Rank 1 is never going to get you there. All you're going to get out of spamming Wing Clip Rank 1 is maximum chance on hit procs going off, which I believe is the point when used with the Nightfall axe so as to achieve maximum uptime of the debuff proc from the weapon. This turns your Hunter into a "Night-Bot" to make every other caster in the raid happy, rather than being something that will make your Hunter look incredible on the DPS meters. As for what a Ret Paladin can do as far as DPS goes ... I refer you to Esfand.

Pretty sure there's something wrong with this tooltip. The "ignore zero armor" part is what I'm wanting to highlight. All of these (cropped) screenshots were taken on Darrowshire while leveling my Rogue. I keep thinking that the correct (vanilla) value for this talent ought to be using a somewhat weird formula that amounts to this: This then yields a performance of ignoring 100/200/300 Armor at Level 60, which then comports with what is reported in these two contemporary articles from 2006 that I found here and here. Bottom line is that the amount of armor reduction should be 2/4/6 armor per character Level, not including the first 10 character Levels in that accounting. Level 25 = 30/60/90 Armor ignored Level 30 = 40/80/120 Armor ignored Level 40 = 60/120/180 Armor ignored Level 50 = 80/160/240 Armor ignored Level 60 = 100/200/300 Armor ignored So far, the only report I can find for this issue on Github is here ... might I ask some friendly Rogue (do such creatures exist?) to copy/pasta this information over to Github where it can be brought to the attention of the requisite individuals responsible for correcting these sorts of issues? First to check if this is (just?) a display error and/or if the underlying formula is coded correctly to operate properly as intended.

Purely for reference purposes, what are the typical resistances for the other damage types (understanding that Holy is of course default set to zero)?

I have seen this behavior on multiple caster classes while playing on Darrowshire.

That's because Players never Flee ... they simply Advance To The Rear.

http://vanillaradar.com/elysium-stats/ Point. Click. Read.

Shadow Bolt is a 3 second casting time spell. With all else being equal (including crits, etc.), +5% damage bonus difference means that in order to deal the exact same amount of damage (common denominator) using Shadow Bolt only (spammed), you're looking at being able to cast 20 Bolts on a DS/Ruin build vs casting 21 Bolts on a SM/Ruin build, for a grand total of 60 vs 63 seconds of casting time spent doing nothing but casting Shadow Bolts. But if you're mixing in Corruption to proc Nightfall, you can basically do a rotation of 1 Corruption followed by 6 Shadow Bolts, yielding a 3+18 spells cast over ~60 seconds (we'll call it 60 just to keep things convenient for comparison purposes). Corruption will tick 6 times per 18 seconds. With 2/2 Nightfall, that's 1-(.96^6)=21.7% chance that Nightfall will proc per Corruption casting (assuming all of the DoT ticks hit for effect). Odds are good that Nightfall will proc at least once per minute, if not more, meaning that if the Player is spamming Shadow Bolt and refreshing Corruption when it expires (pure theorycrafting here) then you're looking at a damage throughput of more like 3 Corruption casts + 19 (or 20?) Shadow Bolts per minute in a SM/Ruin build ... versus only casting 20 Shadow Bolts per minute in a DS/Ruin build when spamming nothing but Shadow Bolts. Granted, those Corruption spells won't crit, since Corruption is a DoT, but the point is that the SM/Ruin build isn't all that far behind the performance of the DS/Ruin build strategy once Nightfall comes into play. Of course, the alternative to doing that in a SM/Ruin build would be to use Corruption+Drain Life as the main go to spells, Lifetapping to keep mana up, and letting those two spells make Nightfall go "proc crazy" so as to instant cast Shadow Bolt a lot between Drain Life channeling. This makes an apples to apples comparison with DS/Ruin build very difficult indeed, primarily because sustaining a Corruption+Drain Life cycle with intermittent Shadow Bolt use only on Nightfall procs becomes something that's very difficult to anticipate a "reliable" rotation for due to the presence of the RNG for proccing Nightfall (and thus Shadowbolts). The main difference here though is that such a strategy is more consistent with Drain Tanking where the Warlock is operating under an assumption of What's Mine Is Mine And What's Yours Is Mine Too thanks to the draining being done, rather than taking a purely offensive Shadow Bolt Spam Only posture that does not drain/steal resources from the enemy to sustain spellcasting while spamming Shadowbolts continuously. At least, that's the way that I would want to be looking at the two options. But you're right that Nightfall is the complicating factor as far as the spreadsheet analysis goes.

Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.

On the subject of Moonkin mana troubles, someone posted an inquiry about Fist of Stone over in the General Discussion forum, which since it has a proc for mana on it seems like it would be something useful for Moonkins starting at Level 48, particularly if they are specced for Omen of Clarity procs as well (and thus intending to melee in addition to spellcasting), before moving up to higher end weapons. Likewise, I have to wonder about the interactions of using a Hand of Edward the Odd with an Omen of Clarity spec Moonkin for being able to produce Instant cast Starfire (with 15% chance to stun?) while in melee as an advantageous cross-pollination. The downside to any of these weapons would be, of course, a lack of Spell Hit, Spell Crit and/or Spell Damage/Healing.

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?item=17943 https://wow.gamepedia.com/Fist_of_Stone It is extremely common to NOT see the actual chance on hit proc rates in the tooltips for weapons. That said, I'm slightly surprised to see that no one apparently considered the interesting inter(re)actions of playing a Moonkin in melee with one of these for supplemental mana gain from the chance on hit proc combined with Omen of Clarity to assist with the notorious mana recovery issues that Balance Druids (and all Moonkins are by definition Balance Druids) have to work around.

Fixed that for you.

Not to be nitpicky (although I'm sure I'm managing to be anyway), but the Holy talent for Paladins gives them a chance (100% at 5/5) to "rebate" the mana cost of some spells when they crit with those spells, yielding a "free mana cost" for casting that one specific spell ... much like how Omen of Clarity (for us) or Clearcasting (for Mages) will allow us/them to use skills at "no cost" rather than making the spells have a "negative" mana cost (spend 100, get 200 back) where you end up with more than you started with before casting (because it's more like spend 100, get 100 back, for net zero cost). The wrinkle to all of this is that whenever these talents (Omen of Clarity, Arcane Concentration, Illumination) come into play, because mana winds up not being expended to cast spells the 5 Second Rule can more easily come into play, where if you haven't SPENT mana in the last 5 seconds, you recover mana at "full rate" from Spirit. This means that using one of these rebate procs to "cast for free" winds up having a net effect of making it more likely that you'll wind up "gaining mana" from Spirit recovery (depending on your casting times and rotations, of course) at a higher rate /faster than if the talent proc had not occurred, simply because you were able to cast without "costing" mana to do so. Needless to say, the longer the casting times of the spells involved the more likely this outcome of "extra" mana from Spirit recovery due to 5 Second Rule yields, since extremely fast spell rotations (Wrath spam, for example) tend to not be 5 Second Rule friendly. So WobLight isn't wrong ... exactly ... but what's going on under the hood is a little bit more complicated, with a few extra permutations and moving parts, than is implied by "paladins gain mana on spellcrit" which isn't exactly the whole story. It's good enough for a shorthand understanding of what's going on, but it's incomplete. The net effect though is that for the same amount of mana spent, you can cast more spells, so depending on how you look at it ("a certain point of view" Sir Alec Guiness? really?) the yield behaves kind of like gaining mana on spellcrit relative to the baseline expectation of spells always costing mana to cast.

An extra swing for damage will show up in meters tracking damage performance, while an extra stun for damage avoidance won't (except when cross-comparing runs using Mace vs Sword specs) unless you're looking at the amount of healing needed/received. Sword Specialization is essentially an offensive choice, while Mace Specialization is essentially a defensive choice ... and it's easier to track offensive performance in this context with the tools we use for such things (DPSMate, et al.). Sword Specialization ends fights "faster" while Mace Specialization ends fights "more safely" than the alternatives. So there are two basic biases favoring Sword Specialization over Mace Specialization. A number of mobs in the game (typically "bosses" and the like) are simply Immune to any and all Stuns (and other crowd control effects). This "negates" the value of investing in Mace Specialization. The counterpoint to this argument is that there's "a lot of trash mobs" to deal with in the game too, on which stun procs work perfectly fine, but since those same "trash mobs" are not considered to be much of a "threat" to (elite) Players, the benefits of additional crowd control on "pathetic trash" is not all that highly appreciated. So Mace Specialization is useful for someone who wants to play "goalie" on the team, but the simple fact of the matter is that in a DPS class like Rogue almost no one wants to play defensively (let alone balanced offense/defense), instead preferring to aim for maximum damage production at all times under ALL circumstances. Which then leads to point two ... "Rushing" and speed runs, not to mention DPS trackers and the like all favor and put evolutionary pressures onto gameplay in favor of maximal damage production (at all times versus all adversaries). Considering the lengths to which people will go to in order to add as little as an extra +1-2% DPS throughput from their builds, it is no wonder that so many people favor the Specialization that produces more damage (Swords) over the one that doesn't (Maces). When the objective is "more kills in shorter time" then the answer is more or less obvious ... use Swords instead of Maces ... because Swords will kill your targets "faster" on average than using an equivalent (pair of) Mace(s) would. That's because if you would have survived anyway, the extra protection offered by Mace procced Stuns doesn't help you all that much relative to killing things faster. That said, anyone dual wielding Ebon Hands while using 5/5 Mace Specialization as a (Human?) Rogue (or even as an Arms Warrior?) probably won't have all that much to complain about in terms of damage production (not to mention looking somewhat badazz), particularly once you get going with Slice and Dice to help speed them up. Spec your talents for optimizing stunlock (Cheap Shot, Kidney Punch, Gouge) and work around the stuns provided by your dual wielding Ebon Hands ... even if they aren't a BiS build spec, it ought to be fun to play in raids with all the shadow debuffs in play.