[Balance] Sunfyre's "Fix my Balance DPS!" thread.

[Slippykins]

Well being a hybrid in my guild is taken full advantage of and they keep making me switch and so forth. So I am behind the curve on gear since I also took a 3 month break from raiding and have recently come back. The log I am linking will not be the best to judge myself by but it's somewhere to start hopefully by Saturday I will have a better log to show you. Secondly, I know that I suck at multi-dotting and I usually just keep dots on at least 3 targets and focus the highest priority target more so than dotting everything. I would also like some help with being able to target the correct targets instead of relying on tidy plates addon to give me the correct target

Wow Armory:
us.battle.net/wow/en/character/bleeding-hollow/Chiayn/advanced

World of Logs:
www.worldoflogs.com/reports/xq5nirc13xh9areq/

• Your reforging is a little out of whack. Sitting at 1530 hit rating over the cap, you can get a lot more stats by reforging out of spirit on some of your gear. I'm assuming you're in Resto reforges at the moment, but just remember you want to get 5100 hit rating total. It's up to you whether or not you want to pursue the 10289 haste breakpoint or stack crit, but if you feel as if you aren't handling the boomkin priority system well you should probably stack haste to minimise SS proc waste. Once you reach 10289 haste, everything else goes into crit.
• Looking at your Iron Qon kill, your DoT uptime is quite low. As soon as you reach a new eclipse you should immediately cast the eclipsed DoT, and as soon as the other DoT runs out you should reapply. Only point where your DoTs shouldn't be up on that fight is during tornado phase while you're stunned, but other than that it's free game.
• In an almost 11 minute fight, you only managed to squeeze in two rounds of Incarnation/CA. If you had used your cooldowns when they were available or close to, you should have been able to get in 4 of each. Your Starfall usage looks good, though.
• Your eclipse cycling was rather slow and, consequently, your Nature's Grace uptime was only 59%. For a single-target fight, you should have around 80%+ uptime on NG, depending on your haste levels. Make sure you are only casting one set of DoTs per eclipse, and you use your Starsurge procs as soon as they appear. Speaking of which...
• Your SS proc waste was about average for your crit rating (20% waste @ 9k crit). Considering your cycle times, that doesn't sound too bad. You'll just need to focus on less movement and more hard casting to push eclipses faster and keep up your overall damage.

Pretty much your only fault is slow eclipses, most likely causes by excessive movement. Making sure you maximise your hard casting during fights like this not only increases your damage primarily but also speeds up your eclipses, which in turn increase your Nature's Grace uptime and hence your DoT uptime.

Armory : http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...gneur/advanced

Logs : http://worldoflogs.com/reports/j9lqb...one/?enc=kills

I feel like I'm underperforming.

With wushoolai I try to refresh my dots during last 2seconds, and I use the clipping technique to refresh DoTs in general.
I delay my SS proc when 1cast away from an eclipse and if it's my 2nd SS during solar until i reach 5energy (well I try)

When moving, I try to spam lunar shower unless it would replace strong dot (wushoolai buffed, eclipsed+NG) and spamming SS.

In the linked logs, I was sitting on only 9k5 crit, and even now @11k I feel like I don't have many SS procs... :/ Do I delay them too much resulting in a proc waste larger than normal ? Are my DoT not enough up on the target(s) ?

I understood the guide in post-it, but when confronted with real-raid content, I feel like the "ideal" gameplay is very hard to maintain.

I would really appreciate your expert tips


P.S : this is our alt raid

I'm going to take http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...urrin/advanced is your boomkin, judging by achievement dates.

• First off: with your amount of crit rating, it's not advantageous to hold onto your SS procs just before entering an eclipse or when in Solar eclipse - you're correct in thinking you're wasting too many SS procs by holding them. I'll talk to Sunfyre and see if I can edit the Moonkin Guide to reflect that change in ideology. The basic mantra now is: use Starsurge on cooldown, all the time. The only exception is when DoTing up targets - your eclipsed DoT takes priority over the SS procs you may already have.
• The blue socket in your pants should be spirit/crit or hit/crit (green gem), not int/spirit. Small gain, but important.
• I would advocate hitting the 10289 haste breakpoint instead of just sitting at 5273 haste and stacking crit. You'll notice a lot less Starsurge overwrites (with the other change I made in my first point), and your rotation will be much faster.
• Like with the poster above you, you aren't cycling eclipses fast enough. From your Jin'rokh kill you only made 4 complete cycles in 3:34, meaning it took you on average 53 seconds to complete a cycle. A normal cycle length should be around 30-35 seconds, with 30 seconds or faster maximising Nature's Grace uptime. Your slow cycling is further emphasised by only 61% Nature's Grace uptime. To bump up your damage, you'll need to minimise the amount of movement you're doing - unfortunately, I can see you were targetted three times with Focussed Lightning, so part of that movement is understandable. Regardless, you'll see a lot more damage if you manage to get through eclipses faster.
• On your Council kill it looks like there were periods where none of your DoTs were rolling on any of the targets. Your highest damage per execute time spell is your eclipsed DoT, followed by Starsurge, and then your uneclipsed DoT. At the very, very minimum you should have your eclipsed DoT running on all targets available, and then spamming your Starsurge button while applying your uneclipsed DoTs to the targets. Only after you have all your DoTs running on all the targets should you think of using Wrath/Starfire, assuming you have no SS procs.
• Also from the Council kill - your SS proc waste was up at 47%, which is quite large for your crit rating. Like I suggested before, you should probably switch to a 10289 haste build, and make sure you use your Starsurge procs the moment they come up. The only time you shouldn't use them on cooldown is if you're currently redotting your eclipsed DoT. (damn it was hard to go through those logs with everything in French...)

Overall, like I said to the above poster, your damage will benefit a lot from minimising movement, maximising your eclipse cycle speed and using your SS procs whenever you can.

[moveth]

Slippy, I dont know if you saw my post above, but at my gear level, is it worth it to go for the 10k haste rating? Ive been debating it, but I cant get there through solely reforging. Should I use Enchants and Gems to get there even if I have to sacrifice a decent amount of crit? I just dont know, to what extent, I should sacrifice crit for haste.

[Slippykins]

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-gzc8kly2jo42ah63/

So we went 10man this week (And all future weeks.) and I just feel like my performance dropped significantly. Is it really just the difference between 10 and 25? Or am I messing up something that Im just not seeing.

(http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/149958/ are our old 25man logs.)

• You have a lot, and I mean a lot, of crit rating. Regardless, on your Iron Qon kill you have 26% SS proc waste, which is around 6-11% over the average amount of waste for that fight. To digress from comparing your 25 man and 10 man kills, I'd say you could benefit from hitting the 10289 haste breakpoint before dumping the rest of your stats into crit.
• On topic: comparing you to my logs for 10N Iron Qon (2 weeks ago), your main problem for that fight was in slow eclipse cycling. You did 8 full cycles in 7:02, or 53 second cycles versus my 15 cycles in 9:08, or 37 second cycles. There's a bit of movement involved in that fight, but minimising this movement is key, especially for 10 mans where ranged are often in stacking groups. Looking at your Iron Qon kill on 25 man from the week previous, you did ~10k DPS less. Seems fair to assume that a good chunk of that is from movement and raid tasks. Additionally, you cycled much quicker on 25 man with an average cycle length of 45 seconds.
• 25 mans will also pretty much ensure you have every buff available, as well as speciality cooldowns like Stormlash and the warrior banner. I'm not sure if you still had those in 10 man, but I can at least see Stormlash applied to you on 25.

Other than that I can't see anything vastly disproportionate or wrong. Your Nature's Grace uptime could be better, but that links directly to your slower eclipse cycle lengths.

Edit:

Slippy, I dont know if you saw my post above, but at my gear level, is it worth it to go for the 10k haste rating? Ive been debating it, but I cant get there through solely reforging. Should I use Enchants and Gems to get there even if I have to sacrifice a decent amount of crit? I just dont know, to what extent, I should sacrifice crit for haste.

I think you should definitely hit the haste breakpoint. You've got a vast quantity of crit piling up that's just waiting to be converted from SS proc waste into haste. Typically you'll change your reforges first, then switch out some crit gems for haste ones. Haste is per-point better than crit, and with SS proc waste coming into the equation as well as SimCraft agreeing with the contentions we made from WrathCalcs, it looks as if the 10289 haste breakpoint should be sought before stacking crit. Though, I know there are a lot of boomkins that will disagree with me. There isn't too much between the builds, but I feel it's significant enough to acknowledge.

[moveth]

Thank you very much. First week ive legitimately done 10man since T13. Im gonna try some LFRs with the haste build. Its super weird going with this much haste. lol

[Slippykins]

Thank you very much. First week ive legitimately done 10man since T13. Im gonna try some LFRs with the haste build. Its super weird going with this much haste. lol

It takes some getting used to, but you should notice your GCD is capped (meaning you can DoT targets faster), your DoTs do more damage with each GCD you place them, and hard casts are a lot quicker. Should pretty much guarantee you 90%+ NG uptime assuming you play well. Should also notice a vast reduction in SS proc overwrites. I covered it more in-depth over here: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post21140318

[Deleted]

Thanks Slippykins!

I was waiting to change my build to the haste one, I just thought I needed more crit before I could do so :/
Since day1 on my 90 boomkin those 2.3sec starfire are boring me and I will re-gem to attain the haste gcd cap gladly

As for my movements, yeah, I still need to get used to not being a melee on most fights, the worst one being tortos, which is emphasized by my long casts.

I'll better prioritize my eclipsed DoTs on multi, and try my best to minimize movement.

[Authary]

Hello,

I may be in need of some help. My guild and I do 10man and I've always been last on the epeen-meter. I reached 90 when they were almost finished with the heroic T14 so I've always been kinda behind items-wise but I finally managed to reduce the gap. Last night we killed heroic twin consorts and I feel my DPS isn't quite where it should be.

Here are the armory and logs :
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Authary/simple
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...2va/details/6/

It says it's not heroic but it is. Damn logs. We fooled around a bit during the lei shen kill so it's not important but I'm not fond of my results on the twins. I recently changed my gems for the 10289 haste breakpoint so those are the only real logs I have.

Here's what I did (tried to do) :
- Starfall + wrath before pull then I dot Suen right before she disappears and resume the classic opening on Lulin
- I tried not to use a second starsurge proc during solar if it proc'ed only one cast before reaching 5 energy. It was mainly experimental but I don't think I wasted too many procs on this.
- NG-dotted Suen when she appeared during phase 1. I didn't have to dot her out of eclipse/NG so I guess it's fine.
- I NG-dotted Suen right before Nuclear Inferno then used astral communion (while hiding behind the meteors) to reach the next eclipse when she stopped deflecting attacks. I could have used mushrooms too but I don't think it would have changed much.
- In phase 3 I made sure to dot both of them

Here are problems I identified :
- I'm the only one without that stupid legendary meta because fuck you RNG.
- I didn't really optimize my pot consumption during the tries and I screwed my prepot for the kill so I didn't have it for the bloodlust of phase 2. Could do better.
- I may have wasted a GCD or two casting dots because I failed at swapping targets when both bosses are stacked.
- I didn't really make the most out of my trinket procs. I'll have to work on that in the future. I just got rid of UVLS and I hated it but I'm not sure of what the dot-refreshing during int-procs consensus is.
- I feel like I'm casting too many wraths.

I'd like to know if there is something I'm doing poorly and I haven't identified yet. Our top dps is another moonkin so I can compare but all I can see is that he's having many more ticks doing much more damage and critting much more often. I don't know what comes from the legendary meta / his troll racial and what comes from something I can do better.

Thank you in advance.

[Shayshay]

Not sure if this belongs here or not.. .But when looking at my logs I appear to be losing a TON of ss. Now during the fight it all seems fine and I'm getting casts off but I'm losing them somewhere, and I know its a huge chunk of DPS lost.... Any suggestions on how to not waste so many procs?

[Nenaunir]

Not sure if this belongs here or not.. .But when looking at my logs I appear to be losing a TON of ss. Now during the fight it all seems fine and I'm getting casts off but I'm losing them somewhere, and I know its a huge chunk of DPS lost.... Any suggestions on how to not waste so many procs?

Might want to post your logs and armory so people can actually see where you are losing the procs.

[Deleted]

Not sure if this belongs here or not.. .But when looking at my logs I appear to be losing a TON of ss. Now during the fight it all seems fine and I'm getting casts off but I'm losing them somewhere, and I know its a huge chunk of DPS lost.... Any suggestions on how to not waste so many procs?

- ignore outdated theorycrafting guiding you to not enter eclipse with SS and not cast 2 in solar etc but send SS allways when it procs, no holding
- get 10k haste cap - it reduces crit so you will reduce 'double' SS procs which cannot be used
- consider /stopcasting macros for your nukes (I dont like that)
- get good spell alert

[Deleted]

- ignore outdated theorycrafting guiding you to not enter eclipse with SS and not cast 2 in solar etc but send SS allways when it procs, no holding
- get 10k haste cap - it reduces crit so you will reduce 'double' SS procs which cannot be used
- consider /stopcasting macros for your nukes (I dont like that)
- get good spell alert

Moving works fine to stop cast. And if you get to a point where you are haste capped, and still have 14k+ crit, you really want to use it to minimize SS proc lost.

[Deleted]

Wondering if i should go for the 10k haste cap already at 521 ilvl. Or should i wait for bit more gear? I can't post links yet but my character is Feralica on Chamber of aspects realm.

[qvgrayfox]

Is it a good choice to hit the 10289 cap by changing yellow gems and loosing 2% of crit?
My armory is: eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/pozzo-delleternita/Qvgrayfox/advanced

Thank you

[Deleted]

Hey guys,
I've switched my offspec from feral to balance for the first time and used the balance guide to learn the spec.
This is my char: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...uffia/advanced
This is the log of yday's Megaera kill. http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/4trp1q5hpa3qfhwd/

That kill I had only 12,5% hit because I forgot to reforge. But had the haste cap.
Anyway, did I get the hang of it? What can I improve on?

Cheers

[Bombercloner]

Hey one of my guilds boomkins is really struggling. He asked me for help so I thought I would bring this to you guys.
Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...urnstar/simple
Logs: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ij...?s=7533&e=7778

Note: He was in for Tortos, Megaera, and Ji-Kun on May 21st.

Any help is appreciated.

[land]

Hey one of my guilds boomkins is really struggling. He asked me for help so I thought I would bring this to you guys.
Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...urnstar/simple
Logs: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ij...?s=7533&e=7778

Note: He was in for Tortos, Megaera, and Ji-Kun on May 21st.

Any help is appreciated.

Your links are broken

---------- Post added 2013-05-24 at 05:42 PM ----------

Hey guys,
I've switched my offspec from feral to balance for the first time and used the balance guide to learn the spec.
This is my char: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...uffia/advanced
This is the log of yday's Megaera kill. http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/4trp1q5hpa3qfhwd/

That kill I had only 12,5% hit because I forgot to reforge. But had the haste cap.
Anyway, did I get the hang of it? What can I improve on?

Cheers

Can't see ur gear (u logged off in guardian spec), ur dot uptimes seem a lilttle low for that fight and NG uptime was quite low (71%) for who's haste capped. Ur probably moving too much as I see u guys are killing all heads and u had the ice shit chasing u. Make sure whenever ur moving ur spamming the living hell out of ur eclipse dots. If you pop a defensive (ams+bs) and stand still for longer it would be better, specially if you are outside an eclipse.

---------- Post added 2013-05-24 at 05:45 PM ----------

Is it a good choice to hit the 10289 cap by changing yellow gems and loosing 2% of crit?
My armory is: eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/pozzo-delleternita/Qvgrayfox/advanced

Thank you

Ur still using the VP (haste on proc) trinket, if u spec into haste cap with that trinket u will only get its proc benefit when doing starfire since ur wraths would be all gcd'd. I wouldn't recomment but you can try simming it on wrathcalcs and see what it tells u.

[Naeviah]

Log: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-pg...?s=8719&e=9079 (this is just for heroic Ji-kun...I didn't fly or get a feather. I tunneled on the platform on the boss the entire fight)
Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...abellah/simple

I feel like I'm way under performing. I know my gear isn't the greatest, but I should do better than I am (at least I feel). Any tips or tricks that I'm missing?

[Slippykins]

Log: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-pg...?s=8719&e=9079 (this is just for heroic Ji-kun...I didn't fly or get a feather. I tunneled on the platform on the boss the entire fight)
Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...abellah/simple

I feel like I'm way under performing. I know my gear isn't the greatest, but I should do better than I am (at least I feel). Any tips or tricks that I'm missing?

• Your DoT uptime is pretty low (~75% uptime). If you're statically on the platform the whole time, you should be able to keep up your DoTs to around 95%+ uptime, significantly boosting your damage.
• Your average cycle length was ~45 seconds, which is still a little long, considering your low levels of haste and no legendary meta gem. With 5.2k haste, you're looking at around 35 second cycle times (typically), and Ji-kun should be around 38-39, depending on Downdraft. Looks like your cycles were extended quite a bit from excessive movement - try to minimise this where possible.
• You had 13% SS proc waste, which is actually very low for your crit rating, so well done!
• Tied to your slow cycle speeds is your NG uptime being around 75% - this should be at around 85%+ for a single-target (35 second cycles).
• You have 11.2k crit rating, you may want to hit the 10289 haste breakpoint instead of stacking all that crit to improve all the points I listed above, as well as reduce your SS proc waste even further. You should see a good jump in DPS, especially for single-target fights. Remember, haste is still better per point that crit even for multi-target fights, as I explained in a post here: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post21140318

If you aren't getting feathers on Ji-kun you wont be able to get the top ranks - see if your guild will allow you to jump into the platform rotation, even if it's just for one platform. This'll give you three feathers where you can use them for a huge damage buff.

Let me know if you need any more help!

[qvgrayfox]

Ur still using the VP (haste on proc) trinket, if u spec into haste cap with that trinket u will only get its proc benefit when doing starfire since ur wraths would be all gcd'd. I wouldn't recomment but you can try simming it on wrathcalcs and see what it tells u.

Thanks for your advice, i'll wait to change the trinket first!

[Slippykins]

Hey one of my guilds boomkins is really struggling. He asked me for help so I thought I would bring this to you guys.
Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...urnstar/simple
Logs: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ij...?s=7533&e=7778

Note: He was in for Tortos, Megaera, and Ji-Kun on May 21st.

Any help is appreciated.

Tortos:

• DoT uptimes are lower than what they should be for Tortos - and there's a disparity between them (85% sunfire, 75% moonfire). Tortos is a big movement fight, but you should be able to roll those DoTs consistently on any targets especially since you spend a lot of your time only able to cast instant cast spells.
• Naturally your cycle lengths and NG uptime will be lower because of the random, sporadic movement. Regardless, he only used Incarnation/CA once in a 4 minute fight, rather than twice. Even when you're getting bounced around, your cooldowns should take priority.
• He cast Starfall 6 times and only hit 81 times - on Tortos where there's a good deal of multiple targets, he should align Starfall when he's guaranteed the whole 10 seconds will hit at least two targets, netting him a bigger DPS benefit. Delaying Starfall past a full cycle is obviously going to result in a loss (Starfall being refreshed upon entering a Lunar eclipse), but alignment with turtles or bats should be relatively easy.

Megaera:

• Megaera is mostly a static fight, not much movement involved unless you're targeted by multiple beams/debuffs. Looks like he got Cinders once and wasn't targeted by beam at all, so I'll assume he stood still for most of the fight.
• DoT uptime is pretty low again, only 60-64% this time. For a stand-still fight, this should be a lot higher. NG uptime was also only 59% - this should be more like 85% considering his haste levels, maybe more like 90%.
• If we take into account 6 Rampages at 20 seconds long each, total "fight" length would be 259 seconds. He made 6 full cycles in that time, meaning 43 second eclipse cycles. This should be more like 33-35 for his haste, and this directly impacts his DoT and NG uptime. More attention needs to be directed to his cycling speed and movement.

Ji-Kun:

• I've already covered DoT uptime, but again it's ~60% for Ji-Kun. Looks like he only got in for one egg/hatchling platform, and he got the feather buff. However, he only used 1 feather out of his stack of 4 - I assume this was to get back onto the platform. A good deal of damage was lost since he didn't use the other 3 feathers to get the feed buff. Additionally, since he only went to one platform, he should have had a lot of standing around on Ji-Kun's platform, so more attention should be on his eclipse cycling again.
• Basically the other points I covered for the last two bosses are applicable here. DoT uptime, NG uptime, eclipse cycles.

Let me know if you need any more help.