I may have jumped the gun a bit…
Last night I took my Boomkin into our raid and absolutely crushed it. I did the best I’ve ever done. I didn’t beat the mages, shaman, or DH but I did way better than I usually do. To put this into perspective, I was doing 160-170k tops last week. Last night I was averaging 220+.
What changed? Good question. According to patch notes there was no positive change for Boomkin. In fact, some Boomkin vets say we were “nerfed” because some “snapshot” system was removed.
I did use a flask and food. Is that responsible for a 50k DPS increase? Maybe. Quite probably.
I felt like my abilities were flowing so much smoother from one to the other. Perhaps some extremely minor GCD tweak? I played no different than any other night.
After the raid we went into Mythic dungeons and I obliterated mobs. Again I didn’t beat the OP shaman who pulled 100k dps higher than me every pull, but I I was doing 220+ on trash and bosses. I can live with that! I can totally live with middle of the pack. I feel like I can be totally viable all of a sudden.
So while nothing officially changed in patch notes, everything changed with respect to my outlook. Yep, it happened overnight. I plan to stick with Boomkin, and spec heals on an as-needed basis.
Hey now shaman aren’t OP, we’re just top tier which historically Blizzard doesn’t allow. People are used to seeing us hang with the mages and rogues. I get top damage sometimes but our Shadow Priest usually blows past me during execute phase.
Good work on the Boomkin. I enjoyed mine back during Ulduar.
Keen grats on the dps. I was looking to move my fresh 110 rogue to your server and join your guild. Are yall past doing any raids or dungeons for fresh 110’s. my ilvl will be around 800, so just seeing if I will need to gear up on my own. Thanks….
@Jay: No raid can truly take a “fresh” 110 as in you just reached level 110 yesterday. We had 2 people on the raid who were 110 for only a week. Honestly, there’s almost no reason you can’t be 840 in 2 days or less. Run dungeons and do world quests and you’re practically 830 in a few hours.
You’re more than welcome to join us! We don’t have any rogues. 🙂
@Keen: Glad you are doing better, just responded to the last post (didn’t see this one been on vacation). I know consumables account from anywhere between 15k-20k DPS in sims I have done for our balance druid in my guild (I’m the only one who knows how to use simcraft). Neck enchant is around another 10k as well. Did you make any progress in your artifact, that could account as well. Even some of the small nodes can be as high as 3-4% increase for some classes and guldens can be as high as 10% increase.
Also just being more comfortable can make a big difference as well, especially with mechanics. Knowing when you can take a hit to finish a cast or have to move immediately etc.
New trinkets could have helped too, as I mentioned in the previous thread, a bad trinket vs good trinket can account for 10-15k DPS by themselves.
I was like 70k DPS higher than last week, and all I need was eat food, drink a flask, and upgrade a couple artifact abilities. Maybe that’s all it took?
I still haven’t gemmed or enchanted a thing.
Keen I always take the forums with a grain of salt, but they seem to say that assassination does much better DPS than outlaw in raids, etc. Trying to see if anyone else has found this to be true. I am currently outlaw and enjoy it but maybe I should start putting some artifact power into my kingslayers? Thanks for any help.
@Jay P: Outlaw is currently the lowest DPS spec for rogues, and one of the lowest specs overall. For heroic content Assassination is the highest since the patch with Subtlety barely below it. This is from parses/logs not forums. Ass/Sub rogues are currently 3rd/4th highest for heroic content (Mythic content the parses are much much different due to less parses and the added mechanics favoring ranged DPS).
@Keen: Depending on the artifact abilities it could be. Flasks and Food are generally worth a decent amount. Also could just be getting the priority/rotation down better and getting mechanics down better.
If Outlaw is truly one of the lowest dps, it would explain why our raids are having issues. As an Outlaw Rogue, I have no problem staying in our top dps tier, maybe some our dps are underperforming.
This brings me to a sad effect of this expansion. With so much time and AP invested in my Outlaw weapon, I have no desire to switch spec and start over with another weapon. Heck, I don’t even want to play any alt as they are way too many things to do on my main, I never seem to get ahead of the curve, but that’s a different topic.
I agree the Outlaw spec has its issue though. Having to fish for good buffs on Roll the Bones being one of them.
@maljjin: I am just going off the 1 day parses which might not be fully accurate yet, though even including before patch outlaw was in the bottom 10.
If you are curious I am going by this:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10#difficulty=4&aggregate=amount&dataset=90
90th percentile is because at that point, it’s parses of people who know what they are doing and the difference between them is mostly due to variance in proc rates etc. That was the one for the last 2 weeks for all EN on heroic.
The nice thing is that there is less than 100k DPS between the highest and lowest spec which means its not super bad.
After the patch if you take out the outliers it’s even better. Outlaw is parsing an average of 334k with the top (not including Spriest as they are insanely OP due to EN mechanics), being 371k only a difference of less than 40k.
Class balance is actually fairly good right now with only a few outliers at the moment, and the ones at the bottom might come up as we get more parses and more people move to and play some of the buffed specs.
@Drathmar : Thanks, this is really interesting.
Unrelated to the DPS point, has anyone experienced frequent large spikes since 7.1 ? At first, I thought it was bad behavior from a non-updated addon, disabling all of them didn’t fix the issue. Downgrading a few graphics settings reduced the frequency, but that’s a less than ideal solution.
@maljjin: You are welcome. As much as I raid semi-casually now it’s hard for me to get out of that hardcore must know everything mindset and so I end up looking a lot of this stuff up.
As to the lag spikes, yes, I have and a lot of people in my guild have as well. For me at least it’s weird as my MS doesn’t change however my FPS just drops randomly so its more FPS lag than service lag.
I wish DPS meters would go away. I think it was more fun when all you cared about was whether the boss was dead at the end of the fight or not.
@Balthazar: Why? DPS meters aren’t bad (nor did I link a DPS meter I linked a statistical chart made from logs of fights), the way some people use them to exclude others might be. Hell that’s not even about DPS meters and even with meters people still only care about whether the boss is dead. The meter is just showing you WHY you are failing to make the boss dead.
The real use of them is tracking things like buff up times, correlating data to find the best builds, seeing who needs to work on mechanics, etc. Honestly DPS meters are a misnomer as they track so much more. Or are you saying people shouldn’t learn to play their class correctly (not optimally but correctly)? I am all for everyone playing their own way, but when I want to beat a boss, I’m not going to take the mage who only spams fireball because that’s how he wants to play, because he is not being useful at all.
But where a DPS meter is actually good in a case like that and that person might not even realize what he is doing is bad. So you can use a meter to show him the difference between doing that and playing the class correctly.
There will always be some way to judge how people perform in a multiplayer situation like that as it’s not fair for some people to have to carry other people. if you are bad at shooters, don’t whine because they don’t add auto-aim to let you hit everything, just either play knowing you won’t be good or don’t play. That’s the beauty of different video games.
Hell, even before meters, people would be kicked for doing stupid shit (always standing in shit and dieing, etc) it was just harder to notice it happening.
@Drathmar: I don’t mind the meters because I want to know I’m at least carrying my weight. Which I don’t think I can do with my outlaw rogue, who I do enjoy playing , doing world quests etc. Does anyone have any input on Hunter or firemage as I have both leveled to about 105. Need to pick one to satisfy my raid demands. LOL
@Jay P: MM is the only strong hunter spec, and fire mage is really good as well. Also frost mage has been moving up the charts so if you got bored with fire you could eventually swap as well.
I just think it creates too much of a metagame about what’s “optimal”, is conducive class envy, and narrows the roles of characters in a group context, etc. People will often feel like they have to switch classes or talents or what have you because their class is “at the bottom of the DPS charts”, etc. I also think it narrows class roles because maybe a class brings CC or buffs or what have you to the table, but their damage is mediocre. Well, can’t have that cause if you’re not tanking or healing then you’re DPS, and your DPS sucks. Also, people start cheesing the fights with their AoEs or otherwise making sub-optimal choices for downing an encounter just to stroke their DPS epeen on the meters.
I realize they are useful and not all people use them to exclude players or certain classes, but these games bring out the worst in people more often than not and I just think overall DPS meters have not been good for the genre.
I get that. I do. However, at least in my opinion and from my experience, when you fail to kill a boss, when you wipe on stuff a few times, when you have any kind of multiplayer game in general, people are going to rank, be competitive, exclude, etc.
If there were no meters at all, people would exclude based on who they didn’t like and try and shift the blame onto them somehow because there would be no way to prove where the actual fault was. It all because “feelycrafting” for why groups are failing which in my experience tears groups in this genre apart more than anything from a meter.
At least with a meter you can be like “hey bro, look, your DPS is kinda low, looking at the meter it looks like you aren’t doing the rotation correctly, here is how to fix it” or “hey man your healing throughput is a bit low, oh it’s because you have so much over healing, really need to not spam the AoE healing unless needed, and spot heal single target more to conserve mana”
My point is that there would be all the things you are blaming DPS meters for without them, but instead of being based on data and statistics it would be based on theory and feeling instead which ends up being much worse.