Whitewolf

Frenzy. It's a very slight difference, but you know min/max is what it's all about. The faster attack speeds are also really good for disrupting casts in pvp.

Just putting this here: Intellect directly increases the amount of mana returned from spirit. http://vanilla-wow.wikia.com/wiki/Spirit You can always swap gear to meet the needs of the fight.

Much better clarification. Dwarf rogues are definitely a favorite of mine too. I even still have him on retail.

Sure they can, but many times its a toss up with the advantage to the other side: arms warrior and paladin. Overpower + rend and reckoning + ret aura + consecrate.

Too bad you aren't alliance I would say get a pocket pally and you quickly become a nearly unstoppable force of reckoning. On the other hand if you find a nice shaman that is willing to work with you, they can actively work to supplement your disruptive capabilities and even absorbing a few spells every now and again. Purging absorb shields negates one of the warrior's main weakness: no rage or crits until you break through that shield. Plus, windfury + sword spec + HoJ = gravy train. In any case, a warrior with a pocket healer is very, very tough to kill without dying to the incoming damage first. Of course if you are looking to pvp straight up hunters are very valuable. With cheetah aspect and 41 yrd range (only fire mages can reach that far, ele shaman at 40 with the ZG set if I remember right) you can kite pretty much anything that isn't mounted and the really long range of mark can force a rogue or druid to stealth at range or risk having to waste vanish. Rogues are there to shut down or assassinate specific targets. Despite you probably not getting the reference FROST SHOOOOOOCK!!!!! And windfury are really fun when you melt some faces.

Get a fast attacking weapon Use judgement of the crusader Activate seal of righteousness Spam judgement and consecration and your other damage spells when applicable. When low on mana switch to seal of wisdom and JoW. If you have a set of spell damage and healing gear use that and switch to judging wisdom first and use SoR. SoR damage can also proc any on melee hit effects. Because of this you want to get some on melee hit gear to boost your damage as the majority of it will be coming from SoR and your melee swings. If you find you end up killing faster drinking instead of adding SoW when low on mana feel free to do so, just costs money if you don't have a mage whip some up prior. Mathematically speaking, if you have enough spell damage gear you can close the gap some but you will at most be doing around 60-70% of the damage output of a Ret spec. Based on my prior classic WoW experience, the biggest talent to have is illumination. If you have that and a skilled tank, you won't need the safety nets of divine favor and holy shock. You should be attacking any spare moments you get to get those precious mana procs from wisdom which at max rank is approximately 20 mana per sec or 35-39 mana if you judge with a 1.9-1.5 speed weapon

Dude, how can anyone take you seriously? Hell, you left out the most important ability rogues have: SnD. Other classes bring a lot to the table. P.S. you forgot warlocks and bringing a shadow priest.

Overall classes and specs are pretty balanced until you get into raids. At which point people will want to pigeonhole you due to the lack of debuff slots in comparison to the number of players in a raid. That being said you can complete most content, even highend raids, with non optimal specs. If you find a laid back guild that will let you play the way you want you will find the game highly enjoyable for endgame content. But as said before, if raids are taken out of the picture, pretty much any spec works extremely well and are probably within 5% of each other overall, variance due to niche abilities and such.

In vanilla it was always a flat reduction in damage and never a gradual decrease like some guides say it was. Heck prior to the nerf it was the best seal to use because there was no damage reduction and didn't rely on spell damage at all. When I played in vanilla the only reason I used SoC after the nerf to SotC was because it was flat out better for pvp...and you could get lucky. That and I never got high end gear, too busy playing pvp to do that pve stuff. In the video, the lowest damage a non SotC strike did was 15, and the lowest SotC strike did 14. There really wasn't much of a difference. A few seconds later the damage range normalized starting with a 35 crit to 33 crit to 18 to 17 to 17 to 18. Weapons have a damage range, it just so happened that in that one instance it went from the high end to the low end consistently. What we have on server very closely resembles what SotC did in the original game.

The attack table is slightly confusing for me. You have your mitigations first, then crit>crushing blow>regular. I think crushing blow is 15% on a target 3 levels higher, right? Because of the way avoidance works one would need 102.6% to be uncrushable with 440 defense because crits were removed from the table increasing the regular hit % by the amount removed. So if one were to have 97% avoidance one could only be hit by criticals and blocks without extra defense. If that is the case then one would only need 67% avoidance with redoubt filling in to remove any possibility of followup crushing blows. 35% block from holy shield, 5% base parry, ~5% base dodge, and 5% base miss chance leaves only 17% more avoidance needed to be uncrushable. If one could forgo the cooldown reduction on judgement they could make that just 12%. If I'm getting this all right, then I think it would be beneficial to forgo defense on blockable enemies and push for that extra 12-15% avoidance. Am I thinking about this the wrong way?

From what I can tell from the googling I've done crit is higher on the attack table than crushing blows. Miss Dodge Parry Glancing blow Block Crit Crushing blow Hit 25 defense = 1% miss and 1% less chance to be crit. If what I read is correct your scenario is not true as you would need 97% Total avoidance for that extra dodge to start pushing the crit off the table. From what I understand defense replaces the crit chances on the table with extra regular hit %. So that 59.4% hit you mentioned becomes 65% when at +140 defense (defense soft cap for crit immunity). I hope it clarifies. My scenario above described what I believe to be an ideal scenario as it still let's you be crit while redoubt is active to proc more redoubts keeping crushing blows off the table. Of course this scenario might be wrong because I can't get any confirmation that this is how the attack table actually works.

Shaman are great healers if you want, healers are always in short supply.

WF recieved an internal cooldown of 2.6 in BC due to the new dual wield talent as you could put windfury on both weapons. Prior to this there never was a cooldown. Windfury strikes were never Nature based and gave extra melee attacks. As for the one shots, not much can survive 4.5k damage with 3 crits and a frost shock. WF can not proc of anything other than weapon attacks.

What is wrong with SoR or is it the one handed talent?

Great guide.

It's too bad you can't get to dancing troll village on these private servers, I used to see mages AoE grind it all the time. Well you can but I don't know what the devs would think about the means to do so if you got caught by them.

Oh I know how it performs, and I also know that not every team cares to minmax raid composition because it is a game. Heck, you can complete a lot of content with raids using a single class. Is it always easy or efficient? No, but it's fun. Arcane is more than viable for any content in the game, it just can't outperform some other specs. As I said before, if you aren't one of those 3 specs other than healer and one of 3 or 4 buff bots you don't have an optimal set up. Frost mage can't compete with shadowbolt, period except in shadow resistant cases.

Warlock is probably the fun class if you like damage, however if you want to raid despite being capable of the highest dps for a ranged dps it is literally shadowbolt spam 24/7 with the occasional lifetap and drain life.a

Gear isn't a big problem. What people don't seem to be doing as balance leveling is using shapeshifts to regen while still killing mobs. Heck getting that first tier resto talent that gives rage and energy on shift is a huge boon. When you get boomkin then you can open with nature's grasp with pounce shred rip then shift to boomkin and nuke.

To be vanilla like clear casting has to have a chance to proc per missile. Same with Wrath of Cenarius. Another factor that I don't know about is the tier 2 8 pc. Set bonus as I have never gotten past level 49 with a mage and my friend stopped playing before he got his. Weaving in pyros at a 41% proc rate would be insane especially with its special case scaling with spell power.

Every spec besides combat rogues, dual wield warriors, and shadowbolt warlocks are useless except to buff or heal these 3 specs. Congrats you win the minmax. sounds fun having 30 rogues, warriors, and warlocks right?

JoC is supposed to receive 43% of spell damage. JoR recieves 50%. The advantage JoC has it it crits for 200% normal damage. The Judgement set 8pc. is a flat damage increase. As in add the displayed damage right after spell damage. This is how it's supposed to be at least. I just joined this server so I don't know how this one calculates it.

I don't know when it's available: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?item=21190 It really isn't until TBC that arcane becomes a top spec. To put it into perspective, arcane will do about 80% of the possible damage that frost can do when maxed. It's really disappointing I know, but until AM gets proper scaling it will always fall behind. Hell in Wrath AM was the hardest hitting ability..........in the 49 twink bracket every 2.5 seconds.

Maybe I'm misremembering about the enchants but I definitely know that certain items definitely scaled with spell damage and healing like the flame shield you get from the trident from UBRS I think it was. That was fun getting it to proc and watching rogues warriors, shamans, and druids just kill themselves. One of my favorite things was watching a shaman multi windfury me to death and the shield just killed him back. Let's just say he just kept running away from me the rest of the match

Well then, runeblade of baron rivendare here I come. And thank you for answering my questions.