First Aid Leveling Tips

Yes, I know what the ‘pros’ will say, that a First Aid guide for WoW is silly.  But maybe they don’t know everything about everything.  And yes, leveling first aid isn’t really on the level of brain activity that might be required for brain surgery or calculus – but if you would rather NOT have to think about it any more than necessary, it’s nice to have it all listed out for you neat and clean.

At the very minimum it will save you a couple of trips back and forth between the AH and the trainers.  Really, if you could just go to the AH and buy every single scrap of cloth you needed (and you already knew exactly how much you would be needing) and could just stand at the trainer and hit the ‘create all’ button and come back every few minutes – that’s not something a total nub would do.  Just a little Dominating.

But even in first aid in wow there is a little trick we can let you in on that will save you s tidy bit of gold through the middle of leveling first aid.  And you wish you had thought of it – really.

Remember back in the day having to go all the way out to Theramore or Hammerfall for your artisan First Aid quest?  Triage is not required any more, but those of you who skip it are missing out on a couple of things.  Blizz giveth, and Blizz replaceth that way.  Not exactly biblical, I know, but . . .

Anyway, when Blizz removed the requirement for the Triage quest, they added an incentive in the form of a XP bonus that doesn’t seem to have a level cap.  In other words, you can still go grab the first aid quests at any point on your way to 80 and get XP based on your level.  Not bad to snag 10,000 to 20,000 experience out of a foofoo quest eh?

And if that’s not enough for you, just go out there during your first aid powerleveling work to save yourself a tidy bit of gold.  Enough for a decent repair of your mains T10 gear after a few wipes – seriously.  You see, the good doctors will train you for Heavy Mageweave, Runecloth and Heavy Runecloth Bandages absolutely free if you complete the quest.

All of those first aid recipes will set you back 37 gold 50 silver if you buy them anywhere else.  Excuse me, but I can turn that 37 gold into about 50 in a couple day’s work – throwing it to some trainer is not my idea of a good time.  Getting to Theramore may be a pain (hush Horde, Hammerfall is easy), but not enough of a pain to blow almost 40g.

So there you have it, a decent couple of tips out of something you thought was completely worthless.  You really shouldn’t judge before you read.  If you already knew about this little trick, you’re not a nub.  If you thought you were REALLY pro and didn’t know it – tsk.  If you’re glad to know it, stick around, we find this kind of thing all the time.  It’s why we (and you) can Dominate.

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Moonkin Form Druid DPS Build

For about as long as we’ve been in WotLK the Boomkin druid is always something you want in your raid for the killer buff – but might have been a little hard to justify bringing because it was tough to do great DPS as a Boomkin.  Apparently Blizz didn’t want Moonkin form to be an also-ran in the latest patch, and so the Balance tree got some really significant buffage.

With the following gear, the balance druid can actually get respectably close to his feral cousin with a max theoretical DPS of 10,034.  That’s a bit of a far cry from the top end feral build going at more than 11,000 but there are a couple of things to keep in mind about that.  First, the feral priority list is far more complex and it’s much easier to drop or clip the rotation.  Next, while people like a nice kitty around, a boomkin who can pull their weight will get a warmer reception.

Plus, how much more fun can you have than pwning face while dressed up like a giant owl?  And the SNL dance – awesome.  I always liked Thunder chicken more than cat form anyway, so it may be time to dust the old druid off and give him a spin around the block in the following spec.

Gear

Example T9 Gear For Balance Druid

Talents

Druid DPS Talent Build Balance Boomkin

Glyphs

Major

• Starfire
• Moonfire
• Insect Swarm

Minor

• The Wild
• Unburdened Rebirth
• Thorns

Of course, the minor glyphs are completely up to you, but the set above is pretty standard.  If you do a lot of running around you might use the glyphs of Aquatic form or dash, since they boost movement speed (dash only occasionally).  And since none of the above glyphs figure into DPS at all you might also consider the Typhoon glyph if you can find reasons to use it.

Priorities

• Flask = Frost Wyrm
• Food = Fish Feast
• Mark of the Wild
• Moonkin Form
• Faerie Fire
• Typhoon – when moving
• Speed Potion
• Innervate – when mana below 2,000
• Treants
• Starfall – when NOT under effects of Eclipse
• Starfire – when 4pc T9 buff is up
• Moonfire – if no moonfire debuff
• Insect Swarm – if no insect swarm debuff
• Wrath – until lunar eclipse procs
• Starfire – if cast time is less than remaining timer on lunar eclipse
• Wrath – if cast time is less than remaining buff on solar eclipse
• Starfire

I’m no expert on Boomkins, and I’m sure the thread will help me iron this out.  But it doesn’t look like a lot has changed for a while with thunder chickens.  Hit the boss with FF, pop treants, potion, trinkets, Moonfire, Insect swarm, Wrath until Lunar Eclipse, Starfall, Starfire until solar eclipse.  Refresh Moonfire and insect swarm debuffs and just swap back and forth between wrath and starfire depending on which eclipse has procced. If you have neither eclipse and dots are ticking, throw starfire until solar eclipse.  Past that just remember to pop treants and starfall when the cooldowns are up.  I will update this based on input from the thread, but it’s basically what I was doing a year ago on my druid.

Damage Sources

It wasn’t until patch 3.3 that the boomkin really had a true chance of getting back in to the top DPS mix, but whatever they changed sure has helped.  We might even convince Gavin to crawl back behind the feathers and start slinging a little chicken pain around in ICC.  But one thing is for certain – it’s not just cats that Dominate any more.

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How To Power Level Jewelcrafting

Now that we are well on our way here at DYS to getting you the best builds for all the classes, it’s high time we jumped up and became your go-to source for professions as well.  We’ll start it off with our Jewelcrafting Guide.  We’ll do the best we can to get all of the professions up in short order, including the secondary professions such as first aid and herbalism.

Dominate Your Server Jewelcrafting Guide

Just use the link above to go directly to the complete jewelcrafting powerleveling guide.  The rest of this article will discuss the ins and outs of leveling jewelcrafting as an overview.  We just might be able to save you a lot of time, gold and headaches if you’ll flow through this bit first.

Leveling JC is something Law will probably never do again, which means at least not for a few more weeks.  It still irks me to no end that about the only way to level the dang thing without spending what amounts to a small fortune is to farm your way through it – YUCK BOMB!  That’s right, the only way you can reasonably spend less than a huge pile of gold on mats for this is if you have a miner and a whole lot of hours to kill.

I prefer to use other people’s hours, that’s what the AH is for.  So I suppose if you are also patient you can just meander along through the leveling Jewelcrafting process as you find good deals for what you need, but I’m not that patient.  Rich and impatient means that I leveled JC from 1-450 in about 6 hours.  Not all in one sitting, of course.  It took a few days when there just wasn’t a single truesilver bar left on the entire AH and I had to wait for someone else to go get them for me.

But in the end I’m pretty happy with having chosen jewelcrafting for my shaman.  I had already done Blacksmithing and dropped Inscription for JC – for the buffs.  Sure, the shoulder enchant is awesome, but the JC only gems are even better – plus two extra sockets to shove more stats into from BS.  For  a lot of classes it’s really hard to beat the BC/JC combo for min/max.  It would be almost as good on my Mage as Enchanting/Tailoring, though not by much.

Anyway the first reason you should consider JC is the same reason we always recommend you choose a profession – because it helps your toon do whatever it is you like most.  PvP guys like engineering, but it’s pretty much novelty stuff in Raids (yes I know that repair bots can be handy but honstly there is a repair guy or three inside ICC).  While you will find tanks with mining skill for the buff, there are other professions with better buffs.  In other words, Gathering professions just don’t help your toon all that much for the most part, at least, not enough to do them on a main.

Lawbringer Has one toon for all of the professions (even though I skip gathering for the most part), which means that I make everything I need on all my toons.  One man show.  Flasks, threads, gems, chants, I never buy crafted anything – buy the mats cheap and make it my dang self.  And in that way Jewelcrafting has been the awesome of the bunch.

It’s hard to imagine living without jewelcrafting and enchanting, with alchemy coming in a close 3rd place.  One toon has fishing and cooking maxxed and there is a tailor and leatherworker in the mix to deal with the leg enchants.  But being able to cut your own gems is awesome.  You don’t have to ask if “anyone has the +12 to nub / +10 geek gem, you just keep up your dailies and go get it.

Now, JC is NOT my favorite thing to use for making gold, although you will see in this thread that there are people who swear by it.  It feels more risky to me since there is such a high cost of entry to the market as a seller and the ongoing costs (in the form of auction house deposits) can absolutely kill your margin.  But I do have a few pet gems that I keep up on the AH at all times – on our server the PvP Meta gems are a good, consistent sellers.

When you use our guide you might not want to go buy all of the mats at once.  It’s hard to keep track of everything, so do it by each guide segment.  Buy all of the mats for apprentice, get them in your bags, then stand at the trainer while you use up the mats.  Then it’s off the the mailbox to clear your inventory and back to the AH for mats for the next level.

We’ve tried to make the guide in such a way that it will be the cheapest route on most servers from 1-450, but you might find a different sweet spot in your leveling where you can get something like 80 shadow gems for next to nothing.  So shop with your eye on the guide page and look for those opportunities.  Even though we think the guide is about as good as it can get, it can’t take all things into consideration for all servers all the time.

In the end we think you’ll enjoy jewelcrafting as much as we do (even though Law resisted it completely for two years).  Is Jewelcrafting the best profession in WoW?  Maybe it is for some people, and it certainly might be the best one for you.  But one thing is for sure, getting your jewelcrafting leveling done with speed and precision (and at the lowest possible cost) is completely Dominating.

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Hit Rating And Spell Hit Rating For Moonkin Druids Explained

There really isn’t an easy way to completely understand hit rating. There are so many variables involved when it comes to talents, abilities, resistances, and the fact that Blizz has a tendency to change their mind from time to time (such as making all hit rating just plain hit rating instead of both mele and spell hit rating, whew!)

But since you are probably looking for spell hit rating we’ll just leave it at that and separate out the different classes so that you can find what you need without having to root through some huge table (if you can even find one that makes sense).

So here we go with Balance Druid Hit rating and caps. To keep thing simple we’ll just go straight for the kill shot and not go into some tedious explanation of combat ratings and all that other what-not. So here goes.

In order to maximize your DPS you need to get hit capped before you worry about anything else. For every 26.232 hit rating you will gain 1% DPS. There is simply no other stat that matters more until you hit the cap. Once you ARE hit capped, more is worthless and then other things become more valuable. Be sure to see our post on Making Gear Decisions For Your Toon.

So now that you know you must be hit capped to maximize your DPS, we need to talk about what the heck the hit cap is. You’ll hear two terms when people talk about the hit cap. One is the hard cap, the other is a so-called soft cap. The hard cap means that you have reached a point where more hit is worthless, the soft cap is a term used for abilities past which point have diminishing returns. There is no such thing as a soft cap for hit rating. You are either at the hard cap, or you are not capped and need to get there.

The absolute hard cap for hit is 446 Hit Rating = 17% in the tooltip

The hard cap represents the amount of hit necessary to ensure that you never miss. That means the hard cap is a 100% chance to hit any and every mob in the game. It may not seem like a big deal to have a 1% chance to miss, but if you miss on a big, fat Moonfire it will seriously erode your DPS in a big, fat hurry. Now let’s talk how to hit the hard cap without having to get to 446 hit rating from gear and gems.

We’ll start at the top and work our way down. For every one of these things you have available, your hard hit cap for spell hit drops to the next number down. Just find yourself in the list and you’ll know how much hit you need to have to be hit capped and never miss. Keep in mind that anything that adds +% chance to hit does not necessarily show up in the tooltip (like +17%), so the hit rating is a much better way of looking at things.

• Dranei or Dranei in Party – Hit Cap = 420

• Druid With Balance of Power – Hit Cap = 342

• Dranei in Party Druid with Balance of Power – Hit Cap = 315

• Druid with Balance of Power and Improved Faerie Fire – Hit Cap = 263

• Dranei in Party Druid with Balance of Power and Imp Faerie Fire – Hit Cap = 237

Keep in mind that heroic Presence is party only, so folks may be fighting to get the Dranei in their group, meaning you might not always be able to count on this buff – plus it’s a 30 yard range so on fights with a lot of movement you may be out of range for it from time to time. Your best bet is to stick with the absolute cap of 263.  It can be tough to get hit capped when you first hit 80, but later on you’ll be looking for nearly every chance you can find to dump hit for spell power or crit or just about anything else.

One more factor to consider is that many bosses will have a certain amount of resistance to one or multiple schools of magic. In the end the balancing act can be almost impossible to land precisely between just enough hit to overcome both the regular combat hit rating and any resistances a boss might have. It’s not a bad idea to just go for 263 as a Boomkin and anything above that is going to overcome a certain amount of resistances that might be present. But it would probably not be a great idea to carry around a hit rating of 350 at the expense of spell power or something else. You can get anal retentive about it if you wish and figure it out for every boss, but only if you have a lot of time to kill.

So there is hit rating for Druids made simple.  Once you get hit capped it’s far better to try to stay as close to 263 or 237 as you can (and still be over) and then use the Simcraft Engine to figure out what else you should be stacking and how much. The less hit you can get away with and still be over the cap, the more of those other DPS stats you can stack which will really bring your DPS up to Domination levels.

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Survival Build For Patch 3.3

A few weeks back we gave our readers the new top dog of hunter builds with our Marksmanship spec here: Highest Hunter DPS Build For Patch 3.3.  But just because Marks made a push past Survival in the max DPS build race certainly doesn’t mean that Survival is now an also-ran.  As a matter of fact, if you are more used to playing Survival and don’t feel like making the switch to a whole new play style, this Survival build still Dominates.  At a mere 164 DPS short of the max Marks build, this Survival spec pumps out a brutal 10,920 DPS (max theoretical).  So without further ado . . .

Gear

Sample Gear Survival Hunter Patch 3.3

Talent Builds

Survival Hunter Build Max DPS

Glyphs

Major

• Serpent Sting
• Kill Shot
• Explosive Shot

Minor

• Mend Pet
• Feign Death
• Your Choice

Priorities

1. Flask = Endless Rage
2. Food = Blackened Dragonfin
3. Hunters Mark
4. Summon Pet = Wolf
5. Auto Shot
6. Aspect of the Hawk
7. Rapid Fire
8. Kill Shot
9. Kill Command
10. Explosive Shot
11. Black Arrow
12. Serpent Sting
13. Aimed Shot
14. Steady Shot

As usual with all our build guides, this is a priority list and NOT a rotation.  You obviously cannot use kill shot until the mob is below 20% health, but it would take priority over all your other shots if the mob is below 20% health.  Keep an eye on the thread below for expert commentary from master hunters who can fill you in on all the details of a prioritized shot rotation.  It’s far less complex for hunters than DK’s and feral druids, however.  You should be able to figure the rotation out on your own based on the priority list here.

Damage Sources

Yeah, the uber geared marksman may still beat you a little in DPS, but if youre like a lot of people and loath change you can just stay survival and do just fine.  It’s too bad there isn’t a completely Dominating Beast Mastery build for raiding, but hey, you can’t have it all.  besides, the gigantuan pets tend to tick people off.  Too much stomping leads to bad blood between friends.  But this Survival spec will certainly keep pace in the latest round of top DPS wars, and we still see a lot of hunters sticking with Survival over Marks.  Good luck Dominating with your Survival hunter.

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Hit Rating For Spells And Mages Explained

There really isn’t an easy way to completely understand hit rating.  There are so many variables involved when it comes to talents, abilities, resistances, and the fact that Blizz has a tendency to change their mind from time to time (such as making all hit rating just plain hit rating instead of both mele and spell hit rating, whew!)

But since you are probably looking for spell hit rating we’ll just leave it at that and separate out the different classes so that you can find what you need without having to root through some huge table (if you can even find one that makes sense).

So here we go with Mage Hit rating and caps.  To keep thing simple we’ll just go straight for the kill shot and not go into some tedious explanation of combat ratings and all that other what-not.  So here goes.

In order to maximize your DPS you need to get hit capped before you worry about anything else.  For every 26.232 hit rating you will gain 1% DPS.  There is simply no other stat that matters more until you hit the cap.  Once you ARE hit capped, more is worthless and then spell power (up to about 4k spell power for mages) haste and crit become more valuable.  Be sure to see our post on Making Gear Decisions For Your Toon.

So now that you know you must be hit capped to maximize your DPS,  we need to talk about what the heck the hit cap is.  You’ll hear two terms when people talk about the hit cap.  One is the hard cap, the other is a so-called soft cap.  The hard cap means that you have reached a point where more hit is worthless, the soft cap is a term used for abilities past which point have diminishing returns.  There is no such thing as a soft cap for hit rating.  You are either at the hard cap, or you are not capped and need to get there.

The absolute hard cap for hit is 446 Hit Rating = 17% in the tooltip

The hard cap represents the amount of hit necessary to ensure that you never miss.  That means the hard cap is a 100% chance to hit any and every mob in the game.  It may not seem like a big deal to have a 1% chance to miss, but if you miss on a big, fat Arcane Blast for 15K it will seriously erode your DPS in a big, fat hurry.  Now let’s talk how to hit the hard cap without having to get to 446 hit rating from gear and gems.

We’ll start at the top and work our way down.  For every one of these things you have available, your hard hit cap for spell hit drops to the next number down.  Just find yourself in the list and you’ll know how much hit you need to have to be hit capped and never miss.  Keep in mind that anything that adds +% chance to hit does not necessarily show up in the tooltip (like +17%), so the hit rating is a much better way of looking at things.

• Dranei or Dranei in Party – Hit Cap = 420

• Mage with Precision OR Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 368

• Dranei or Dranei in Party Mage with Precision OR Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 342

• Arcane Mage with Precision AND Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 289

• Dranei or Dranei in Party Arcane Mage with Precision AND Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 263

There are a few levels past this if you do a lot of 25 man raids, or have just the right combination in your ten mans.  If you always run with a druid that uses improved faerie fire or a shadow priest using misery you can get by with just 210 hit rating.  And if you happen to be a Dranei or have both a Dranei AND SP/ImpFf in your raid you can do as little as 184 and be capped.

Keep in mind that heroic Presence is party only, so folks may be fighting to get the Dranei in their group, meaning you might not always be able to count on this buff – plus it’s a 30 yard range so on fights with a lot of movement you may be out of range for it from time to time.  Your best bet is to stick with the absolute cap of 289 unless you ARE a Dranei (in which case you will always be in your party and can’t get out of range without some wicked bipolar debuff) in which case you can always be safe with a hit rating of 263.

The bottom line is this.  If you are an arcane mage your basic hit cap is 289.  If you are a Dranei or always party with a Dranei your basic hit cap is 263.  Everything else is just gravy.  Now, the more gravy you get, the more hit rating you can drop in favor of other stats.  But the reality is that it’s much harder to balance staying just barely above the cap than it is to find a bunch of gear without hit on it.  It can be tough to get hit capped when you first hit 80, but later on you’ll be looking for nearly every chance you can find to dump hit for spell power or haste or just about anything else.

One more factor to consider, however is that many bosses will have a certain amount of resistance to one or multiple schools of magic.  In the end the balancing act can be almost impossible to hit precisely between just enough hit to overcome both the regular combat hit rating and any resistances a boss might have.  It’s not a bad idea to just go for 289 as a mage and anything above that is going to overcome a certain amount of resistances that might be present.  But it would probably not be a great idea to carry around a hit rating of 350 at the expense of spell power or something else.  You can get anal retentive about it if you wish and figure it out for every boss, but only if you have a lot of time to kill.

So there is hit rating for mages made simple.  If you are arcane, your goal is 289 add in Dranei and it’s 263.  Once you get hit capped it’s far better to try to stay as close to 289 or 263 as you can (and still be over) and then use the Simcraft Engine to figure out what else you should be stacking and how much.  The less hit you can get away with and still be over the cap, the more of those other DPS stats you can stack which will really bring your DPS up to Domination levels.

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The Cat Is Back In Patch 3.3

Not too long ago we did a post about feral druid cat form and had our fair share of negative feedback from the feline community.  It seems that any feral build without mangle was just not going to satisfy certain kitties with quite finicky tastes.  we promised we would revisit the build in a form that included mangle, and here it is.  It’s not going to put out as much overall DPS, but if you’re used to it it might just be better for you than the new version without Mangle.  Besides, with a max DPS of 10,913 theoretical dmg you might just find it’s plenty anyway (plus one moar button to push when face-rolling).

Gear

http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=14726081#talents

Talent Build

http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=14726081#inventory

Glyphs

Major

• Savage Roar
• Rip
• Shred

Minor

• The Wild
• Unburdened Rebirth
• Dash

As is the case with most builds, the minor glyphs are mostly up to you since none of them figure into direct DPS in any way. So if you are in love with something else feel free to use it, but these are pretty typical.

Priorities

This build does Mangle, and adding something to the priority list certainly does not make the list less complex.   It’s not nearly as bad as some DK lists with internalized rotations inside the list, but there are some conditionals you have to bear in mind. Check the thread below this post for input from the folks who do this all the time for more nuts and bolts. And remember, this is NOT a rotation, so things may seem a little out of order. It’s a priority list, so get that straight before you complain.

• Flask = Endless Rage
• Food = Hearty Rhino
• Form = Cat
• Maim (interrupt)
• Faerie Fire
• Tigers Fury (when energy is less than 40)
• Berserk (when energy is less than 90)
• Savage Roar (without SR buff)
• Savage Roar (With 5 combo points on target and Rip has more than 6 seconds left)
• Shred (to extend Rip when Rip has less than 4 seconds)
• Rip (when at 5 combo points to debuff target)
• Ferocious Bite (when combo points are at max and target has less than 6 seconds to die)
• Ferocious Bite (at 5 combo points and rip has more than 10 seconds left)
• Mangle
• Rake (unless the target will die in less than ten seconds)
• Shred (if you have more than 70 energy)
• Shred (when Omen of Clarity procs)
• Shred (when combo points are below 4 and rip has less than 3 seconds left)
• Shred (if the target will die in less than ten seconds)
• Shred (if Berserk is still active)

Damage Sources

Remember that according to the wikki simulcraft engine, this build Feral Druid Spec Pwns Face WITHOUT using Mangle does 214 more DPS than a mangle rotation. And the build above is the Mangle inclusive build everyone yowled for.  Either way you want to go , it turns out that a well-played cat really does Dominate.

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Win A Little Swag And See Your Toon Enshrined On DYS

You may have noticed that we are updating our class pages to link to all the specs we’ve been posting.  In the interest of making things look a little better around here what we really need is a few good pictures of each class in action.

Now, Law could go and do them all (at least one level 80 of every class, except Lock and Rogue) but we know how picky you guys can be.  It just wouldn’t do to have pics of, say, my pathetic little Paladin in crud gear posing as Dominating.  But we know that not only do our regular readers have some seriously geared toons, they also have a good eye for the artistic.

A while back during the Midsummer festival event we had a little screenshot contest:  Screenshot Contest, The Votes Are In.  First place went to the lovely Fran Molina who submitted the fantastic shot below.  Boy, does 18 months seem like a really long time ago.  We’ve come a long way at DYS since then, but one thing hasn’t changed, our readers still Dominate.

It’s time to show off your skills once again.  We need you to get on your mains and snag some killer screenies of your toon in action.  We’ll all vote on the best of the best and your screenshot will be featured on our class pages.  The grand prize will be a $50.00 gift certificate to J!nx, where you can get some killer swag for your sweetie (or yourself if you’re like that) for Valentine’s day (if everyone hurries).  Second and third place will get WoW time cards so you can play free for a while.

Maybe it’s a pic of you doing the Captain Morgan leg-up on Arthas.  Perhaps it’s your toon in Mimiron’s head or some other wicked flying mount you bagged.  Anything and everything we’ll put up for a vote.  But one thing is for sure, we need some truly Dominating pics for each class.  Voting begins when we have at least one screenshot of each class (so hurry up) and then we’ll post them all for voting.

So get those screenshots submitted in the next few days and we’ll find out who gets to have their toon be the spokesperson for their class right here at DYS.

Send your screenshots to editor@dominateyourserver.com with the subject line “class screenshot”

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Change Of Pace Build For Mages In Patch 3.3

When all you’ve got is a two button rotation, things can get a little dull.  And at least with the build below you can go right from leveling directly to raiding for at least part of the time.  You might still want to go arcane on Boss fights, but the frost spec has a little more utility on trash.  It’s an idea anyway.  I actually keep this frost spec on my mage for doing dailies and just random 1v1 killings.  In the long run it’s not going to rival the top DPS builds, but it can keep you from going completely numb in the brain from face-rolling arcane.  You can see our Arcane spec here: Arcane Mage Build.

Gearing Example

Frost Mage Gear Early Patch 3.3

Talent Build

Frost Mage Talents For Patch 3.3

Glyphs

Major

• Frostbolt
• Water Elemental
• Molten Armor

Minor

• Your choice – has no impact on DPS so suit yourself

Priorities

1. Flask = Frost Wyrm
2. Food = Fish Feast
3. Water Elemental
4. Arcane Brilliance
5. Focus Magic
6. Counterspell (Spell Interrupt)
7. Icy Veins
8. Mana Gem
9. Speed Potion
10. Deep Freeze
11. Frostbolt (when Target is frozen)
12. Fireball (when Brain Freeze is up)
13. Cold Snap
14. Mirror Image
15. Frostbolt
16. Evocation
17. Ice Lance (when Target is frozen)
18. Fire Blast (when moving)
19. Ice Lance (when moving)

Damage Sources

When you are leveling you might drop a few points into Frosbite, Imp. Blizzard and permafrost, but its not really necessary.  Once you get the perma pet you blow stuff up so fast that slowing them down is a little bit of overkill.  It’s about 1,00 DPS less than arcane, but should have more utility for trash pulls, and more buttons to push on Bosses, although using this for progression kills is hardly recommended.  But if you are looking for a change of pace from time to time as an off spec, this frost build is about as Dominating as it gets outside of Arcane.

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Not Just A Raid Buff For 25’s Any More – Shadow Holds Its Own In 3.3

Another class that gets the short end of the PvE stick because of how OP they can be in PvP is the priest.  One little change to keep these guys from melting every face in arenas and they get a little worthless for PvE – again.  But the interesting thing about 3.3 is that there doesn’t really seem to be any class that is just completely on the bottom of the pile.  Almost every class has at least one spec in the 10k range, and the priset is now no exception.

Gear

Shadow Priest Example Gear Setup

Talent Build

Shadow Spec DPS Build

Glyphs

Major

• Shadow Word: Pain
• Mind Flay
• Shadow

Minor

• Fortitude
• Fading
• Levitate

(As per usual; the minor glyphs are quite a matter of personal preference since they have little or nothing to do with DPS in most cases).

Priorities

1. Flask = Frost Wyrm
2. Food = Fish Feast
3. Fortitude
4. Divine Spirit
5. Inner Fire
6. Shadow Form
7. Vampiric Embrace
8. Potion of Speed
9. Shadow Fiend
10. Shadow Word: Pain
11. Vampiric Touch
12. Devouring Plague
13. Mind Blast
14. Mind Flay
15. Shadow Word: Death (if moving)
16. Dispersion

Damage Sources

Remember to run your own numbers to get your Pawn scales for your current toon.  Plus, re-run your scales in the engine every time you get a new piece of gear so that you are always completely up-to-date when it comes to making gear choices.  We show you how to do that in the Article Making Gear Choices For Your Character. It’s been so freakin’ long since Law did shadow (think leveling with Sherpaman before WotLK as in this article: The Solo Priest; You Can Do It! and The Lawbringer Rules ) that I won’t even attempt to give you insight into the priorities here, you’ll have to get that from the thread below.

But at least at this point the shadow priest is more than just a decent addition to a 25 man raid, they can actually be a big contributor on an individual basis in the form of some seriously massive, and quite Dominating, DPS of their own.

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