The Offspec Experiments

Meet Ilikemelee

2009-06-30T06:02:00.000-07:00

He likes melee. Alot.

Fully gemmed, enchanted and specced (more on that later), his stats are:

Attack Power: 4828
Hit Rating: 302 (~9% additional chance to hit)
Crit Chance: 30.4%
Melee Haste: About 15%
Expertise: 0. :(
Agility: 1304

Until Next Time . . .

Smite Priest Take 2, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love Glyph of Smite

2009-06-30T05:47:00.001-07:00

Greetings, readers, if you're out there, time for take 2 on the Smite Priest.

To compare our results from last time, I specced Shadow and took a run at the target dummy. Having never played a Shadow Priest before (which features a notoriously complicated rotation), I hit 2.4k DPS. So that'd be the degree of difference between supported and non-supported specs, regardless of player skill.

Back to Smiting! Having managed to obtain at last a Glyph of Smite (shout out to Blinkey for his legendary service of putting every glyph on the Horde AH), I did a pure Holy Fire rotation run, achieving 1550 dps. That's ~10% or 150-200 dps better than without the glyph.

Next, I ran all-out rotations, averaging a very respectable 1700 dps.

But that's not all. By working harder on the timing, I could hit peaks of 1900. Not for very long, but reliably enough to consider it a realistic benchmark. That's about 3/4 of the damage of the damage of a regular dps spec in the same gear.

Final conclusions on the Smite Priest: Somewhat Viable.

If you have good gear, and want to hit some Heroics dishing out the Holy vengeance, then Smite is for you. But please don't try to raid with it!

Until next time . . .

First Batch of Smite Priest Tests

2009-06-27T00:53:00.000-07:00

So here are some preliminary results:

Raw Priest Power, no Talents:
Smite Spam: 700dps. (Not bad, not great either)

Smite Spam with Holy Fire: 960dps. In this run, Holy Fire accounted for 30% of my dps (of which only 5% was the DoT), despite being cast only once every 10 seconds. What that implies is that casting holy fire results in a drop in smite DPS of around 60, but results in a massive overall 37% damage boost.

Raw Shadow Word Pain: 225dps
Raw Shadow Word: Pain + Devouring Plague: 450dps
What's interesting here is that Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague are basically even in terms of DPS.

Finally, Shadowfiend damage: 570 dps. Clearly, for the 15 seconds or so the Shadowfiend is up, he contributes a fairly substantial damage boost.

Talented:
Spite Spam only: 1175dps. That's pretty nice for spamming a basic nuke, and 2/3 again better than untalented! Surge of Light is a pretty RNG (random) ability, its nice when it procs, but will only do so about 20% of the time. If adding Holy Fire to the rotation leads to a ~35% damage boost, that would suggest we're heading for the range of 1600dps.

Spite Spam with Holy Fire: Maximum of 1400dps (average result a bit lower, around 1300). Definitely better, but not as good as I had hoped. Holy Fire once again counted for about 30% of my damage, but in practice that meant a disproportionate ~170-200dps drop in Smite's damage and only 20% more damage overall. Clearly, interfering with the sheer throughput of Smite is going to give any and all attempts to increase dps decreasing returns. That is, the more complicated the rotation, the more Smite's damage is going to suffer.

Note: These tests were conducted without Glyph of Smite, which I am finding hard to come by on the PTR without heading into the lag-fest that is Dalaran. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the Glyph is worth ~200dps, taking our final result to a respectable 1600dps.

Talented, Devouring Plague + Power Word: Pain is worth about 570dps. But again remember, Smite is doing ~1200 dps on its own. That means, over the space of 2 global cooldowns, we lose 3600 damage. Shadow Word Pain lasts 18 seconds, so its 'effective dps' contribution is perhaps 30% lower than this figure. Devouring Plague has a 24 second cooldown, so is a little more efficient.

So Let's Blow Everything!
My first attempt was less than ideal. Adding Shadowfiend, Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Pain to the rotation, as well as blowing Power Infusion, Beserking (Smiterella is a troll), Living Flame and Scale of Fates resulted in a paltry 1350dps.

I tried replacing the 'on-use' trinkets with passive ones (Pandora's Plea and Eye of the Broodmother to simplify the rotation, and this time only achieved 1250dps. In part, this is because
a) the passive trinkets are largely inferior to the 'on-use' trinkets for dps (ie. the passive 125 spell power from Scale of Fates is the maximum benefit on Eye of the Broodmother);
b) Pandora's Please didn't proc; and
c) I lacked the extra hit rating of the Living Flame.

Going back to the active trinkets, and getting in some practice improved this performance, resulting in a maximum performance of ~1550dps (again, without Glyph of Smite). I can hit that mark fairly sustainably now; over time, enough crits start accruing to have a legitimate influence on the statistics. Latency also definitely plays a part, by using a timer to start casting before the previous smite has finished, I can pack alot more dps in.

So I'm still on the fence about this one. I'll put in some more practice, hopefully get a Glyph of Smite, and then come to a final conclusion.

Until next time . . .

Meet Smiterella

2009-06-26T03:45:00.000-07:00

Meet Smiterella, our newly minted, t8-toting Smite Priest.

Fully gemmed, enchanted, and self-buffed, she has the following stats:

+2481 spellpower

449 Hit Rating (additional 17.5% chance to hit)

21.5% crit rating

329 Haste Rating (10% spell haste)

387 MP5

Lets take her for a run!

Smite Priest 101

2009-06-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

a.k.a. Holy Priest DPSing: What is it an how does it work?

This spec relies on two key spells to dish out damage: Smite and Holy Fire. Smite is a simple nuke with a 2-second cast time (talented); what makes Smite so powerful is that it gets 43% of the caster's spellpower, as well as talents that boost its crit chance by an additional 5% and damage by 15%. Surge of Light, the quintessential Smite Priest talent, gives you a free, instant-cast Smite when you crit with the ability (similar to, but not the same as, Lightning Overload and Sudden Doom).

Holy fire is your other nuke, with a 10-second second cooldown that applies a 7-second holy DoT ('Damage Over Time') on the target. With Glyph of Smite, the two spells interact to give Smite a 20% damage boost when the DoT is on the target (nifty!). For AOE situations, Holy Nova is available.

Most of the rest of the Smite Priest's talents will be spent in the Discipline tree, to pick up Inner Focus and Power Infusion, which add to your arsenal of cooldowns to use when you need that extra bit of damage.

From the Shadow School, we may be able to weave in Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague and Shadowfiend if we can spare the Global Cooldown (GCD) to cast them.

The final build should look something like this: 34/30/7

Until next time

Methodology

2009-06-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

The methodology I will be using is very simple.

Take the offspec premades to the Heroic training dummy in their nearest capital city, and attempt to do damage. Recount will tell me the amount of damage done and I will post here for everyone to see.

What about standards? What will I mean if I say a spec is viable, or not viable? In the interests of scientific legitimacy, I'll put down some numbers ahead of any testing being conducted. My poorly geared Shaman can do 2.4k DPS on the Heroic Training dummy without any raid buffs or debuffs. Therefore, given the Tier 8-quality gear of pre-mades, I will expect no less than the following:

1000 or less DPS: Not Viable ('Sorry, try again')
1000-1500 DPS: Not Really Viable ('I play this spec for shits'n'giggles')
1500-2000 DPS: Somewhat Viable ('Please don't kick me out of the Party!')
2000+ DPS: Viable ('Please don't kick me out of the Raid!')

Until next time . . .

Introducing our Candidates

2009-06-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

So, which are are our initial candidates?

Currently, there are no talent trees which support healing which are not utilised effectively for a healing play-style. Similarly, there are no tank-support trees which are not utilised for a tanking playstyle. Although rogues, shaman, hunter, hunter pets and warlock pets could, in theory, tank a mob given sufficient gearing and very good healers, that's just brute force. Similarly, mages and warlocks have 'range-tanked' certain gimmic fights in the past, but outside those encounters, it is not a common or viable approach.

Also, its very hard to experiment with a tanking or healer spec against a target dummy!

Therefore , we will be examining three potential new DPS specs. Two of these are healer trees (Priest and Paladin) that, for the purposes of levelling and soloing, have in-built damage abilities (Shaman and Druid healers, due to their hybrid nature, don't need specific damage-dealing support in their healer role to the same degree). Although all tank specs do quite good damage as an essential element of threat-generation, this blog will, at least not initially, argue in favour of Prot- or Bear- dedicated DPS roles.

Our third candidate takes an existing DPS tree and changes the playstyle from 'ranged' to 'melee'.

Let's meet them . . .

The Smite Priest (Holy/Discipline Hybrid)
Long gone are the days when shadow priest DPS was laughed at. Priests already have a wholly legitimate ranged-caster DPS specialization. Nevertheless, there is a potential for a hybrid build that takes both Surge of Light and Power Infusion to work as a second ranged caster dps specialisation.

For more reading on Smite Priests, see the Holy Fire Spec blog and this thread at elitistjerks.com

The Melee Hunter (Survival/Beast Master Hybrid)
Once upon a time, Survival was the hunter's melee tree. Don't believe me, check out this. Survival limped on for a while as the Hunter PvP tree, until being made a viable dps option in Wrath. Elements of Survival's haunted past, however, survive until the present day, and Gweryc, among others, has made a living validating its ongoing existence.

That said, melee hunters are in a pretty bad way at the moment. Successive changes by Blizzard has virtually killed it off entirely. I should know - I've tried levelling one through BC content. Gweryc himself has specced almost entirely into Beastmaster and, for lack of a better term, 'plays' as his pet. Has hunter melee dps survived? This blog aims to find out.

The Shockadin (Holy Paladin)
Ah, shockadins. Once upon a time, a holy/retribution hybrid that took 31-points in the Holy tree to get Holy Shock performed very well in PvP. Now, however, that Retribution abilities scale significantly better with attack power than spellpower, the received wisdom is that putting 31 points into the Holy tree gives one little more than a gimped retadin.

There is, however, another option, typified by this thread. In short, one takes Holy Guidance, Judgements of the Pure and Enlightened Judgements, taking the Holy tree almost to its maximum. This transforms the paladin into a lean, mean, spellcasting machine. Moreover, one that has significant ranged DPS capability. What can such a spec do? This blog aims to find out.

Until next time . . .

Introduction and Overview

2009-06-24T02:00:00.000-07:00

Well, everyone, it looks like the WoW 3.2 PTR is now live. So its time to get this show started.

Firstly, a little about myself. I have played WoW casually, on and off, since the beginning. I have a max level enhancement shaman in mostly iLvL 200 purples. And I enjoy the theory of the game almost as much as the game itself!

So what is this blog all about? Basically, I intend to use the availability of pre-made characters on the Public Test Realm (PTR) to experiment with unconventional talent specialisations ('specs') for classes which I, myself, can't be bothered levelling to 80.

World of Warcraft is currently a wonderfully diverse game. Although its 10 basic classes compares poorly to some games, in reality, there are at least 34 different way to play the game. Call them play-styles, call them 'aesthetics', at its core each one relies on a certain distribution of talent points and abilities to make it very different from other specs in the same class. At no other time in WoW's history have so many variations been officially supported by Blizzard and made raid-viable (that is, in a Player vs Environment setting - PvP balance is a whole other story).

Let's take a look at the current distribution, shall we?

Tanking Classes (Total: 6):
Protection Warrior
Protection Paladin
Feral Druid ('Bear')
Blood Death Knight
Frost Death Knight
Unholy Death Knight

Healing Classes (Total: 5):
Holy Priest
Discipline Priest
Holy Paladin
Restoration Shaman
Restoration Druid ('Tree')

DPS ('Damage') Classes (Total: 23)
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Frost Mage
Beast Master Hunter
Survival Hunter
Marksman Hunter
Assassination ('Mutilate') Rogue
Combat Rogue
Subtlety ('HaT') Rogue
Demonology Warlock
Affliction Warlock
Destruction Warlock
Arms Warrior
Fury Warrior
Retribution Paladin
Blood Death Knight
Frost Death Knight
Unholy Death Knight
Feral Druid ('Kitty')
Balance Druid ('Moonkin')
Elemental Shaman
Enhancement Shaman
Shadow Priest

Arguably, as Ghostcrawler said in the recent Mage Q&A, the Elementalist a.k.a.Frostfire Hybrid spec represents a new, 4th aesthetic for the Mage class, bringing the total to 24.

Alot of these specs had to fight hard over many years to get where they are today. And this blog if going to look at (at least) 3 more candidates that currently aren't being officially supported, taking them for a joy ride to see if they are able to join this august company.

Until then,