Help with low Balance dps

[Hyodra 0]

I've posted here in Mists, and as soon as I got a hang on things, everything changed and now it looks like I'm having trouble again.

 

My opener is as follows: prepot three seconds before the pull, starfire, Celestial Alignment, Incarnation, Moonfire, Starsurge, Starfirex2, Starsurge, Starfire (once or twice), and then Moonfire again. After that I'm ping ponging back and forth between eclipses.

 

I feel like I've got the general rotation down, but I still seem to be underperforming. Is there anything I could be doing to improve my damage? My output is not nearly as high as it should be with my gear. Any help would be greatly appreciated! :D

 

Link to armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kilrogg/Hyodra/advanced

 

Link to logs:

 

• Latest Imperator heroic attempts
• All Highmaul fights this month

[Rabbidpikey 0]

Im still learning massively with my Balance, but the one thing i notice straight away is your DoT's...

 

Moonfire and Sunfire, neither of them are very good uptimes...59% and 61%

From what i have read and learnt... is intially there dps is low, but there DoT over the whole fight is quite a big benefactor of your overall fight's DPS

 

someone who knows more please tell me if im right or wrong.

 

After watching the replay on log's i noticed around the 1 minute 30 sec mark you lose Moonfire on the Boss,

Edited December 22, 2014 by Rabbidpikey

[Randytaylor 1]

Make a CA macro like so:

#showtooltip

/cast Celestial Alignment

/cast Berserking

/cast Nature's Vigil

/cast Moonfire

 

If you need to activate a trinket you throw /use 13 or 14, wherever you have it.

 

When countdown is at 2 you Incarn,at 1 you pre-pot, at pull you use the CA macro.

 

(2..)Incarnation > (1..)Pre-pot > (Pull)CA macro > Starsurge > Starfire> etc.

 

If it's a multi target fight off the opener like twins you can do Balance of Power instead of Euphoria and instead of Starsurge you would use Starfall for the opener. You should only Starfall if there is 2 or more targets if you're lunar side, 3 or more if you're solar side. This works for me, I've read guides from a bunch of boomkins and I've applied and molded it into my rotation.

 

One of the most important things, I can't stress enough, is keeping moonfire and sunfire up, but not only maintaining 99% uptime if possible, but making sure if the target you last casted moonfire/sunfire on died, you reapplied it to a living target, preferably one that is going to be alive for a bit.

 

If you're using Euphoria you can usually keep moonfire up by casting it at lunar peak and just doing solarfire either at the beginning of solar phase, or towards the end of solar peak, preferably at the end of solar peak. If you aren't using Euphoria then you will have to reapply the dot at the start of a phase and end of a phase, you do not have to worry about doing it at the peak, it's not even a noticeable increase or loss in dps. It really doesn't matter.

 

For imperator there's certain things that need to die pronto, and you can line your Incarnation and CA up for these easily. The first time the warmages come out, and the transition with the reaver. On the reaver phase, your guild needs to decide if you need to kill the reaver or mage(s) first. It'll be up to whether your tanks or heals are better equipped which will decide this.

 

The main thing of this fight for ranged is not setting off mines, and focusing down your priority targets. The branded stacks should be really payed attention to during the distortion phase because if you tunnel for a second and there's a mine and you get branded on you that can be nasty. This will just come down to the raid's comfort level of the fight, there's only so much you can do as a ranged and the real crucial stuff will rely on the tanks. All you have to do is avoid stuff and do damage. You should be using displacer beast during the distortion force nova. Just do your normal damage and as the force nova gets closer you back up a little and just hit displacer beast, immediately switch to moonkin form and get back to your place.

 

Seems like you take way too much damage from force nova when you can completely avoid it up to the last phase. And you guys should be popping anomalies with healing cds. When you upgrade your weapon that'll be a nice boost, I suggest getting the shattered hand enchant on your weapon for now it's literally one crystal from the garrison enchanters study if you have it.

[Kazistrasz 216]

Hi and Merry Christmas!

 

Thank you for bringing logs and trying to seriously increase your DPS!

 

I'll take a look at your logs tomorrow and see where your gaps all.

[Kazistrasz 216]

Sorry I'm a day late!

 

I'm looking at the last wipe on Imperator, from the pull up until you died (0:00 to 7:27)

 

Since you died, we're going to cover your survivability first:

 

Most of your damage taken is something you can't avoid being hit by - adds exploding when they die.  However, you can do a lot more to reduce that damage or help cover healing.

 

You used Barkskin once throughout the entire fight, for a Force Nova near the end.  Thats it.  Barkskin has a one-minute cooldown. You shouldn't use it on cooldown, but there's enough damage being taken that it's inexcusable to only have used it once. There were many opportunities to reduce incoming damage using it, ESPECIALLY when you were popping all the little adds coming out of the intermission. That right there was more than a fifth of all the damage you took in the fight, and you could have taken a significant chunk out of that.

 

You never used a health potion or a healthstone.  There's no reason not to use those, especially in an emergency situation. When you died, a healthstone *could* have made up the difference to save you, depending on how many more ticks of Force Nova you were planning on taking.

 

You took Nature's Grace as your T6 talent, and you used it right off the bat and almost immediately after coming off cooldown three minutes into the fight.  NV is no longer any sort of DPS gain, so don't use it like that.  Wait until there's a period where you'll be taking damage that you'll be able to single target through.  Perhaps the best places for this are during intermissions. You've got a lot of damage going out through the fixates that can benefit from this.  Also, since you won't detract from your ability to do Single Target, when it comes time to burst the small adds you can simply turn on Starfall, hit them with a Sunfire, and then blast through the boss/little adds individually to also provide additional raid healing.  It's not a huge amount, but it helps.

 

You're using Displacer Beast, but you could use it more effectively.  It's two GCDs to use, so for small bits of movement (like moving from mines), you shouldn't use it.  The best use for a fight like Imperator is to completely bypass Force Nova.  Wait until it's right in front of you. You'll pop out completely past it and take no damage, the same way I on my warlock drop my circle to teleport past it. Force Nova doesn't hit you once.  It hits you as long as any part of that graphic is touching any part of your hit box.  In your death, you took 23 hits from Force Nova over the course of 5 seconds. A good use of Displacer Beast could have prevented that entire wave from hitting you. Even if you can't use Displacer Beast for being on cooldown during Replication when you get Force Nova in sets of three, you should stop everything you're doing to run through them.  If your guild doesn't have planned uses for Stampeding Roar, you can use that and reduce the time your entire raid has to spend moving through the nova.

 

Now, onto your DPS:

 

When you look at just the part of the fight you were alive for, your DoT uptimes are actually pretty good - 93% and 97%.  Sunfire could be a little bit better.

 

You're using your cooldowns when they're available, so you're not losing out DPS by letting them waste. You also do good at using Inc before you use CA so that you don't waste that GCD. This is a classic mistake for learning boomkins, and you avoid it. You can macro CA and Berserking together, but I strongly recommend against macroing anything else in there, especially a raid-healing cooldown like NV. Don't macro it specifically to Moonfire, because during a fight you'll often want to not be using Moonfire immediately when you activate CA.

 

Your opener isn't perfect, but it isn't horrible.  Use Inc before your pre-cast Starfire.  Don't use it after.  Pop all of your CDs for that Moonfire.  However, there's no reason to use your Nature's Vigil immediately at the start of the fight - wait until there's actually some damage going on. Your second Moonfire needs to go off before CA ends, you missed that by 0.6 seconds, meaning that last Starfire should have been Moonfire instead.  This helps with uptime on Sunfire.

 

The not good part of this, so far, is that I don't see any trinket buffs. You have Shards and a stat stick, so I should at least be seeing Shards. I also don't see any sort of weapon proc. Make sure you're using your trinket (use it on CD; don't save it for CA), and enchant your weapon.

 

Now, the biggest tell of problems playing boomkin these days are getting good use of Starsurge charges. You cast Starfall 8 times and Starsurge 27 times, for a total of 35 charge uses.  We want to see a number close to that for your potential available charges.  You begin with 3 charges.  For a 7:27 fight, you had enough time for it to recharge 14 times. To go with this, you had 27 charges proc from Shooting stars. So, you had a total availability of 44 charges, meaning you're 9 short.  Put simply, you're letting yourself cap out.  Look at the rotation section of my guide (pinned at the top of the druid forums) on when you should be using Starsurge.

 

All together:

 

Your DPS is doing okay without going into fight-specifics about maximizing based on adds. But, your survival skills are abysmal. Great boomkin raiders like Lappe (of <Paragon>) aren't great just because they maximize their DPS, but because they also can minimize incoming damage and maximize their utility to the raid by finding every possible way to make their class work for the fight. This is the area you need to work on the hardest.

[Hyodra 0]

Thank you for all the detailed feedback!

 

I'm currently using Euphoria, but for the fights in the log posted on December I was actually using Balance of Power. A guildy of mine suggested that it might be a dps increase over BoP, and so far I've noticed an improvement (although it might also just be more gear).

 

And thank you very very much for pointing out the lack of trinket procs! I'd actually macroed one of my old on-use trinkets to Berserking along with Nature's Vigil and completely failed to update the macro when I got a new on-use trinket. *facepalm* I'll find a keybind for the trinket alone as well, since you're right: the trinket cd doesn't align with Inc or CA anyway.

 

I've been using HotW for all my time in Mists. Now that it's useless in raids, I wasn't all too confident when I should be using Nature's Vigil--I figured it wouldn't hurt too much to macro it to my big dps cds so I wouldn't end up neglecting to use it entirely. I'll try to be smarter with my NVs in the future. I can't say much for the healthstones/potions, I'm afraid. Quite often our RL will call for us to use them at once at the same time as a healer cooldown, although I'm not always sure if or when they will be called in any given fight. Unless it's an emergency, I tend to wait for the order. My Barkskin usage is definitely very poor, though, and I'm going to try to use it at a lot more key moments when the unavoidable damage starts to pile on high.

 

As for Displacer Beast, I've already been using it to bypass Force Nova; I can certainly work on my timing so that I take fewer Nova ticks as I blink, but on the attempt with the buttload of Force Nova hits, derping/straight up raid awareness was more of the issue. My guild's strat for Branded in the later phases is to run out to drop it on designated 4-stack Branded targets (our warlocks). I was unintentionally chasing the Force Nova damage wave in an attempt to get close to them, and didn't notice I was moving with the damaging hitbox... *double facepalm* In addition to that, on many, if not most of those pulls, our raid leader would call for a wipe when someone failed the Branded mechanic and didn't get to our designated targets fast enough, so I would purposefully stand in mines and chase Force Nova to die faster (no dagger anymore). I  apologise... I really should've mentioned that in the initial post.

Edited January 1, 2015 by Hyodra