Alright, I need advice in regards to my Mage.

First, here’s my Armory: Ernst Armory
Or at WoW-Heroes if it’s more helpful: Ernst @ Wow-Heroes

My problem: Simply put, my damage per second is not as high as it should be.

By the time I stopped running instances with my Death Knight, she was getting close to doing 3,000 dps on boss fights. She was usually first or second on the DPS lists, depending on which boss it was.

Now, my Mage is quite better geared than my DK was, and yet I can’t seem to do more than 2,300 dps on bosses, either in Heroics or in 10man raids.

I used to go as Frost, because my guildies appreciated the Replenishment from my Enduring Winter. Since 3.3, though, they (healers in particular) have been able to get their Mp5 higher, so I’ve been going Arcane.

As Arcane, my rotation usually is thus: Arcane Blast – Arcane Blast – Arcane Blast – Missile Barraged Arcane Missiles

If MB hasn’t procced by the third AB, I’ll cast AB once more. If MB procs that time, I hit AM. If it hasn’t procced by the fourth AB, then I hit Arcane Barrage so I can get back to my main rotation right away.

When I play frost, My rotation is basically to spam Frostbolt. When Brain Freeze procs, I throw a Fireball. If Fingers of Frost procs, and we’re fighting a boss, I hit Deep Freeze; otherwise I toss an Ice Lance.

I usually save my talents like Icy Veins, Arcane Power, Mirror Image, etc. until the bosses so that we can burn them down. I also have a trinket, Mark of the War Prisoner, that I pop as well.

Since reaching the Hit Cap, I was going to focus my gemming on Spell Power and Haste with Reckless Ametrine, but I’m thinking… should I instead focus my gems on Crit and Haste?

The bottom line is that I’m missing about 1,000 dps. I’m a frakkin mage for crying out loud, and it’s not like my gear is horrible. It’d say it’s pretty good for about a month at level 80. Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something in my rotation(s)?

I really need to figure this out; we want to try Lord Marrowgar again in Icecrown Citadel, and Lady Deathwhisper if we can. Our guild leader says all DPS should be doing at least 3k, but I’m not even close to being able to maintain that. Not even against target dummies.

[/QQ]

Ever since I’ve been a fan of the fantasy genre, I’ve been drawn to the wizard/sorcerer/mage character type. The idea of hurling balls of burning fire at my enemies, tearing open holes in the space-time continuum to travel hundreds of leagues in a matter of a few steps, or repelling everything from rain to falling arrows with an unnoticeable shield of magic has always been attractive to me.

When I was first exposed to MMORPGs with the game Everquest, my first character was a wizard. To make a long story short, Everquest kind of soured me on playing magic-based classes in games. I fell back to melee classes – Shadowknights and Rogues in Everquest, Rogues and Deathknights in World of Warcraft.

WoW is different than EQ when it comes to magic-based classes, however. (Actually, it’s different in a lot of aspects, but for the sake of this post….) I won’t get into the nitty gritty of why they’re different, but let’s suffice it to say that being able to solo (as a Mage in WoW) has been a huge factor in my reignited interest in these magic masters.

Einz, whose Armory you can check out in the sidebar, is an old character. He was my second character to make it to a decent level, and has been put on the back burner several times. I created him long before Burning Crusade was released; on the Silver Hand server in fact, under the name Ernst. When we moved to Sisters of Elune because of population issues on SH, he came with.

For his first 60 levels or so, Einz was an Arcane mage. I relied heavily on Arcane Missiles and (the now defunct) Improved Arcane Missiles, which made the spell uninterruptable by damage. It served me well for quite a long time.

While in Hellfire Peninsula, I toyed with an AoE Frost spec, but the experience per hour I was getting was not worth the heightened risk. In fact, I wasn’t getting any more experience per hour than I was blasting things one at a time. So I went back to Arcane. This was about where I got caught up in the Death Knight craze.

For the most part, my other characters went untouched while I played my Death Knight. I’d considered getting back into my Mage, but after months of disuse, the talents had been changed, and the idea of relearning the class made it unappealing. Back to the Death Knight.

After a couple raids in which we had a serious lack of ranged DPS, I decided to level my Mage for raiding and instances. But there was a problem. The last few times I’d tried playing Einz, each fight would suck up at least half of my health and mana. That was no way to go through Outlands and Northrend. So a friend and I did some research, and found the Frost tree.

Not discovering the Frost tree as a solo spec until 63 is kind of like having rhinoceros in your studio apartment for three years, then suddenly saying “Hey, how long’s that rhino been here?”

Oh, the power. My mage went from “How am I supposed to solo like this?” to “Holy crap, how is this not OP!”

Just by spamming Frostbolt I could kill creatures before they even touched me. And even if they did, for various reasons, I could throw up Ice Barrier and get off that last Frostbolt without being interrupted. Finish them off with a Fire Blast or an Ice Lance, and I’m ready for the next sucker with health and mana bars close to full. Of course, these results will vary greatly if there are adds, I’m jumped, or we’re in close quarters, but Ice Barrier is a great help in those situations.

For a while I was using a rather sloppy Frost build. I was doing close to 800 dps. Just the other night, though, I finally got around to fine-tuning my spec. I went with a raiding build that used Torment the Weak as well as some other talents in the Frost tree. After this respec, my dps jumped up at least 100 points. I’m now doing over 900 dps on average, with peaks and valleys ranging from 500 all the way up to 2,000.

As you can see in my Armory, I’m wearing mostly quest gear. The only exceptions being the heirloom shoulders and robe. I’m level 75, and yet I’ve seen level 80 “DPS” characters only doing 900 dps in Heroic dungeons.

There’s a lot of potential for my mage when he hits 80, but of course I’m not going to get my hopes up. I’m not going to expect 3k dps the first time I run a Heroic. Hopefully it won’t be completely lousy, but the important thing is that I’m able to improve with time. That is the whole point, after all, isn’t it? And part of that continual improvement will be finding the best talent build.

As my paladin started into her 40s, my experience with the class began to grow strained. Quests were getting fewer and farther between, it seemed. The mobs were getting tougher, but my measly DPS seemed to stay the same. I could still tank 4 or 5 things at a time, but I was also starting to reminisce about how my Death Knight could tank 4 or 5 things and still dish out serious DPS. And he would end the fight at or near full health. My paladin usually had to cast Gift of the Naaru, a bunch of self heals, and maybe even Lay on Hands. I was starting to get fed up with it.

Then Patch 3.2 happened.

More specifically, the nerf to Exorcism happened.

This seemed to throw my whole Paladin play-style off. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on Exorcism’s instant cast. I was finding myself hitting the button to cast while I was running. Or moving just after I started casting it. It was the straw that broke the Paladin’s back.

I wanted my Death Knight back.

I didn’t really have a problem with that, except for a few issues:

1. I hadn’t played my DK in quite a while; I’d taken a multi-month hiatus from the game earlier this year, and had almost completely forgotten how to play a Death Knight.
2. He was on Horde side.

This second issue was the one that gave me pause. Sparing details, those that I socialize with in WoW were making a shift back to Alliance. So, I had a decision to make.

Should I delete my level 77 Blood Elf Death Knight so I could reroll on Alliance side?

I thought about this long and hard. I’m a bit of a packrat, you see, and have trouble deleting things. Even Soulbound weapons that I know I won’t use again; if it looked cool or it had been a trusty companion for many levels, I have a hard time sending it to that Great Pixel Bucket in the sky. Comparatively, the prospect of deleting a level 77 character was agony.

Granted, rerolling another Death Knight meant I’d only have to replay 22 (19 if you don’t count the starting area) levels, as opposed to all 77. Even still, that’s a lot of work tossed down the drain.

How will I solve this dilemma?

Stay tuned for rest of this tale!

Succumbing to various forces of persistent coercion, I made a paladin a couple weeks ago. It is the first paladin I’ve played in a long time, and I think I owe an apology; I’m not sure to whom this apology should go, so I’ll just leave it open and if the shoe fits….

The last time I tried playing a paladin, I only managed to get to level 18 or 20 before the accumulating boredom finally became too much to bear. This was back when Seals only lasted two minutes and were “consumed” by Judgements. It was really hard for me to die, but it also took a long time to kill anything. So, I deleted the paladin for something a little more exciting.

Fast forward two expansions.

This time around, I have motivation in the form of a friend who has a level 80 Protection paladin. Oh, and a more exciting class to play helps, also.

I rolled a Draenei for one reason: Gift of the Naaru. It’s already saved my ass a dozen times, and I’m sure it will save me several dozen more.

I began as Retribution, but switched to Protection at level 24. I wasn’t playing a paladin for its DPS, and the survivability of a Tankadin is hard to ignore. Very hard.

So I’m level 35 and mired in Stranglethorn Vale. The only quests I have are four levels above me; all the lower quests are done.

So with the prospect of my paladin becoming even more fun to play, I offer an apology for ever doubting the power of the paladin class.

Humbly Yours,

Nyarla

Last night I was able to give my Death Knight a real workout. I started off gathering quests in and around Thrallmar. As expected, they were pretty similar to the Alliance versions, but with slight modifications. For example, the Alliance quest Fel Orc Scavengers has you kill 20 Bonechewer Orcs, while the corresponding Horde quest Bonechewer Blood has you collect blood from the orcs.

My minion and I headed out to finish up a couple of the quests I’d started the first night of my arrival in the Outlands. As I got into the swing of playing the class, the first thing I noticed was that my DPS was pretty darn close to that of my 65 rogue. I’d say I averaged about 350 DPS, sometimes getting up to 425, sometimes only pulling down 250. Enyx’s DPS averages around 425, but even still, this piddly little 58 Death Knight is closer than what I’d probably think he should be.

I chose Unholy for my Death Knight because I liked the performance of that talent spec in the beta. I may try Blood for a while, just to see how the DPS compares since I wasn’t able to in the beta.¹

The minion, the centerpiece of the Unholy Death Knight’s talent tree in my humble opinion, is pretty strong. When I didn’t have any Corpse Dust, I had to slaughter an orc in order to raise another minion. Fighting solo, I did notice a sizeable drop, probably 30-35%, in my damage output. It took noticeably longer to defeat the orc, as well. The Death Knight’s minion is not as powerful as a Hunter’s pet, obviously, since Hunters get talents for their pets, but it’s definitely a nice little buddy to have following you around.

Unlike my mage and rogue, I haven’t developed a fighting technique with my Death Knight yet. With Enyx and Einz, there’s a certain order I’d cast spells or use abilities, depending on where in the fight I am and any other circumstances. With my Death Knight, however, I’ve just been mashing the Strikes for the most part. Other than pulling with Death Grip² and slapping a Icy Touch on the target right away, there’s no method to the madness of my fights. I just swing away, smacking whichever Strike is available and throwing in a pinch of Death Coil to taste.

[Fast forward 24 hours...]

With a night of Unholy Death Knighting under my belt, I decided to give Blood a try. It took me a little while to get into the groove – or at least some semblance of a groove – but I managed to spend almost the whole night in that talent spec. The first thing I wanted to compare to Unholy was Blood’s DPS. I have to say I wasn’t all that impressed. I didn’t notice much difference on average, but it seemed like the spikes were a lot more extreme than with Unholy.

Another attraction of the Blood tree are the myriad self heals. The green numbers were flipping by quite a bit during fights, especially when accompanied by my posse of Bloodworms. But again, I didn’t really notice a difference on my health bar compared to when I was Unholy. With both specs, my health bar only ever went down when I was getting beat on by at least 3 creatures. I felt more comfortable as Unholy, and since there wasn’t a gross difference in performance between the two, I switched back to Unholy.

The Unholy Death Knight reminds me quite a bit of the Shadowknight class in the original Everquest. It was the my main character’s class, though I never got above level 53. Shadowknights were a hybrid class, a mix of a warrior and necromancer. They were tanks that used DoTs and a weak pet to offset their slightly reduced Armor Class. They were the anti-Paladin. Unlike Azeroth’s Death Knights, however, Shadowknights of Norrath could not stand toe-to-toe with adversaries that weren’t significantly less experience than they.³ To solo, the Shadowknight had to snare and fear their target and hack away at their backs like a despicable rogue, their pet not much more helpful than a mosquito.

The Death Knight, while reminiscent of the old days spent terrorizing Norrath, is much more powerful, much more independent. This jives better with the lore of the class and the overall feel one should have while playing it. The Death Knight sows fear and disgust, if not outright hate, everywhere he goes. It’s the same with the Shadowknight; yet how can you live up to this if you have to rely on groups or beating on fleeing creatures in order to gain experience?

The Death Knight feels like the new model of Shadowknight,⁴ version 2.0. It will take quite a bit of playing to really get into the groove, but I won’t mind.

I’m sure a vast number of people will tire of the new class, the new toy, and we’ll see the number of Death Knights taper off in the coming weeks and months. I don’t think I’ll be one of them.

Having already leveled three Death Knights through the newbie area, I wanted to see what the class could really do. Well, relatively speaking, anyway. I wasn’t going to go joining any raids or Pee-Vee-Peeing, as the Damn Kids are wont to say these days, but I wanted to see what kinds of numbers they might throw down.

All in all, I didn’t really get a good sense of their power over the course of the night, for many reasons. Before I left, I wandered around Dalaran trying to find the Mechano-Hog vendor. Once I realized that it wasn’t actually a vendor but a motorcycle that somehow is able to exchange money for a bike, it was golden. I joy-rode a bit around town, then decided on sowing seeds of Death throughout the frozen wastes.

First of all, Northrend is completely foreign to me. I have no idea where anything is, nor do I know what areas are designed for what zones. I wanted to try my hand against some 78-80 level mobs, but I was clueless as to where I might find such creatures. So, I hopped on my government-issued Nether Ray and flew off into the sunset.

I flew around blindly for a bit and picked an area at random. I was in the Storm Peaks, I think, and there were kobolds and some… weird things. I wandered around a bit and found a cave with level 78 Garm Watchers.

To say it was a massacre would be an understatement. I went through the cave with my ghoul minion for a good five minutes, slaughtering everything. My health bar didn’t move. If it did, it was imperceptible to me. It wasn’t until I gathered up three kobolds in addition to a Garm Watcher that my health bar started to go down. Even still, I wasn’t in any real danger.

Now, this could have been because of the armor I was issued, but this level 80 Death Knight is strong. Throw in my “permanent” ghoul minion, and I’m a machine. I only wish I’d had a damage meter going so I could see what my dps was. Even though my weapon had a speed of 3.6, with all the Strikes and special attacks, the weapon was rarely idle. Even with the two-hand weapon, the damage, both yellow and white, kept pouring out.

Like I said, though, this wasn’t in a raid situation, or even a questing situation. I just picked some trash mobs at random and threw down. So, I can’t say how they fare in more difficult situations, but I can say that I am looking forward to starting my real Death Knight on a live server and tearing through the landscape.