Spec refinement: combined Prime, Prince, Drak, Maklamos
by Harmil on 2012/08/01 15:51
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Update: In 1.11 I recommend this twist on this build, that's more healing-focused, but still has tons of Dom ultility:Chloro 36 / Dom 30
On Prime, you need instant-cast squirrel (Dom 16). On Prince, you need Natural Conversion (Chloro 12), Reflective Command (Dom 6) and as much health (e.g. Chloro's Raised in Nature, and Lock's Vitality) and healing as you can get. On Drak, you ideally want instant-cast squirrel (though you can definitely get away with just the 3 points in Clinging form) plus some other useful feature for the raid, so you're not just sitting on your thumbs while waiting to refresh squirrel. On Maklamos, you need Arresting Presence, but (thank you Luckia and Mad!) we've discovered that you do not need Empowered Presence, making it much easier to take enough Dom to do this. For the Ship/Captain, you need squirrel, much the same as Drak.
In the end, I've come up with a spec that I think covers all of these bases. In addition to the core needs, you get Wild Growth, battle rez, and opportunity.
Here's my build: Chloro/Lock/Dom 26/24/16 combined raid utility build
When I'm not doing whatever my utility thing is, I use it like any other non-51, raid-healing Chloro/Lock (Keep Vines up, cast Wild Growth and Ruin on cooldown, cast Radiant Spores to refresh and bang out Flourish, Bloom and Vile Spores as needed; otherwise dps with Lock spells, keeping Life Leech up to proc your SHoE, if you have one).
I'm definitely the type of class leader that hates to mandate anything, but there's an awful lot of good in this build in terms of bringing maximum utility. At least do look it over and consider making sure that you have these features covered in one or more of your own builds. Thanks!
On Prime, you need instant-cast squirrel (Dom 16). On Prince, you need Natural Conversion (Chloro 12), Reflective Command (Dom 6) and as much health (e.g. Chloro's Raised in Nature, and Lock's Vitality) and healing as you can get. On Drak, you ideally want instant-cast squirrel (though you can definitely get away with just the 3 points in Clinging form) plus some other useful feature for the raid, so you're not just sitting on your thumbs while waiting to refresh squirrel. On Maklamos, you need Arresting Presence, but (thank you Luckia and Mad!) we've discovered that you do not need Empowered Presence, making it much easier to take enough Dom to do this. For the Ship/Captain, you need squirrel, much the same as Drak.
In the end, I've come up with a spec that I think covers all of these bases. In addition to the core needs, you get Wild Growth, battle rez, and opportunity.
Here's my build: Chloro/Lock/Dom 26/24/16 combined raid utility build
When I'm not doing whatever my utility thing is, I use it like any other non-51, raid-healing Chloro/Lock (Keep Vines up, cast Wild Growth and Ruin on cooldown, cast Radiant Spores to refresh and bang out Flourish, Bloom and Vile Spores as needed; otherwise dps with Lock spells, keeping Life Leech up to proc your SHoE, if you have one).
I'm definitely the type of class leader that hates to mandate anything, but there's an awful lot of good in this build in terms of bringing maximum utility. At least do look it over and consider making sure that you have these features covered in one or more of your own builds. Thanks!
Last edited by Harmil on 2012/10/21 11:53; edited 4 times in total
re: Spec refinement: combined Prime, Prince, Drak, Maklamos
by Harmil on 2012/08/01 16:21
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Refinement on the refinement: if you want to build a separate instant-CC build for Prime and/or AP build for Maklamos, or just let someone else do that, you can get a faster battle-rez, 5/5 Improved Mage Armor for overall dps/hps throughput and Natures Touch to allow you to pop a big life nuke on opportunity procs, which gives you a nice raid heal proc.
It's a toss-up. I'd rather get the extra spec slot back because I ALWAYS end up squirreling on Prime, but you can go either way. Definitely giving up AP for Maklamos would hurt too much for me.
Here's the alternate build: 30/30/6 Chloro/Lock/Dom
Edit: and a second alternate which uses Elementalist to give increased crit and tanking damage reduction while boosting points spent in Chloro to get Living Infusion bonuses, faster battle rez refresh, mana-generating self-shield, and Living Energy ("clover") for the raid:
40/16/10 Chloro/Dom/Ele
It's a toss-up. I'd rather get the extra spec slot back because I ALWAYS end up squirreling on Prime, but you can go either way. Definitely giving up AP for Maklamos would hurt too much for me.
Here's the alternate build: 30/30/6 Chloro/Lock/Dom
Edit: and a second alternate which uses Elementalist to give increased crit and tanking damage reduction while boosting points spent in Chloro to get Living Infusion bonuses, faster battle rez refresh, mana-generating self-shield, and Living Energy ("clover") for the raid:
40/16/10 Chloro/Dom/Ele
Last edited by Harmil on 2012/08/02 17:25; edited 1 time in total
re: SL READY: Archon builds
by Harmil on 2012/05/08 9:25
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UPDATE to 1.11: New info and macros.
Archon must max out at at least 51 points (you can go deeper, come 2.0, but for now, you have to spend all 51. I also highly recommend increasing utility by adding in Dom. Here's a sample archon build that I use:
Archon 51 / Dom 15 raid support
Buttons and macros
My rotation isn't simple, but I think it's what archon needs to do:
Archon Spam Macro:
Archon must max out at at least 51 points (you can go deeper, come 2.0, but for now, you have to spend all 51. I also highly recommend increasing utility by adding in Dom. Here's a sample archon build that I use:
Archon 51 / Dom 15 raid support
Buttons and macros
My rotation isn't simple, but I think it's what archon needs to do:
- Refresh Crumbling Resistance if it's below 1 min
- Refresh Ashen Defense if it's below 1 min
- Refresh Lingering Dust if it's below 1 min (keep in mind, many mobs are immune, but you still have to refresh it to get the self-buff component)
- If at full charge pop Power Drain (or save it for a few seconds if the boss is about to do some big damage)
- I usually pop Illuminate right after Power Drain
- If there is a caster, Arresting Presence might be better than Power Drain as a charge consumer to back up interrupters
- If Searing Vitality self-buff is below 1 min, refresh
- If raid buffs (Shared Vigor, Burning Purpose and Arcane Aegis) are off, re-cast, otherwise, channel Patron's Rage on cooldown to refresh.
- If 5 or more players are grouped up in a stable spot, cast Lava Field at thier feet
- Archon spam macro (keep in mind that the buffs granted by the nukes in this macro are the majority of your contribution to the raid's DPS... this is KEY)
Archon Spam Macro:
- Code: Select all
#show Surging Flare
suppressmacrofailures
cast Earthen Barrage
cast Volcanic Bomb
cast Surging Flare
cast Spark Shower
cast Leeching Flames
cast Waning Power
cast Pillaging Stone
cast Neural Prod
Last edited by Harmil on 2012/11/13 0:32; edited 3 times in total
re: How I tank Prince
by Harmil on 2012/06/22 2:45
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On the King/Prince fight in Hammerknell, I've tanked successfully a couple of times. Here's what I do:
1) Make sure you have min, 8k health, self-buffed
2) Make sure you have at least 120 death resist, unbuffed
3) Have a spec like this one Chloro/dom spec for king/prince (UPDATE: see my combined raid utility build, 26/24/15 Chloro/Lock/Dom)
The basic point of the spec is to cast Reflective command every time Prince uses his Terminate Life spell. You NEED to have cast bars up so you can see them. When he starts to cast this spell, stop everything and cast Reflective Command. If that's on cooldown, cast Natural Conversion. You can macro them like this:
Other than that, your job is to stay out of his short-range AoE that he has around himself constantly, stay out of the purple AoE, and kite him around until he's dead. Heal yourself as needed and never let him touch you.
Also, it's pretty important to stay away from King. If you get too close, you'll be in range of his fear. There's nothing worse than being feared when Terminate Life gets cast!
1) Make sure you have min, 8k health, self-buffed
2) Make sure you have at least 120 death resist, unbuffed
3) Have a spec like this one Chloro/dom spec for king/prince (UPDATE: see my combined raid utility build, 26/24/15 Chloro/Lock/Dom)
The basic point of the spec is to cast Reflective command every time Prince uses his Terminate Life spell. You NEED to have cast bars up so you can see them. When he starts to cast this spell, stop everything and cast Reflective Command. If that's on cooldown, cast Natural Conversion. You can macro them like this:
- Code: Select all
#show Natural Conversion
suppressmacrofailures
cast @player Reflective Command
cast Natural Conversion
Other than that, your job is to stay out of his short-range AoE that he has around himself constantly, stay out of the purple AoE, and kite him around until he's dead. Heal yourself as needed and never let him touch you.
Also, it's pretty important to stay away from King. If you get too close, you'll be in range of his fear. There's nothing worse than being feared when Terminate Life gets cast!
Last edited by Harmil on 2012/08/01 16:00; edited 1 time in total
re: Harb/Pyro/Chloro dps
by Harmil on 2012/11/30 13:27
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I've been working with a number of different combinations of Pyro, Chloro and Harb. One that has worked out really well so far is this 54/17/5 mix. It takes advantage of a number of fun tools like using piercing beam to proc Blazing Light; using Fireball on armor procs to keep up as much combust as possible and otherwise trying to keep stacks of Rending Slash on the target. The basic spam macro is:
Conditioned Response and Burning Shield are optional, and will lower your dps very slightly. Move them out and put them on buttons if you think you will remember to use them when you absolutely need survivability, but as long as you're near full health, they will only be up every 30 seconds (below 50%, Conditioned Response has a chance to reset its cooldown faster).
Your "rotation" is a priority list:
That's all for single-target fights.
You can respond to heavy incoming damage with Reaper's Blade and Planar Shield. You can enter combat and switch targets using Blade Rush. Your ideal combo is to get an armor proc from Tempest Winds so that you can cast a fireball immediately after it finishes channelling and then drop right back into your spam macro.
You can use Blazing Light at the start of the fight and refresh it with Lucent Slash for an extra pair of dots, but I find that that's too much busy work to even get a reliable parse, so your mileage may vary...
For two-target fights, I recommend using Blade Mark, Blazing Light on both targets and then your normal rotation with a single Lucent Slash before every Fireball to refresh Blazing Light and re-casting Blade Mark on cooldown. (hint: if you really want to piss off Spye, do this when adds show up in a fight so that he can see you mostly targeting the boss... it makes him SOOOO angry!
For 3-6 targets, Blazing Light on at least a couple of them and spam Lucent Slash until you're down to 2 or fewer targets.
For 7+ targets, just spam Lucent Slash (it hits 5 targets at a time, and leaves a DoT on those 5, so you can stack some amazing damage by continuing to spam this while orbiting the group, so that you keep selecting a new subset of 5... your DoT continues to tick on basically all of them).
For really short fights, don't bother with anything more than the spam macro (or Lucent Slash for really short AoE fights).
On boss fights where you have to get out of melee range, pop Phantom Blades to keep using your normal rotation from range, and then Blade Rush back in once it's safe!
- Code: Select all
#show Vorpal Slash
suppressmacrofailures
stopcasting
cast [notactive] Charged Blade
cast [ctrl] Introspection
cast Storm's Fury
cast Vorpal Slash
cast Flame Bolt
cast Burning Shield
cast Conditioned Response
cast Rending Slash
cast Fireball
cast Blazing Light
Conditioned Response and Burning Shield are optional, and will lower your dps very slightly. Move them out and put them on buttons if you think you will remember to use them when you absolutely need survivability, but as long as you're near full health, they will only be up every 30 seconds (below 50%, Conditioned Response has a chance to reset its cooldown faster).
Your "rotation" is a priority list:
- Self-buff with Eldritch Armor and Lightning Blade. If you don't have a bard or archon, cast Flaring Intellect.
- Cast Piercing Beam at the start of combat and once after every Tempest Winds channel, before anything else. (NOTE: Need to test trying this right BEFORE Tempest Winds...)
- Use Tempest Winds on cooldown, but make sure that Charged Blade is active first!
- If your armor procs, hit Fireball (if you spam your fireball button, it will cast and then "immediately" start to cast again. That's why there's a "stopcasting" at the top of your spam macro.)
- Mash your spam macro
That's all for single-target fights.
You can respond to heavy incoming damage with Reaper's Blade and Planar Shield. You can enter combat and switch targets using Blade Rush. Your ideal combo is to get an armor proc from Tempest Winds so that you can cast a fireball immediately after it finishes channelling and then drop right back into your spam macro.
You can use Blazing Light at the start of the fight and refresh it with Lucent Slash for an extra pair of dots, but I find that that's too much busy work to even get a reliable parse, so your mileage may vary...
For two-target fights, I recommend using Blade Mark, Blazing Light on both targets and then your normal rotation with a single Lucent Slash before every Fireball to refresh Blazing Light and re-casting Blade Mark on cooldown. (hint: if you really want to piss off Spye, do this when adds show up in a fight so that he can see you mostly targeting the boss... it makes him SOOOO angry!
For 3-6 targets, Blazing Light on at least a couple of them and spam Lucent Slash until you're down to 2 or fewer targets.
For 7+ targets, just spam Lucent Slash (it hits 5 targets at a time, and leaves a DoT on those 5, so you can stack some amazing damage by continuing to spam this while orbiting the group, so that you keep selecting a new subset of 5... your DoT continues to tick on basically all of them).
For really short fights, don't bother with anything more than the spam macro (or Lucent Slash for really short AoE fights).
On boss fights where you have to get out of melee range, pop Phantom Blades to keep using your normal rotation from range, and then Blade Rush back in once it's safe!
Last edited by Harmil on 2012/12/02 13:39; edited 8 times in total
re: Harb/Pyro/Chloro dps
by Harmil on 2012/11/30 13:32
0
BTW: I've done dummy testing with a number of other tools. So far, it seems to be a DPS loss to use Flame Bolt (not shocking given that I'm not far enough into Pyro to get the proc from it) and Countdown is dps neutral or a small loss. Shockingly, Internalize Charge is a big dps loss (I was macroing it into fireball procs).
You can do decently by replacing Pyro outright with more Chloro and using Vile Spores for procs. This is more of a hybrid heal support role, but does decent dps as well, and is great for leveling or soloing. If you go that way, experiment with putting Entropic Veil into the Vile Spores procs and let me know how it affects dps.
Remember, the goal is to:
1) cast as many fireballs as possible
2) get through as much of that macro as possible so that you trigger Natural Awareness and Rending Slash as much as possible.
In my current, pre-expert gear, this spec runs up about 6.8k dps, now, but in raid gear some mages are reporting 11 or 12k single-target dps with other specs, so we'll see how long this continues to scale passably...
Edit: My best numbers are now around 7.2kdps, but my usual fumblings usually bring me down to 7kdps over the longer haul (this rotation is very sensitive to a missed opportunity to cast fireball or to keep up Natural Awareness).
You can do decently by replacing Pyro outright with more Chloro and using Vile Spores for procs. This is more of a hybrid heal support role, but does decent dps as well, and is great for leveling or soloing. If you go that way, experiment with putting Entropic Veil into the Vile Spores procs and let me know how it affects dps.
Remember, the goal is to:
1) cast as many fireballs as possible
2) get through as much of that macro as possible so that you trigger Natural Awareness and Rending Slash as much as possible.
In my current, pre-expert gear, this spec runs up about 6.8k dps, now, but in raid gear some mages are reporting 11 or 12k single-target dps with other specs, so we'll see how long this continues to scale passably...
Edit: My best numbers are now around 7.2kdps, but my usual fumblings usually bring me down to 7kdps over the longer haul (this rotation is very sensitive to a missed opportunity to cast fireball or to keep up Natural Awareness).
Last edited by Harmil on 2012/12/03 10:12; edited 1 time in total
re: Infinity Stone progression for Mages
by Harmil on 2012/12/06 17:38
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I've put up a spreadsheet of the Infinity Stone (and Torvan Hunter rep for cape) progression for all armor slots. I'll add weapons later, but for now this is a great guide to where to spend your Infinity Stones to get the biggest bang for your buck.
Mage Infinity Stone gear progression
Mage Infinity Stone gear progression
Headcount
by Harmil on 2012/12/06 12:03
0
| Harmil wrote: |
| 395 hit. Aiming for 400 by Saturday for the raid rifts. |
Got to 408 last night. here's what I did:
First off, you need to get infinity stones! That's pretty much the entire battle, right there. You need a crap-ton of them. See the gearing up article that I wrote for where to spend them, but the basic upshot is:
- Get every +hit ARMOR piece that the world vendor sells first.
- Start off with the PvP weapon because it's cheap and easy.
- There's a good, common drop weapon for each class in experts that you might want to target getting instead of spending infinity stones to upgrade the PvP one.
- Get the best +Hit runes you can (see my Runes for Strom Legion article for more)
- Upgrade all of the +Hit armor items you got with Infinity stones (alt-click the item to see what it requires to upgrade)... this will go from +40 hit to +53 hit on each item, so it's a big jump!
With runes, the expert drop staff, all of the +hit basic blue infinity stone armor slots and 1 upgrade (the gloves), I hit 408.
re: Runes for Storm Legion
by Harmil on 2012/11/27 0:46
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I've been putting together a spreadsheet for runes here:
Storm Legion Rune Spreadsheet
I'm still missing some faction runes, and probably some player made ones. If you want to help me update either post more info here and I'll add it or give me your gmail address, and I'll add you as an editor.
Storm Legion Rune Spreadsheet
I'm still missing some faction runes, and probably some player made ones. If you want to help me update either post more info here and I'll add it or give me your gmail address, and I'll add you as an editor.
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