[Balance] Need help with Spoils/Heroic Spoils

[wheels29 0]

Hi, my guild recently downed Heroic Spoils but I think that I was not contributing enough. I have always had problems doing a good amount of damage on Spoils as balance, but I really feel that I need to improve this. I'm starting the fight at 75 eclipse, almost at lunar, holding cooldowns for big boxes, multidotting but not redotting, but I'm never using hurricane. I've really been struggling, and any help would be appreciated. My logs are here http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=3161&e=3657

Edited August 19, 2014 by wheels29

[Pinkis 12]

Hello fellow boomkin! I can give you some tips for heroic spoils, although I'm not top boomkin and I'm raiding 10man, but you may find something usefull.

As we did spoils on 10 man we spit our dps into 2 groups of 1 melee and 2 ranged. I've been in a same group as ele shammy, so I left aoe stuff to him, and what I did myself was focusing on killing sparks. What I've found usefull was getting into eclipse, spamming eclipsed dot on 5~ targets and then moving to another eclipse. Doing so I was able to have a starsurge proc for almost every spark, and as adds have a decent amount of healts my dots did quite lot of damage. In the end of the fight I've dealt same amount of damage as ele shammy.

 

For start of the fight I did same as you. Getting 75 eclipse power to lunar, using starfall just as tank gets to pandaren box, then casting starsurge at the pandaren, dotting him, dotting the second pandaren, using ss procs/casting starfire and refreshing starfall as soon as it was out. If I didn't mess up or get stunned I was reaching ~800k dps on pandas.

 

Also talk to your healers. As this encounter can get a bit healing intense, expecially at third big box, your healers may appreciate HoTW + tranq combo, and maybe even a couple of rejuvs for the raid.

 

As you can see I haven't mentioned using hurricane a single time, as I did not use it at all. There are classes better at aoe, especially when mobs are moving a lot. Boomkin is strong at single target spells so use them to get down priority targets (sparks, urns, kuchongs and etc.) and leave aoe to aoe classes. That's my strategy for this.

[Kazistrasz 216]

Spoils is a crap fight for the way Boomkins are built right now. It's not much about you; it's just the way Blizz designed the spec. For Boomkin to function, you have to be nearly constantly casting single-target, hard-cast spells, and you have to keep DoTs going. Spoils poses a problem with this, for a few reasons:

 

A ) Stuff you frequently have to move out of or away from.

B ) Things have so little HP they can easily die mid-cast, wasting your cast time.

C ) Things have so little HP, they die before your DoTs can get most of their ticks in.

D ) Insert every mechanic of the fight here because it's just a garbage fight.

 

It's not a great fight for anyone besides warlocks that can use Shadowfury to never run out of embers and cast boatloads of Chaos Bolts.

 

Things that should help you:

 

• Only throw DoTs on medium and large box targets, and only when they are at full or near-full HP. If they're at 50%, they're going to die before your DoTs get enough ticks in to have been worth casting.
• Switch targets so that you never or rarely stop casting your single-target spells. This keeps your Eclipses cycling and keeps your Nature's Grace uptime as high as possible.
• Avoid casting spells at low-HP targets if you can to avoid the mob dying mid-cast. This wastes precious time you need to spend cycling and maximizing Nature's Grace uptime.
• Don't use Hurricane/Astral Storm ever.
• Save CDs for bigger boxes when you know you'll get the full use out of them.
• Plant yourself where you can minimize movement. Find a place in the middle of the room where you'll be in range of every box so you don't have to chase things around.

 

When we're concerned about maximizing our damage performance, try to avoid having to stop DPSing to heal. Yes, and HOTW Tranq is a lot of healing, but it's a MAJOR hit to your damage. Even at high haste when you can get the channel to 6 seconds, it's awful. That's 6 seconds that you're not casting, cycling your Eclipse, and refreshing Nature's Grace. Spoils isn't that hard to heal, to be honest. The only hard part are the Mogu bosses if no one kills the statues. Tell the healers to put their big boy underpants on if they want your help on that fight.

[Pinkis 12]

Yay, what I've said was pretty much right ^.^

 

About healing - I use tranq, because as we progressed through the fight people were making mistakes putting unnecessary pressure for healer. Due to that he was constantly using CDs on 1st and 2nd boses (on matid side), and as we entered mogu side ant started doing 1st boss it was a huge risk that someone would die from aoe so I just offered to help with tranq. I prefer lower dps but dead boss to higher dps and wipe :)

[Kazistrasz 216]

The mantid bosses don't bring much damage, just constant pressure. They really shouldn't merit spending CDs. As a healer, they're really not that bad until you get picked for bombs. If you're doing mantid first, you're not running out of range/LOS of people to drop them, so worst case scenario is to tell your side to eat a cookie or hit a personal.

 

Dead bosses are good, but killing the heaviest-hitting bosses quicker minimizes healer stress. Using a single GCD to activate a ghetto healing CD (or NS macro) is one thing, but completely gutting your DPS by stopping the most important part of your rotation for 8 seconds is something you should be trying to avoid at all costs.

[wheels29 0]

Thank you for the advice guys, it's very helpful and I will look to use it on my next kill!