Proving Grounds DPS Gold as Blood

[Nalumis]

Regarding the achievement You're Really Doing It Wrong I made several (about 20) tries on this. According to Wowhead's comments, it should be a cakewalk... I once got to wave 10 but did not make it there because I did not have a Berserker buff left. In most cases, I struggle even earlier, mostly at wave 7.

My gear is my normal tanking gear (Armory) including those with Bonus Armor and with Tectus' Beating Heart and Tablet of Turnbuckle Teamwork equipped. My gear is optimized for Multistrike, although I know that sockets and set bonuses are not applied to Proving Grounds. I use a flask and buff food.

Is there any advice on how to pull more DPS? Talents? Glyphs? Specific items that I should farm?

[Sunnydee]

Best and most easiest way to do this is to drop ilvl. CM scales with your ilvl now and not the oposite, i did this on my dk aswell. prob around 4hours worth of trying in normal gear, read some on wowhead, grabbed a Garrosh heirloom, some 630 gear and a mission trinket AAAAAAND one shotted it.

[Terridon]

I haven't tested this, but was something we talked about in guild.
It's scaling to your ilvl, so go with low ilvl gear, and take a high lvl weapon, for the extra weapon dps. Dunno if it will stay at higher ilvl compared to the rest, while the mobs overall scales down to 30 lvls below your weapon. Could prolly do the same with trinkets.
Worth a try if you're struggling at least ;D

[Sunnydee]

and take a high lvl weapon, for the extra weapon dps.

actually you want low ilvl wpn beacuse it scales farmost with your weapon so you can't "abuse" it

Can add that i noticed this in endless dps. got easier for every weapon i put on that had lower ilvl

[Terridon]

actually you want low ilvl wpn beacuse it scales farmost with your weapon so you can't "abuse" it

Can add that i noticed this in endless dps. got easier for every weapon i put on that had lower ilvl

Ah okay.
Thanks for the clarification ^^

[Nalumis]

Thank you for your suggestions, I will try it!

[Terridon]

Now i just did it, because i got curious.

When you say 7th wave, do you the mean the one with the first big guy(8th), or the one before it?
Used chilblans/gorefiends grasp for some better control of the banana-slingers. Well.. that was the talents i had when i started.. seemed to work)
Is a good idea to keep dots/dps on it going during it, to bring it a few % down before the shield falls. It all helps. Just make sure you're not depleting your runes.

If it's the one with the first big guy i just spread diseases, pooled blood tap/RP up and dumped defile right when the shield fell off. Around 50-60% i used dancing rune weapon and used soul reaper for that double reaper on it, and pummeled it down below 35% which pretty much killed it off when reaper hit. Just drop next reaper on it and it should be ok. It's a bit tight on it though timewise. But at least you have it pretty easy on the next.

9th wave i did the same, except i took zerger buff a few secs before shield fell, and killed it without using cds.
Last wave i managed to fail around a bunch of times.
Should make it easier for you if you dps the biggie, slowly after you've killed adds off, but keep blood tap high enough for you to be able to tap it after you've killed the time-bomb-mob. At that point there should be something like 40 secs left, so just pop your army. It will be up for the full duration of the downtime of the shield, take zerger buff and nuke it with army/all runes/death coils, use empower rune weapon, dancing rune weapon and keep nuking it. I applied diseases again when i popped rune weapon for double of them, but dunno if it's worth it there.
I just bloodboiled the last time-bomb-mob down while dpsing the main one.

Did use a lowly 636 weapon. No idea of it made it easier, but dps felt fine with that.

Hope that's of some help at least <.<

[Deleted]

youtube-com/watch?v=BnEa46ngqNg was real easy

[Socialhealer]

proving grounds really is the worst joke, what does it teach anyone about anything? it's honestly nothing like raiding, i can pull 99 percentiles in mythic, but proving grounds i'm failing?

worst balanced shit i've even seen, answer is always use junk gear because blizzard think you're an lfr hero and make it a joke, but ilvl 695? they think you're from paragon/method.

[mitbrandir]

proving grounds really is the worst joke, what does it teach anyone about anything? it's honestly nothing like raiding, i can pull 99 percentiles in mythic, but proving grounds i'm failing?

worst balanced shit i've even seen, answer is always use junk gear because blizzard think you're an lfr hero and make it a joke, but ilvl 695? they think you're from paragon/method.

I think actually does teaches you how to actually how to deal with specific situations in the best way. For example, I had to change my healing style completely to complete endless 30, because with my own healing style I would've run OOM already before wave 10. So I guess, it did actually teach me something.

Can't really give any advise for the actual achievement, I did it as brewmaster, and with ToD on the last mob it's kinda GG.

[Socialhealer]

I think actually does teaches you how to actually how to deal with specific situations in the best way. For example, I had to change my healing style completely to complete endless 30, because with my own healing style I would've run OOM already before wave 10. So I guess, it did actually teach me something.

Can't really give any advise for the actual achievement, I did it as brewmaster, and with ToD on the last mob it's kinda GG.

oh doing the tanking/healing sure, but the dps just feels broken, the more gear you get the harder it feels. especially with set bonuses disabled and some set bonuses really change some classes, i'm sure theres some math that could be done to show how at ilvl 610 you're expected to do like 60% of your potential max dps, and ilvl 700 you're expected to do 98% or something to make each wave in endless.

[Bigbazz]

I think using lower ilvl is more to do with better itemisation than anything else, it's fairly well balanced. I did it as Protection Warrior on my first time while running my Gladiator gear, probably around ilvl 665-670 at the time... For the most part it was very well optimised to do lots of damage as Protection, I completely walked it.

I'm fairly sure it bottoms out at ilvl 615, so going below that is pretty pointless. The Ilvl615 garrison trinkets are well over budget in terms of itemisation, which is why they are very popular for proving grounds. Technically the old Legendary cloak would be popular but the socket is completely ignored so I'm not sure it's worthwhile, though the gear doesn't scale down it still has the same restrictions as challenge modes in terms of the bonus stats/sockets.

As for what does Proving Grounds teach you? It teaches you to optimise your strategy and plan your cooldowns, it teaches you to use mechanics to your advantage and prioritise targets... Those who say they can't do it are the only ones who throw out the excuses about it being useless. Pulling a 99th Percentile on a boss is often easier than Proving Grounds, because bosses are less about individual skill... You can get away with doing the fight while having no responsibility and throw in a bit of nice RNG and you're looking sweet on the deeps.

I do it on a weekly basis, getting a 99th percentile log is more about fight duration and RNG on procs/crits/multistrikes than skill... Proving Grounds is a personal challenge.

[Deleted]

i did it with 655 ilvl and breath is quite needed atleast for me to burst down the biggest adds fast enough.!

[Deleted]

I did this with quite a bit of time to spare:
This is with PL + Def

Wave 8: Defile immediately. Continuously circle the big add and let Blood Boil from your Blood Runes + Diseases kill the two small adds. Defile as soon as the shield is down. Dancing Rune Weapon + Soul Reaper at about 50%.

Wave 9: Defile immediately. Death Grip the Banana Tosser on to the other two adds and bring him down. I use a macro for interrupting the healers which I'll write below. Take the first berserk before the shield drops off then take out the Banshee. Defile when the shield drops and use Soul Reaper at around 45-55%.

Wave 10: Use Army of the Dead with a few seconds to go on wave 9, if the time is lenient enough.
Defile immediately. Take the second berserk when the shield is close to dropping, and immediately defile. I also tried pooling runes for this if possible and taking down the banshees with death coils / blood boil.
When the shield drops, this is the 'rotation' I used:

DRW + Defile
Death Strike
Soul Reaper
ERW + Soul Reaper + Death Strikes


Interrupt Macro:
/target Small Illusionary Mystic
/target Large Illusionary Mystic
/cast Mind Freeze
/targetlasttarget


Edit: I had imported a Weak Aura to put myself into Frost Presence when I entered blood spec, as I was testing out a multistrike BoS build as a DPS, and if I was in blood presence I would forgot to switch and take agro. As soon as I noticed and put myself into blood presence for this it became much easier. I'm an idiot :P

[Tarthlock]

Did this on my DK in December wearing all 630 gear and was pretty easy, str flask and mastery food

[nightfalls]

As for what does Proving Grounds teach you? It teaches you to optimise your strategy and plan your cooldowns, it teaches you to use mechanics to your advantage and prioritise targets... Those who say they can't do it are the only ones who throw out the excuses about it being useless. Pulling a 99th Percentile on a boss is often easier than Proving Grounds, because bosses are less about individual skill... You can get away with doing the fight while having no responsibility and throw in a bit of nice RNG and you're looking sweet on the deeps.

To be honest, the healing one doesn't really teach you much, other than how to heal Proving Grounds. The problem is that to do it, you need to tailor your play completely around the Proving Ground itself, and the problem with that is it hardly mirrors anything else you'll be doing in actual gameplay.

In reality, it is more scripted than any sort of boss fight, since you know the exact timeline and exactly what mobs will spawn, where, and what they will do (aside, maybe, from guessing in the healer one whether the NPC's will actually interrupt correctly or not). So while I agree there is a fatigue factor, I'm not quite sure aside from rote memorization how much skill there is in the PG's.

The DPS one is probably a bit better, in that it is more of a reflection of stuff you might do as a DPS (when doing some extreme play, rarely do you use that many buttons in a raid, but who knows?). Tank one is probably as scripted as the healer one, at least for lower Endless.

Though, I also have to admire being able to do 3 straight hours+ of literally the same mobs over and over in Endless - *just* for the actual successful attempt.

(And even then, I can't see how the strategy for doing high Endless tank waves remotely resembles actual tanking). For those who like doing PG as a goal in its own end, sure, but I don't think it's really "practice" for anything else beyond just Gold and 30 Endless.