Viable means competitive in serious gameplay such as progression raiding or high rated PvP. I think what you're asking is: "Are shockadins more fun now?" The answer being yes, they are probably more fun than ever.
Viable means competitive in serious gameplay such as progression raiding or high rated PvP. I think what you're asking is: "Are shockadins more fun now?" The answer being yes, they are probably more fun than ever.
They'd need to come up with decent, non-gimicky specs for the other 10 classes before they added any more in. There are some that are easy (like a caster DPS for Paladins, that could have been called an Exorcist if Exo was still spammable), but there are others that would be difficult to come up with. What would a warrior's fourth spec be? It would be a stretch to be a ranged weapons expert, because that's essentially what a Marksman hunter is.
'Viable' is dependent on what you want to do, so let's not all get hung up on the minutiae, okay?
Oh, the hunter one could be good. Perhaps a melee spec? One where the 'aspects' become more akin to fighting styles than just passive self-buffs? Then again, that kind of encroaches on the monk's territory of flavor.
A tanking mage could be interesting as well. Another healer would be necessary, I would think, just to make sure we expand on the number of roles relatively evenly.
Had a little play around against a Level 85 dummy just now. The necessary Shockadin glyphs were used of course, self buffed. Plenty of wasted mastery on my gear so these numbers could be further bumped by avoiding mastery gear and using dps trinkets etc.
- Sustained dps without using any cooldowns is about 20k.
- Burst dps with Avenging Wrath, Sanctified Wrath and Divine Favour was 40k!
- Using Seal of Insight for the haste or Seal of Truth for the dot both resulted in pretty much equal dps. The latter requires you to get up to 5 stacks of Censure and then only judgement when the stack is about to fall off to maintain it. Perhaps a theorycrafter might have more to offer on the topic but they looked near identical to me.
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1. Sustained dps will be somewhere between 20-30k dps at 85, including cooldowns. This could be bumped higher through the use of spell dps trinkets and less mastery.
2. The burst damage is VERY powerful. Holy Paladins could make a very meaningful contributions on fights like heroic Spine right now. An on use trinket plus cooldowns and your dps could very much make the difference.
3. While the damage output is much more viable than ever, and we can sustain it for longer, mana will not hold for the duration of a boss fight of raid length. I found I could oom myself in about 2 minutes.
4. Using Seal of Insight or Seal of Truth with Judgement to maintain 5 stacks of Censure are both about equal in damage. Seal of Truth will win in any heavy movement situation due to Judgement use and the Censure dot.
Last edited by Pasture; 2012-08-30 at 11:06 PM.
Holy paladins are extremely unbalanced in low level pvp at the moment. In the level 10 bracket they were 1 shotting heirloom geared. Even now at lvl 30 holy shock crits for 2k.