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  1. #21
    Immortal Zka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by wholol View Post
    You and your friend over there might enjoy playing smite spec , I'm not here to tell you how to enjoy the game but please do not throw this misinformation that holy smite spam is the "way" , you look like idiots trying to invent the wheel.
    ??? If one chooses to be non-shadow spec, then smite spam is the ONLY efficient way to level SOLO above 40ish, as wand damage stops scaling. Yes, shadow is more efficient, dungeon spam in a competent group is also more efficient, but if you choose to go disc or holy and spend a lot of time solo questing, then guess what, you will have absolutely no other option but spam smite when your wand stops doing noticeable damage.

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    Quote Originally Posted by valky94 View Post
    wands, because wands do a good amount of dmg while lvling, especially with 5 points in wand spec
    Oh yes, wands do fine damage, up until they suddenly don't, because they stop scaling.
    I just /facepalm at this point.

    2 of you guys here want to convince the community we should wand stuff to death up until lvl 60 when we solo, that is fucking bullshit.

    Sure, I've used wands until 60 to abuse the 5s rule, but in the last few levels, you need to bring a mob below 10% before you start wanding. You can't wand them from 70-50% like in the early levels, you will fucking die every single time.
    Last edited by Zka; 2019-10-15 at 09:10 PM.

  2. #22
    ykes, the hybrid tax before it was hot

  3. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by Zka View Post
    You can't wand them from 70-50% like in the early levels, you will fucking die every single time.
    Wait what?

    You will die when you wand mobs to death after 50%? Dude, you need to invest in some green gear. Cant wear your starter armor until 60.
    Also buy a blue wand at around level 50. It is worth it even if it costs 30g or something.

  4. #24
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    Levelling as disc does work but I went shadow all the way to 60 because I simply didn't have the patience to solo quest as disc. Pull with Mind Blast, SWP, Mind Flay, Psychic Scream, Mindflay was my style. So what if I went oom every 5 mobs, I spent a boatload of gold on drinks and preferred to level that way. Healing in dungeons as shadow is also a blast even when you get to 60, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

  5. #25
    Immortal Zka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Exkrementor View Post
    Wait what?

    You will die when you wand mobs to death after 50%? Dude, you need to invest in some green gear. Cant wear your starter armor until 60.
    Also buy a blue wand at around level 50. It is worth it even if it costs 30g or something.
    Yes, around lvl 55+ mobs start to hit hard enough that you will die if you try to use your wand as primary damage. Or you'll have to spend most of your mana to stay alive - not efficient. I had blue gear and best wands from instances and I still could not use wands as primary weapon at higher levels.

    At lvl 20ish, best wands do as much or more damage than your dps rotation. Sure as hell you're gonna want to keep your wand maxed out and even specced for it. But close to 60 my smite spam on deep holy does 200-350 dps, while the best blue boe wands cap out below 60 dps. Best bop ones from 5mans are a bit above 60. Wands are not even in the same ballpark with smite damage at this point. You need to change your approach to wands a few times during leveling no matter which spec you play. You always aim for the highest kill rate - a balance between dps and mana conservation. Sure as hell you can conserve a lot of mana with wands but if you kill mobs at a snail's pace then you've lost your advantage. Some people seem to think that you can use wands as primary damage all the way to 60 and/or you can skip using smite as disc/holy (and stay efficient), but none of that is true.

  6. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by Zka View Post
    ??? If one chooses to be non-shadow spec, then smite spam is the ONLY efficient way to level SOLO above 40ish, as wand damage stops scaling. Yes, shadow is more efficient, dungeon spam in a competent group is also more efficient, but if you choose to go disc or holy and spend a lot of time solo questing, then guess what, you will have absolutely no other option but spam smite when your wand stops doing noticeable damage.

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    Oh yes, wands do fine damage, up until they suddenly don't, because they stop scaling.
    I just /facepalm at this point.

    2 of you guys here want to convince the community we should wand stuff to death up until lvl 60 when we solo, that is fucking bullshit.

    Sure, I've used wands until 60 to abuse the 5s rule, but in the last few levels, you need to bring a mob below 10% before you start wanding. You can't wand them from 70-50% like in the early levels, you will fucking die every single time.
    I don't know what you're doing wrong if you're dying to a single mob one on one , it's fairly obviously you're trying to advocate smite spam but only using wand at 10% is not even close to being optimal in terms of mana efficiency.

    At higher levels (50+) you could cast 2-3 smites then shield and dot/wand till finish, those initial 2-3 smites will bring the mob around 50% ish then dot and wand are enough to finish the mob, like I said you need to keep your wand updated, at lvl 50 you can grab the mara wand or the wand from the hinterlands elite quests or even an AH wand that gives good dps and it'll keep you going till 55~.

    Wanding at 10% will not be enough regen to help you minimize downtime. Please share with us how many times you sit and drink after smite spamming? because I'm 100% sure you're not being efficient at all, stop trying to convince everyone smite spam is great, it's already a subpar niche type of leveling path that you've chosen for yourself , yet you still want to come here and tell people it's better than being efficient.

    There's also another argument , after level 55 none of that stuff matters because you'll be doing dungeons a lot for your pre raid bis, which means your spec is irrelevant for questing.

    As someone who swapped to holy/disc raid build at 55 to spam dungeons to 60 I rarely ever had to quest after that point since I was in dungeon most of the time, on the off-chance I had to do a quest , like the EPL in dreams quest, I usually grouped up with others or just avoided combat, when I did need to kill something I just spammed some smites then dots/shield/wanded at around 40% ~ and that was enough.

    I find this link to be very useful for any priests who might be wondering about these questions regarding leveling builds and efficiency:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CLytIpJniY.

    Eventhough I don't particularly like the creator of said video, the priests who contributed to it's creation are top tier priests who have leveled priests so many times in from the vanilla days then onto private and then classic. There's a particularly good thing about this vid as it provides in-depth detailed analysis when it comes to efficiency and rotation, though some of the things said in the vid are outdated as it is pretty old.

  7. #27
    I'm at 52 atm, Holy spec, questing in Felwood as we speak, so killing mobs withing my lvl, and i can tell you that with the gear i have 1x Holy Fire+SW:P+1x Smite+1 Mind Blast and then wand is more than enough to quickly dispatch a same lvl mob. Most often than not, depending on crits, when i start wanding the mob is already bellow 30%.

  8. #28
    I leveled as holy with wand/spirit tap talents and it was really good imho.

  9. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by Zka View Post
    ??? If one chooses to be non-shadow spec, then smite spam is the ONLY efficient way to level SOLO above 40ish, as wand damage stops scaling. Yes, shadow is more efficient, dungeon spam in a competent group is also more efficient, but if you choose to go disc or holy and spend a lot of time solo questing, then guess what, you will have absolutely no other option but spam smite when your wand stops doing noticeable damage.

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    Oh yes, wands do fine damage, up until they suddenly don't, because they stop scaling.
    I just /facepalm at this point.

    2 of you guys here want to convince the community we should wand stuff to death up until lvl 60 when we solo, that is fucking bullshit.

    Sure, I've used wands until 60 to abuse the 5s rule, but in the last few levels, you need to bring a mob below 10% before you start wanding. You can't wand them from 70-50% like in the early levels, you will fucking die every single time.
    As someone who just finished leveling a priest, this is retarded. I mean, if you're saying that if you start auto-attacking a mob and go afk you might die, sure, that's probably true. But thats true of basically any class.

    You can wand a mob down from 100 - 0 if you are really bored, with no real risk to yourself if you use shield, or even renew. In general, all you really need is SWP + shield and you can basically wand any non-elite to death. I mean, it's not the fastest, and you might have to drink after a couple kills, but if you're dying as a priest, you're doing something very wrong.

    I can go to Mara and wand down the goblin boss at 60 as holy. I'm using a level 53 wand of the eagle, nothing special. Not sure what you're smoking, but send an ounce of it to my room.
    Last edited by phattsao; 2019-10-16 at 02:31 PM.

  10. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by phattsao View Post
    As someone who just finished leveling a priest, this is retarded. You can wand a mob down from 100 - 0 if you are really bored, with no real risk to yourself if you use shield, or even renew. In general, all you really need is SWP + shield and you can basically wand any non-elite to death. I mean, it's not the fastest, and you might have to drink after a couple kills, but if you're dying as a priest, you're doing something very wrong.

    I can go to Mara and wand down the goblin boss at 60 as holy. I'm using a level 53 wand of the eagle, nothing special. Not sure what you're smoking, but send an ounce of it to my room.
    Some times you're even forced to do it. I mean, how many times you're killing mobs that run away and find yourself killing 3 at the same time and nearly empty, the way you described is the only one to go if you're forced to and it works just fine, slowly, but fine.

    Btw what does "wand stops scalling" means? Have i missed something?

  11. #31
    Quote Originally Posted by Drusin View Post
    This is from http://wowpop.appspot.com/ before Blizz decided to break /who scanning in like the first half of September so there's probably more by now.



    42,000 alliance 60s
    22,000 Horde 60s
    nice graph reading skills )))))))))))))))

  12. #32
    Quote Originally Posted by wholol View Post
    This is a load of bull, I don't know what level you're hardstuck on but regardless of your spec at that level range nothing should be out-dpsing your wand, unless you're still using your level 5 wand then claiming it's "falling off hard" , just follow a wand progression properly, every priest should pass by BFD for the wand quest.

    29 dps wand further enchanced by 25% = 36~ dps.

    At level 25 you're using smite rank 4, a 2.5s cast that deals between 95 and 112, for argument's sake we'll take an average of 100 damage per hit.

    100/2.5 = 40 dps.
    First of all, I said it STARTS to fall off at 25, but let's ignore that because it was miscommunication on my part.

    Second, going Holy means taking Divine Fury, so the cast time of Smite is 2 sec. so the dps is actually 50.

    Third, you do not spam smite only. You are still allowed to use SWP, even if it's Shadow damage because the DPM is too good to ignore. Also you are forgetting Holy Fire that is a great initiator spell and secondary to SWP in terms of DPM.

    So at 30, things are a bit different. Using your example of a stupid priest spamming only Smite is a dps of 92.4 (168/2 sec cast = 84dps and increase that by 10% from Searing light talent). The best wand you can get at lvl 30 is Necrotic wand that has a dps of 32.21 = 40.26 with wand spec. Suddenly the dps is halved and wands thereafter only increases by 1 dps per level average.

    That aside , we obviously have to talk about the implication of the 5 sec rule and how good wanding is for efficiency. If you are the kind of player that loves to spam spells instead of using wand then even with spirit tap you would still have to drink every 2 pulls, whereas efficient application of wanding will often leave you full mana by the time you pull the next mob.
    No, you do not have to drink every 2nd, 3rd or 4th pull when "spamming spells" as long as you have access to Spirit tap. What was it again about not spreading misinformation?

    Killing a mob within 10 secs every 5th or 6th pull is worth one mana break, but that's just my opinion.

    A wand just like any other spec, the way you level doesn't change much. you frontload spells initially: shield -> 1 or 2 smites then dot and wand to death, if the mob is a humanoid and might run into another pack you finish with MB to stop it from aggro'ing, in most cases though you won't need to use MB.

    The point of frontloading your spells is to get into the 5 second rule early on and benefit from the regen, by the time the fight ends and spirit tap kicks in you'll be full mana by the time you pull the second mob and so on.
    Why are you using SWP as the last spell? SWP has 18 sec duration, you want to get it out early so you don't waste mana. And even better, why not start with Holy fire?
    Last edited by Dergiab; 2019-10-16 at 03:13 PM.

  13. #33
    Quote Originally Posted by Dergiab View Post
    Why are you using SWP as the last spell? SWP has 18 sec duration, you want to get it out early so you don't waste mana. And even better, why not start with Holy fire?
    Fire and SWP should be your first 2 spells specially because of the dmg bonus from spirit tap wich is quite large

  14. #34
    Stood in the Fire
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    Another thing people seem to forget is the +dmg gear that will affect your spells, but not your wand.

    Including the dreamweave set, the star belt at lvl35, southsea boots and red mageweave pants, weapon and offhand you can easily reach over +100 spell damage at around lvl40. This will affect smite and other spells, but not your wand damage. That's going to be a huge difference.

    If you ignore shadow spec, which is obviously the most effective way to grind mobs, the most efficient way to bring down a mob is PWS and start with holy fire - SWP - smite - mindblast and then wand to death. That requires to have wand spec, spirit tap and divine fury.

    Mobs will be below 30% health, and with SWP ticking on top of wanding, you should easily finish it off quickly while being outside the 5 seconds rule when spirit tap hits.


    This is the most effective way both in term of speed of killing, and mana usage. You can kill 10 mobs or so before having to drink for 20 seconds, and you will kill quickly.

    Yes, you can just SWP and wand, which would completely avoid the need to drink, but it will really decrease your dps and thus the time it takes to kill mobs. You can also only spam smite (or combination of other spells), but that will drain your mana quickly without increasing your dps significantly.

  15. #35
    Quote Originally Posted by voidillusion View Post
    Some times you're even forced to do it. I mean, how many times you're killing mobs that run away and find yourself killing 3 at the same time and nearly empty, the way you described is the only one to go if you're forced to and it works just fine, slowly, but fine.

    Btw what does "wand stops scalling" means? Have i missed something?
    I was wondering that too. I heard on some private servers there were bugs that made like a Hunter's ammo pouch bonus affect wand speed. Maybe this guy is going off of private servers, which would explain why he's so wrong.

  16. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by Dergiab View Post
    First of all, I said it STARTS to fall off at 25, but let's ignore that because it was miscommunication on my part.

    Second, going Holy means taking Divine Fury, so the cast time of Smite is 2 sec. so the dps is actually 50.

    Third, you do not spam smite only. You are still allowed to use SWP, even if it's Shadow damage because the DPM is too good to ignore. Also you are forgetting Holy Fire that is a great initiator spell and secondary to SWP in terms of DPM.

    So at 30, things are a bit different. Using your example of a stupid priest spamming only Smite is a dps of 92.4 (168/2 sec cast = 84dps and increase that by 10% from Searing light talent). The best wand you can get at lvl 30 is Necrotic wand that has a dps of 32.21 = 40.26 with wand spec. Suddenly the dps is halved and wands thereafter only increases by 1 dps per level average.



    No, you do not have to drink every 2nd, 3rd or 4th pull when "spamming spells" as long as you have access to Spirit tap. What was it again about not spreading misinformation?

    Killing a mob within 10 secs every 5th or 6th pull is worth one mana break, but that's just my opinion.



    Why are you using SWP as the last spell? SWP has 18 sec duration, you want to get it out early so you don't waste mana. And even better, why not start with Holy fire?
    You use SWP last as it's the last spell you'll cast before wanding something down, the reason is you want to hardcast first to gain the advantage of range, you don't want to SWP then smite as it will pull the mob prematurely.

    You can start with holy fire as first cast, it is mana efficient but it depends if you're saving gold for your mount at that level, you can skip this entirely as the dot it provides isn't really that good and you can just substitute this with a smite.

    When I said SWP last I am still taking into consideration the time it takes for the mob to die so as to not waste ticks, since I prefer to level with efficiency I will only use 1 (or 2 depending on mob hp) hard cast at that level to pull with followed by a shield and dot ( at this point the mob is in melee range ) and you wand it till it dies, if you find that you're killing the mob before the dot is even past half it's duration then you only cast 1 smite instead of 2, If then the mob is still dying before half the dot duration then you pull 2-3 mobs by dotting them as it seems their hp values are low.

    If at any point you find that you are ending combat far too close to full mana before spirit tap THEN you can insert more hard casts prior to wanding, the goal isn't to kill the mob faster as you can see, it is to make sure you end combat with above 60-70% mana so that spirit tap can top you while you move to your next mob.

    In the case where you find that mobs are too closely stacked and you are full mana WHILE spirit tap is up then you can hard cast quite a lot since you get the benefit of spirit tap while casting, though in most cases mobs will either be too far spread apart or too clumped for you to pull less than 2 at a time.

    The point of a wand is to provide a balance between hard casting and regen, if you somehow are able to hardcast every pull while reapplying shield multiple times to make sure you are not getting pushbacks (I seriously hope you aren't hard casting while being pushed back or your entire argument is out the window) and then somehow managing to not go oom for 6 mobs in a row then I don't know what to say, your priest must be so special and great at regen that it puts the rest of us peasants to shame ! you must have some insane amount of spirit that us mortals can never achieve while leveling, I wish I had a video of you doing 6 consecutive pulls before ooming.

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    Quote Originally Posted by phattsao View Post
    I was wondering that too. I heard on some private servers there were bugs that made like a Hunter's ammo pouch bonus affect wand speed. Maybe this guy is going off of private servers, which would explain why he's so wrong.
    I don't know what to expect from these guys, I mean they advocate hard casting smite till the mob is at 10% hp and then wanding, then they claim it's mana efficient to do so , it's quite baffling.
    Last edited by wholol; 2019-10-16 at 04:37 PM.

  17. #37
    Immortal Zka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by voidillusion View Post
    Btw what does "wand stops scalling" means? Have i missed something?
    Apparently you did. I've already posted about it. Wands do pretty much as much dps as your skills at low levels. At high levels your skills do way way more damage than the best wand you can buy or loot from dungeons and mob health is tuned against skill damage, not wand damage. Therefore wands get less and less important as you level up. That's a solid fact. Some people are quite upset (or totally ignorant) of this fact in this thread (or just lack any kind of reading comprehension), attacking me from left and right, trying to explain how retarded I am

  18. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by Zka View Post
    Apparently you did. I've already posted about it. Wands do pretty much as much dps as your skills at low levels. At high levels your skills do way way more damage than the best wand you can buy or loot from dungeons and mob health is tuned against skill damage, not wand damage. Therefore wands get less and less important as you level up. That's a solid fact. Some people are quite upset (or totally ignorant) of this fact in this thread (or just lack any kind of reading comprehension), attacking me from left and right, trying to explain how retarded I am
    Well then i havent missed anything, they dont scale or stop scalling at all, spells and spellpower do.

  19. #39
    Immortal Zka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by voidillusion View Post
    Well then i havent missed anything, they dont scale or stop scalling at all, spells and spellpower do.
    Sure, I didn't mean the damage of a single wand would scale with anything. Afaik it doesn't. I meant you can replace your wand for a higher dps wand. But the problem is, wand dps gets smaller and smaller compared to your skill dps as you level up, even if you have access to the best possible wand.

  20. #40
    Quote Originally Posted by Zka View Post
    Sure, I didn't mean the damage of a single wand would scale with anything. Afaik it doesn't. I meant you can replace your wand for a higher dps wand. But the problem is, wand dps gets smaller and smaller compared to your skill dps as you level up, even if you have access to the best possible wand.
    Well the way i see it is like this, for me wand always went hand in hand with SWP tick in terms of dmg. Atm in my case my SWP without spirit tap ticks for 140ish, and my current wand averages 100 per hit, so yeah in a way i see your point, the relevance of it's damage becomes lower at higher lvls, but it's still the complement it always was and it's still the regen window with dmg on it it always was.

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