Fel

It's worth noting that due to the loot system, over time the base ~850 ilvl requirement will become obsolete. Even casual players will be picking up welfare loot that allows them to easily explore the new content eventually. I think people react negatively to the idea of attunements in general, and it's primarily because, as Blainie said, there's an attitude of entitlement to the WoW population now. Although Blizzard has certainly diversified and retuned content to be more accessible to the casual player base, there is still a spectrum of content available and by its nature, some of it w

This is the crux of it. Regarding your earlier comment, I can see what you mean in the guide, but I suppose it could be construed as ambiguous (in the sense that it implies that faster chaos bolts are good). You are correct however, I carried that assumption further than the guide implied, entirely my error. Thankfully, there are these awesome forums to come and check yourself on :D It'd be interesting to know how the math shapes up on this. I supposed you'd be comparing how much of an extra Chaos Bolt 3 Backdraft-hasted Incinerates buys you, against an unmodified Chaos bolt's damage. The

Hahah, Affliction was my passion and my main spec back when I locked in late Cata/early MoP. I went Destro for WoD because I didn't like the affliction changes, and also because I was going to trial in my friend's guild and Destro at the start of WoD looked like the strongest spec. Sadly, I didnt get to stay on the lock, or I'd like be fulltime affliction now. As it stand, Destro is all I have my bars (and brain) configured for so far this xpac. I tried affliction for Twins in an LFR once a few weeks ago, I need a few days of practice to even start to perform. Just dont have the time *tsun

Er... So I chastised myself for failing to read, and went to brush up on it, and I actually found the bit on info that had me using Chaos Bolts on Backdraft. It's in the Icy Veins guide. >< So that should either get an update, or the info provided by Paracel is incorrect. I'll do my own testing to see what's right ( I have a pretty solid feeling Para is right, it makes sense), but perhaps the guide should get a small update or note of some kind, if this is proven theory crafting :D No criticism of the guides, they're great, just giving you all a heads up. Thanks, Fel

Gotcha. the # of casts differential is because he's spending all his Backdraft procs on Incinerate. Horribly embarrassing but I.. did not know that that was a DPS loss. In fact, I had thought the opposite and was making every attempt TO use Backdraft on Chaos bolts :S. Before you throw me (deservingly) under a bus, I did a TON of reading when the xpac first hit and I was warlocking as main. Somewhere in between there and my forced switch back to Holy Paladin, I must've forgotten/misremembered that piece of information. Unless that actually changed at some point in the last 6 weeks, in whic

Hi Icy Veins crew, I'm scratching my head over something here. I've been under-performing my personal expectations for my DPS on single target fights. I'm a reasonably competent warcraftlogs user, and looked into what other people were doing to see what I might be doing wrong... I came up empty. I conducted a few tests and couldnt find anything, but then I lucked out and got a direct competitor in a heroic HM PuG run. I do hope he/she isnt unhappy with my referencing him/her here. This is me: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/malganis/Felturd/advanced- ilvl 659 This is him:

I think it depends on your assignment Omaric, and your group's capabilities. From the perspective of getting the boss down, I think the GCDs to maintain corruptions on the offtargets are not offset by increased primary-boss DPS from shadow trance procs. You'd be better served (or your raid would) by simply having you perform an optimal single-target rotation on the boss. This is conjecture however, and something that you can test yourself. Get skada, open multiple windows to display damage taken and enemy damage taken, and then mouseover when Kaolan is about to die and check your damage done t

I'd advise against leveling as Holy unless you really like to take your time and experience the content (I have lots of respect for that style of play, but it's a dying breed nowadays). If you are looking to keep yourself prepped so that you aren't utterly unprepared for Holy at 90, you can do what I've done with all my heal capable toons, and dual-spec as soon as possible, then heal dungeons for fun and experience as soon as it's possible. As many in the thread have already mentioned, there's not very much cross-over between end-game healing and leveling healing (even in dungeons), so I'd dis

Not completely, you still want a max burn phase out of those powered-up DoTs, but you also want zero downtime. Essentially, refresh UA with <~2 secs left, refresh corruption as close to 0secs as you can, and Agony as close to 0 as well. In pratice, it will tend to work out that you can be MGing right up til each of those DoTs come off, and remember that each tick of MG also procs that powered DoT, so it's extremely beneficial to keep it running as long as you can. If you're feeling cocky and have good latency, you can refresh Agony right as it displays '0' secs and it will still retain its

The guide recommendation for 2-heal was made at a time when most guilds progressing were nowhere near ilvl 495, and thus the capability to 2-heal the fight (very manageable) vs the capability to 5-dps it (VERY tight enrage timer, such that if you do a little search, you'll see that the first few guilds to down the fight had to class-stack to manage it), made 2-healing the sensible recommendation. Speaking from the 2-heal perspective (having started from an ilvl value when this was 'non-optional' for most groups), but having tried both, it's barely more complicated. De-synchronizing totems fro

Hi Guapo, Based on a cursory inspection of your logs and gear, you are performing in line with expectations. CD usage, uptimes etc, all are accrate/adequate. Ret scales stupidly with: 1) Weapon 2) 4-piece tier If you obtain either of those (your weapon is good, lucky find, but you'll get stomped by someone with a 489 or higher) you'll see a huge increase in your DPS. Until then, increases will be very incremental. If you are fidning yourself lacking in direct comparisons to other retters, it's likely they have one or the other of thesse two things, or just a substantially higher over

This is pretty cool, I've been waiting for you to jump into another spec ever since I fell in love with your affliction guides/theorycrafting here. I've dabbled in the other two specs but have not had time (I main changed to lock only recently, so even affliction from a heroic progression perspective is still fairly novel) to really learn them thoroughly. Good luck and have fun with the change if you do decide to take it on. I'm sure I'll follow along in some capacity but I'm more than likely to stick with affliction unless they nerf it into oblivion. Might even appreciate the challenge of n

I only have limited experience so far, and on 10man so it may not be of much use. What I've discovered so far is, it's critical to have the debuff uptime on the boss (and ideally on the protector you choose to DPS) as much as possible. From checking logs and watching vids, guilds doing this well have a player with a reasonable number of stacks (5+, anywhere up to 16 or so) on the boss the moment she becomes attackable. I attempted this with 2 players stacking only, and while we had it roughly nailed down (there wasn't a set rotation order, just whomever had highest stacks at any given time wa

There have been some great moments in both Cata and MoP with my raid teams, all of which made me proud and gave me a sense of accomplishment, but in terms of screaming my head off/requring change of panties, the following will stick with me forever I think: (VoA) Earth, Wind and Fire, 10 man, current, server first (ToC) Scarab King, 10 man, current, server first (Ulduar) Firefighter (Mimiron 'hard mode'), 10man, current, server first (Ulduar) Algalon/Glory of the Ulduar Raider, 10man, current, server second Wrath was an amazing expansion for me. We were raiding 25man officially, but had a

Reapply them manually. Fel Flame, although a tempting alternative, has been loosely proven to be a DPS loss in almost all circumstances, including the one you've suggested above. I'd recommend reading through the forum posts on the lock forums here for tips and tricks on general locking. Regarding openers, I've found that the highest *initial* burst is: T-1: Pre-pot/Haunt T0: CoE T1: DS:M/SB:SS MG until Haunt is @ 1 sec: all procs have now occured SB:SS to get all DoTs @ max buff Haunt Doomguard while haunt is in the air MG while maintaining haunt as much as soul shards will allow, an