Question about your DPS - WoW

So, i dinged 85 with all of my 5 toons a few days ago and noticed the "You need a higher item lvl to enter this dungeon - 329 required." for Heroics, so i decided to do some AH shopping and a few 85 normal runs.

Shortly after i got my 329 minimum i went to do the(pre patch), said to be easy, Vortex Pinnacle.
Simply put, i got raped by the first boss. It was all easy and so, but when he had about 500 000 - 1 million hp left i found myself starved on mana on all of my toons..

So question is, when did you start doing heroics successfully, without getting oom before the combat is even near to finish?

Is there any "advice" on how much mana / sp / dps etc. i should have before i start?

What team combo are you running?
With my shammies it was terrible at first, using thunderstorm whenever it was available helped a lot for the mana regen. I also had 1 resto shammie, so manatide totem did some help.
Level your rep up to max so you can get the neck from Wildhammer (or Horde eq), same for the other reputation gear, it is worth it imho.

Currently playing as follow..

1 Protection Paladin
1 Resto Druid
1 Destruction Warlock(considering going Affliction for better regen temporarily)
1 Elemental Shaman
1 Fire Mage

elementals are in a very bad spot as far as mana goes. I would recommend dropping some dps and using more lightning bolt maybe?
Affliction wouldn't be a bad way to go as far as mana regen goes
As for the mage...I've heard frost is also viable...I don't know how true that is.

I wish I could give more advice, other than grab some better gear. I know the people that are clearing heroics are doing it with higher level gear than would otherwise be necessary.

I can't comment much further without speaking out my ass.

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Originally Posted by isthisspam

As for the mage...I've heard frost is also viable...I don't know how true that is.

I can't comment much further without speaking out my ass.

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I am actually considering replacing my mage with a shadowpriest, with the recent buff to power word shield + additional healing(HoT alike) + Shackle and mind control(especially mind control) makes up for the loss of sheep. AoE fear with Glyph would work like Frost Nova(even better since mobs can't keep hitting you.

And i probably won't need to give them much attention on many encounters, like with affliction warlock..

The concern is whether i lose tons of dps on this or not, and if it's really worth it..

Should i be using my mana tide totem instead of healing totem? It doesn't provide much mana, so for survival i assume healing totem is better?

What kind of dps are you doing? How much mana do you have? Or rather, when you started heroics?

In regards to Frost Mage,

Maybe it's just me but with all procs they got and considering bosses cannot be frozen, so you are dependant on Fingers of Frost to proc continuesly, making it a pure RnG for us?

From time to time I have been running all my shaman as resto.

It's slower to kill, but it's much safer - so less deaths and no down time (so it is faster moving from mob to mob), and they never have mana issues spamming lightning bolt.

4 x riptide, 4 x imp heal stream totems and earthshield on the tank make him robust to not usually both with actual heals. However I use the quick heal x 4 if he ever needs a top up - doesn't affect mana much as it goes back up shortly after.

I used this setup to kill Onyxia as I was running out of mana with Ele spec.

I've used it in Grim Batol, Halls of Origination etc.. (unfortunately still need ilvl for heroics) and it makes things quite calm - no panic ! I had to switch back to Ele for bosses that needed to go down much quicker though.

Ele spec should never run oom on a single target fight. If you go oom then you do something wrong. The problem I think is that almost every macro I've seen here uses chain lightning. Which is both stupid from a dps perspective and from a mana perspective.

Even more so as of this patch, where your mastery can proc rolling thunder.

I went in there fresh with my shammies at eighty five, and the resto totally ran out of mana before the boss died. It took a little more gear to get the group up in sta enough that healing wasn't near as required. I was also spamming heals like Woltk until I realized that nobody needed to be completely topped off and to give the heal totems time to work their magic between his tornado collapses. I remember I even called in a real shaman healer to try and help me get it down and he ran out of mana as well in fresh quest blues and greens.

Side note, that dungeon got a little buffed on Tuesday and I haven't been in there since so it might not be as easy as it was for us coming up a month ago.

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Originally Posted by zenga

Ele spec should never run oom on a single target fight. If you go oom then you do something wrong. The problem I think is that almost every macro I've seen here uses chain lightning. Which is both stupid from a dps perspective and from a mana perspective.

Even more so as of this patch, where your mastery can proc rolling thunder.

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Not quite sure what that would be, as i would be doing wrong then.
Although i do not go oom on normal encounters, and after i reforged and enchanted my gear i tend to stay quite high up on my shaman at all times, still having mana issues on resto druid and mage though. :(

Figured after reviewing my recount meter that i am overhealing like a truck, but it's hard to optimize a sequence healing macro that will not overheal most of the times.. :cool:

My suggestion would be to run the 3 normal 85 instances and see if you do well. Once you can steamroll all of them, then start trying heroics. Remember that the ilvl 329 is the absolute minimum to enter a Heroic. I have about 333 average now and I still have some trouble in normal instances. I'm not going to bother with heroics until I can mow through normals.

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Originally Posted by Bollwerk

My suggestion would be to run the 3 normal 85 instances and see if you do well. Once you can steamroll all of them, then start trying heroics. Remember that the ilvl 329 is the absolute minimum to enter a Heroic. I have about 333 average now and I still have some trouble in normal instances. I'm not going to bother with heroics until I can mow through normals.

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^^ good call. I got spanked when I first queued for heroics after meeting the iLvl requirements. After a week or so of getting some rep and normals down I was able to put SFK, VP on farm. A week after that BRC/ Deadmines also on farm. Gearing makes a big difference.

I would also suggest getting Revered rep with the factions that have gear upgrades for your toons while doing normals. HoO is a great normal for rep since it has 7 bosses, not much trash and the trash is easier than GB trash.

I was also running out of mana on my resto druid. The problem was overuse of rejuvenation. So I changed my heal macros to these, and haven't had any mana issues since.
#1 (mostly for tank heals)

/castsequence reset=target lifebloom, lifebloom, lifebloom, nil
/castsequence reset=target regrowth, nourish, nourish

#2 (more like the oh shit button, since Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch probably isn't worth talenting).

/castsequence reset=target rejuvenation, healing touch, healing touch, healing touch, healing touch
/cast swiftmend

I use both of these on my mouse with Vuhdo, and spam Wild Growth along with my dps.

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Originally Posted by Cyphoner

Not quite sure what that would be, as i would be doing wrong then.
Although i do not go oom on normal encounters, and after i reforged and enchanted my gear i tend to stay quite high up on my shaman at all times, still having mana issues on resto druid and mage though. :(

Figured after reviewing my recount meter that i am overhealing like a truck, but it's hard to optimize a sequence healing macro that will not overheal most of the times.. :cool:

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The way I understand it is that your dps shaman is running oom, right? My comment was based on ele shaman alone. So without knowing your rotation / macro, my wild guess is that you either ...

- use chain lightning in your standard rotation vs single targets, which is a mana sink and should be avoided
- you clip a lot of flame shocks, so you might wanna evaluate your timing
- you off heal with the ele, which is not meant to be unless in oh shit situations for a few heals, but either way ele healing = oom; even with the very best gear available
- you are not specced into rolling thunder? since patch it even gives mana back from mastery procs
- you renew 'all 4 totems' while only 1 needs to be renewed (e.i. searing totems); dropping 4 totems at once has a heavy mana cost
- you don't make enough use of thunderstorm enough, if you don't want the knock back you can glyph it (bot major and minor, to decrease cd and to get higher mana return)

really i'm raiding with ele shaman, and I can't recall a single situation where i ran oom, not even when I was starting up in heroics. not even on a fight like magmaw where i was casting earthquake on adds all the time or al'akir where i kept up myself in P3 getting debuff and still maintained my dps. and with yesterdays change it's even easier to keep mana up as ele.