How to build up your DPS in raids

 This is going to be some of my thoughts on the subject of damage per second. This is not aimed at bleeding edge raiders, they should know this. Note that I do not claim that this is the only way to do things.

Raid DPS.

First and foremost it is important to note that in a raid environment it is your raid dps that matters most. To some of you this is perhaps obvious but it is very common that people just focus on their own personal results.

Why is this important to state? Because there are ways to increase your own dps by sacrificing potential gains to the raid. Example: not applying sunders or shattering throw as a dps warrior. Not doing that extra work will, most likely, improve your personal dps but lower the raid dps and in the end it might cost you that important boss kill.

How to tackle this? Find out what raid buffs and boss debuffs you have and see if they’re already covered. To continue with our dps warrior, if you have a warrior tank in the raid you will not have to stack sunders for example since he will do that automatically through devastate. Once you have gone through your abilities and you see what your need to worry about, and what not to, you can move on to what you can do to improve yourself.

The reintroduction of long, difficult and time consuming questlines

We all remember certain questlines.

Linkens “It’s a secret to everybody” or “You are Rakh’likh, Demon”, "The Scepter of the Shifting Sands" or some of the old attunement quests.

We remember them not because of the loot we got in the end or the experience points they gave, we remember them because of their epic scale and how much we had to work and travel to complete them. They where not something everyone did, in some cases very few got around to completing them (for example Dungeon Set 2).

A lot of old old-world quests had you traveling all over Azeroth. Some of these where just normal quests that where just annoying to complete and completely broke you off from the area you where questing in to deliver some package or something to someone on the other side of the world. For just normal quests this was not very good.

However for end level questlines that the developers had put extra time in to developing and that had a great story this was very cool.

The reason this was so cool was because it brought depth to the world around you, it made it feel more alive. A lot of them made sure to be annoying and difficult, this was a great thing since that made you feel as if though you had actually completed something special. Another huge factor in this was how they often started off as unassuming average quests that didn’t seem like anything special and also how “un required” the quest rewards where.

When Cataclysm came and remade the old world and its quests most, if not all, of these kind of questlines where lost. They might have been breaking with what the forward jump in time that occurred and changes to the zones had brought, they might have been dropped due to the fact that they did not bring any end game rewards or they might have been dropped because of the fact that they where too messy for newer players to complete.

Cataclysm quests where at first very appealing and interesting to me due to how streamlined they where, but after a while I realized that it was all a railroad. Jump on and ride along but no choices are allowed.

Where is the forsaken in Kalimdor that in the middle of a questing zone convinces me to take up the banner of the banshee queen as an undercover agent and travel to Eastern Kingdoms to start a whole new line of quests instead?

Why can’t I choose a faction to support and, maybe not exclusively, quest for all over Azeroth from for example level 15 to 60 (tabards don’t give faction specific quests) and upon reaching exalted get access to a specific questline (levels 58, 68, 78 and 85) with a unique reward?

In summary.

Generally questing should not be a pain, but sometimes it should!

Do you miss your first months in WoW?

Just before Cataclysm hit I recreated one of the first screenshots I ever took in WoW. Back when the world was unknown and fresh.


I took ages leveling and stopped regularly just to check out side quests that where below my level. Like The Mithril Order quests, so much mithril and thorium. I miss that time.


What really has changed for me with WoW I think is time. Back when I was leveling my first character I had no end goal or other reason to hurry up. I was, and still am, a non social player. I like doing as much as I can on my own. This helped to shield me from information about endgame content, and for that matter any information on what was around the corner. Everything was so new.


I think a lot of people that perhaps raid or pvp at max level, or even just players that have been playing for a long while, easily get very cynical and upset about either Blizzard or WoW itself. I have recently been feeling unhappy with the game, a lot because of what Cataclysm did to it but more on that in another post.


I belive that players really have to just stop and take a breath now and then. Perhaps start a non guild alt without heirlooms that one only levels through quests or whatever is prefered but always focusing on the moment instead of fighting to get to some end goal.


If people did that I would bet that the WoW community, being utterly childish and aweful atm, would be a nicer thing to partake in and be a part of.

A new vid series maybe?

I've been thinking about starting a series of vids that focus on a little side hobby I have in WoW. Filling up my bankspace, well filling it up with interesting and shiny stuff really.

This whole collecting thing I think started when I did the warrior quest for the whirlwind weapon. I picked the sword of course and noticed that this was a weapon that looked very different from the other sword-looking swords I'd had before that (this was my first ever character in WoW so everything was new). When the time came for me to separate from it in favor of a better weapon I just could not vendor it. Ever since it has dwelled in my bank, a memory of simpler times.

That was how it all started.
After that sword many other things came and went in my bank, hard choices where made and less shiny stuff was taken out back and dealt with. In later days a lot more have been entering my vaults. A lot of stuff I have can no longer me attained, many things went the way of the Dodo when Cata came.

Anyway my idea with these new vids would be to show people the cool stuff that is out there and some of the history surrounding the items, Ashkandi anyone? And to show people that they can get items that are a big part of the history of WoW.
Also just to share with other collectors out there and speculate what Blizzard might remove next so that swift action can be taken. And perhaps to entice more people to get bigger bankbags.

Al'Akir joins his son in death!

Finally, after a lot of hard work, Vanguard managed to take down Al'Akir 25 man last night.
As I understand it that was the first 25 man kill of Al'Akir on the server, and I can understand why.

Al'Akir on 25 man is very rng, at least at first. But even after knowing the fight it is easy to have 1/25th of your raid screw the other 24 up. Especially in P3 where a cloud at the wrong level leads to what I call the "electric sandwich". The recipe is one cook and 24 pieces of ham. If it wasn't for that this fight might be concidered fun.

What I found most annoying about the fight is of course P1. The reason I hate it is because I can only speed it up by so much. Since the tank can't really generate a constant high threat, due to wind bursts and tornados, I as a dps have to be really careful not to overaggro. This is trickier than it might sound due to the randomness of the tank threat "pauses".

My trick to combat threat at the start is to use pre-pot but start by just stacking up sunders and saving my cd's for the 3rd rend. This is not enough in itself but it certainly helps. I wish I could just throw everything I have at the guy, Rawrr.

Anyway, I'm very happy to have defended this shattered world and to have gotten the raids done exclusively on 25 man.

Looking forward to crying about hardmodes now ;)

What is wrong with raiding, 10 vs 25 man, in Cataclysm

Ok let me talk before you start throwing things.

Raiding in Wrath of the Lich King (henceforth: Wrath) built upon the lessons learned by Blizzard in tBC.
They noticed that people loved the option of going with 10 man raids.
They also noticed that there was a huge problem with raiding in tBC. That was that you basically had to do every raid after the other, starting with the oldest easiest ones, in order for you to get to the gear you needed for the later raids.
If you wanted to do Sunwell you had to have done everything before Sunwell for you to have any sort of decent gear basically.

So enter wrath.
In wrath every raid had the option to go either 10 or 25 man. Great, everyone can choose what to go for. Current gear could be gotten through heroic dungeons and tokens.
The problem here was that 25 man raids where harder than their 10 man counterparts, another issue was that every raid had separate achivements for 10 and 25 man.
To clarify: Every raid achivement had 2 versions (some exceptions).

So people started thinking that 25 man was the more hardcore way of raiding, and Blizzard reinforced this by tieing certain quests (like Shadowmourne) to "only 25 man" and most of all through loot which was much better on 25 man.

So; Cataclysm.
In Cataclysm Blizzard wanted to remove any sort of "This way is the real way to raid" by having 10 and 25 man raids share everything. Loot, achivements, lockouts and difficulty.

My issue is this.
10 man is very different from 25 man! Now I'm not saying that 25 man is always harder or vice versa, but they are very different. Some bosses are easier on a certain raidsize, this is a fact. The problem is not that I want to go back to the wrath system of doing things, the problem is that I don't get recognition for what I have done.

Blizzard turned away from using separate achivements for the different raidsizes because they are supposed to be equaly hard now. They are not.
You tell me that Nefarian on 10 man is as hard as it is on 25 man with a strait face.

I want Blizzard to reintroduce separate achivements for killing Cataclysm bosses.
I don't want the metas to go that way though mind you, I don't care about them. I just want to have a separate achivement for Bastion of Twilight 10 man and Bastion of Twilight 25 man for example. That's all.

WTF does one play Arms?

Good question. Hmm, lets start with a short recap of dps warriors.


Once upon a time in vanilla.
Back in classic WoW Arms warriors, otherwise known as MS (mortal strike)-warriors, where the dps warriors. Fury was not working very well, this might have been due to suboptimal gear (this would later become a trend with fury and also arms to a lesser extent), and so arms reigned supreme.


Fast forward to WotLK aka the rise of fury.
Titan's grip. Now fury could suddenly wield twohanded weapons in one hand. This together with increasing crit and ArP from endgame gear made rage generation for fury insanely high. This alone made fury in endgame WotLK the ultimate melee dps class. Endless rage made it possible to use Heroic Strike on every attack and with Whirlwind working the way it did nothing could hold fury down. Single target or multi targets made no difference.


But the most significant thing about fury was; It was easy to play.
Yes I said it. It was damn easy to play. Add to that fact that if you could find your way to any sort of decent gear you would be putting out huge dps numbers and you have one hell of a onesided looking balance of dps warriors. Everyone (face)rolled a fury warrior. (Now I'm not saying that people that excelled at fury where just facerolling, but excelling at anything requires effort so)


Ok so what about Arms?
Arms is not easy to play.  ...Yeah that's about it.
If you where a good arms warrior in Icecrown Citadel you would be putting very big numbers out and if you where playing with anyone but people that knew exactly how to play their class you would outpreform them, unless they where better geared. I personally was constantly finding myself at the top spot(s) when it came to boss dps. This was very surprising to since all I heard from people was: "Arms can't dps".


Now the problem with arms in WotLK was that the class was capped, at some point arms could just not conjure any more dps. Arms didnt have the endless rage that fury had and that made using Heroic Strike a tricky business because of the fact that the used the "...on the next normal attack swing" mechanic. That always created, at least for me, the fear of: "What if my rage is not there when it goes off?".
I am at 85 rage, I hit HS, I continue my rotation, my rage goes down to 35 and then HS goes off leaving me ragestarved -_-
I always hated that mechanic and I love what Blizzard did with it in Cataclysm. If we would have had that in WotLK things might have been different.


So what is so great with Arms then?
People that play arms know and it is hard to describe but playing arms feels more ..real.
Think of arms as an arcade fighting game take on WoW. It is a frantic hammering of buttons, constantly knowing that if something procs you must react fast and make sure you dont lose that mortal strike/execute/rend/sunder-debuff/battleshout you've got rolling. There is no steady flow of rage comming in, it crashes in on you slapping you in the face screaming: "Omfg HS!".
Executing a perfect bossbattle in terms of your rotation is next to impossible and every single bossbattle is different from the previous one. You're constantly adapting, fighting to stay on top.
It feels excactly like a battle should feel.


In the end I can't really put into words what makes playing arms so rewarding.
But people that play arms know.