@ the recent nerfs...Follow

so after the hotfix yesterday bringing JotW down to 15% and SoC/JoC down by 20% I did Kara and ZA yesterday evening... I realize we haven't seen all the extent of the nerfs. we'll soon see a buff from the change from 20% crit damage to 10% total damage on judge, CS and DS. at about 40% crit rate including all raid buffs the crit damage was a boost of 8% (.4 * .2 = .08) on these 3 abilities. this will be a boost of 10%. then we'll see 25% crit damage turn into a 40% bleed over 8 seconds from crits. this is supposed to be a buff according to blizz but only will be if it stacks... which would lead to rediculously large DoTs ticking away over time...

so using SotM yesterday I figured I was probably seeing pretty close to the DPs numbers i'll see after all the nerfs hit. depennding on the bleed it might be a little lower than what I saw yesterday. I have about 2200 AP and 30% crit unbuffed and didn't notice what I had buffed. overall I did almost 1500 DPS through the 2 raids and used about 10 mana biscuits (about what my holy pally uses). the next 2 dpsers were both Hunters with maybe kara gear and some badge gear. my gear leaves me only one upgrade in ZA and mostly I need BT/SWP for upgrades. I only mention that to say it felt about right being 400-600 dps ahead of the hunters. the only toon I felt should have competed was our mage, but he was behind the hunters. the hunters were Ximera and Positidren and I was on my ret Camila if you're interested in our gear. Ximera averaged 1100 dps over the 2 raids and Posi was at just over 900. the mage and a few others were right behind Posi who was actually just specced to survival.

DPs... if this is really representative DPS I think its acceptable. not the way i'd have like the nerfs to go, but not overdone depending on how the bleed effect goes... I was on top but only by about the margin that i'd have expected for my gear level. if anything I think Ximera should have been farther behind, but he's always done an exceptional job with his hunter so it was no surprise.

Mana... JotW by itself wouldn't have been enough. I didn't have time to do any dalies, but I predict that i'll need to drink somewhat regularly doing dalies which is acceptable. raid buffed (JoW, BoW, Replenishment, Arcane Brilliance, Kings, and an ele shaman, and heals from SotM) mana wasn't really an issue. 4 of the 10 times I drak was because this retardin pulled aggro like he shouldn't have and died. 6 times drinking over the course of 2 raids is efficiency like my Holy Pally had pre-patch. definitely acceptable...

lastly @ the utility arguments... I still think we need to watch for when we can help out, but I think that call to help needs to be an emergency situation now. we don't have the mana regen anymore to dps and throw out heals. a heal now will need to be because if we don't a tank or healer will die, not just because its getting hard on healers. the need to be able to handle hard by themselves now... Hand spells need to be saved for the clothie healer or yourself because you won't have the mana anymore to be using them all the time.

if blizz leaves it as it will be after all these changes I think ret will be very competitive dps and with a basic judge, CS, DS rotation shouldn't have mana issues much. not more than can be dealt with by one pot per fight and Divine Plea after lvl 71 anyway.

I was expecting this to hit harder (and it might still), but so far it seems to be only a minor overall nerf. Blizz's decision to keep SotM/B where they are was a good one eveenn if i'd like to see SoV there too for better boss dps. it is what it is though. Ret will continue and it seems we'll stll be much better off than we were in BC.

i'll try to stop with all the QQ'ing i've been doing, lol. it was nice being OP while it lasted though, even if I still think the only OPness we had was really in PvP...

yeah, first time using SotM... I died lol... I didn't switch to SoC cause I respec'd out of it. if anything i'd use SoV for boss fights where SotM wasn't a good option. SoV will be getting a nerf but its the same percentage and its a better boss seal than SoC anyway.



my gf was healing on her priest and when I asked her how much she was needing to heal me she didn't even notice much that I was taking damage. the other healer was a BoL Pally healer and may have been throwing me a heal occassionally, that would have still gone to the tank anyway so it seemed not to hurt the healers much... but we'll see how that works as we get to bigger raids later this week.

all in all it didn't hurt my dps too much and seemed to have minimal impact on healers and the raid in general (beyond noob user error with a new seal...).

We ran ZA yesterday with some significantly undergeared dps members of the raid to get them some upgrades so the fights were much longer than normal. We 3 healed it instead of 2 healing it as well so even less DPS. I never ran out of mana judging wisdom and using seal of blood for most of the instance. Quite the opposite many times I had absolutely nothing to cast at all. I threw in multiple flash of light instants around just for the hell of it.



I think they broke a few things with our mechanics with the hotfixes though, or perhaps I've just been unobservant. Two rets one holy and one prot pallie were in the run. Judgement of wisdom appeared to stack. This surely can't be correct and may have added to the owerwhelming mana I had. Seal of corruption either does no damage and is working as intended or it resets every crit ala the old warrior deep wounds so you never get a tick. Ran it for Zuljin number one and it did no damage for the entire combat. We wiped it up because of a lot of fail so used socomm for number 2 which was a noticeable dps increase.




A final aside with the wtf easiness of all the raids now if you have skilled healers and tanks I really feel that there are gonna be many worse players hitting dungeons and raids in wrath.

Not sure what to do about this as my guild contributes as well but I see healers getting tier 5 from a raid that more than likely couldn't heal a heroic mag terrace run still. I think that when actual progression runs start again its gonna be a bitter pill for many people to swallow.