Paladin Blog - World of Warcraft: January 2016

Friday 29 January 2016

Ret Solo Heart of Fear Heroic 10m

MOP raids can provide some fun at level 100, and heroic MOP raids can be quite challenging.

i know prot spec is the best for solo-ing old raids but i have to maintain my retribution/holy spec for guild raiding/pvp. therefore, i can only solo as retribution for now.

Heart of Fear - Heroic Mode, 10 man

1 Imperial Vizier Zor'lok
2 Blade Lord Ta'yak
3 Garalon
4 Wind Lord Mel'jarak
5 Amber-Shaper Un'sok
6 Grand Empress Shek'zeer

Imperial Vizier Zor'lok - Heroic Mode, 10 man

seal choice: SOT
talent choice: HA, ES, Sera
trinket choice: Vial, EDH

FYI, if the boss has no target to melee, it will start to channel Song of the Empress which does a lot of damage on us.

the fight begins at 1st platform. when you dps the boss to 80%, it will leaves behind a copy of himself and start flying to 2nd platform. don't chase after the boss to 2nd platform yet because we must kill this copy asap, otherwise this copy will start to channel Song of the Empress if left alone. once the copy is dead, rush to the 2nd platform quickly and melee the boss once to stop the Song of the Empress. take the time to heal yourself to full on this platform.

when you dps the boss to 60%, it will leaves behind another copy of himself and start flying to 3rd platform. this time, we must ignore the copy and chase after the boss because on the 3rd platform, the boss will cast Convert on players, and it will be a wipe since you are the only player in the raid now. the only way is to burn the boss ASAP, which is why i decided to save all my major CD for the 3rdplatform. take note that the 2nd copy (on the 2nd platform which you ignore) will be free to cast Song of the Empress so you may like to use a divine protection or simply LOH yourself at the end.

platform 1 - AW on the copy
platform 2 - AW on the boss
platform 3 - ES + Potion + AW + Sera + Ring + Vial + HA

Blade Lord Ta'yak - Heroic Mode, 10 man
Garalon - Heroic Mode, 10 man
Wind Lord Mel'jarak - Heroic Mode, 10 man

seal choice: SOT
talent choice: HA, ES, Sera
trinket choice: Vial, EDH

we can simply zerg these 3 bosses down, they are all very easy and no strategy is needed.

on pull, take your time to build 5 holy power, and then use all CD

ES + Potion + AW + Sera + Ring + Vial + HA

the legendary ring will explode and kill the boss, skipping the last phase of ta'yak as well

for mel'jarak, you will get stun once, but you can divine shield out of it anyways

Amber-Shaper Un'sok - Heroic Mode, 10 man

seal choice: SOT
talent choice: SW, ES, Sera
trinket choice: Vial, EDH

this is by far the hardest boss in heart of fear because of the Reshape Life mechanic. if the boss transform you into a Mutated Construct at any time of the fight, it will be a wipe since you are the only player. the strategy is to make sure that this never happen by pushing phases quickly.

1st Reshape Life = 50 seconds
2nd Reshape Life = 40 seconds

to prevent the first Reshape Life, you must finish both phase 1 and phase 2 in less than 50 seconds. and then kill the boss at phase 3 in less than 40 seconds.

in order to push all 3 phases successfully, you need to plan your CD according to the dps requirement.

phase 1 - reduce boss hp to 70% (around 2.7m)
phase 2 - kill the Amber Monstrosity (around 2.8m)
phase 3 - kill the boss (around 6.23m) in 40 secs

phase 3 has the highest dps requirement therefore i save my legendary ring for it.

phase 1 - Potion + AW + Sera
phase 2 - ES + AW + Sera + Vial
phase 3 - Drum + Potion + AW + Sera + Ring

in phase 3, you are going to take a lot of damage. it is necessary to use scared shield + divine protection + LOH in order to survive. when the ring is about to explode, you should also try to use a divine storm and clear all the adds so that the boss take the full damage of the ring itself.

Grand Empress Shek'zeer

seal choice: SOT
talent choice: HA, ES, Sera
trinket choice: Vial, EDH

final boss is very easy (as compared to amber-shaper un'sok), the only problem is the last phase where you will get feared and heavy damage, but that is ok, because we can divine shield out of it and bust her down, or we can simply skip the last phase if the legendary ring kill her on explode. she has around 8 mil hp, so you can consider hitting her to around 80% hp, and then unleash all your CD

ES + Potion + AW + Sera + Ring + Vial + HA

when i use my CD around 80+% hp, my ring is able to kill the boss on explode.

Friday 22 January 2016

Playing as a Hybrid

ever since the gear changes in 6.0+ for WOD, i am very satisfied with the way blizzard allow our gears to transform the primary stats according to our class spec. that make things so much easier for a hybrid class, such as my paladin, to be able to use all my 8 pieces of plate dps gears as my holy/tank/dps gears.

in WOD, jewellery slots (neck, cloak, ring, trinkets) gears have to be separately earned, but it is still a lot easier as compared to the past. although jewellery slots offer the most important secondary stats and proc, we are still capable of performing at 50% to 60% of a pure healer class by using a set of sub-optimal jewellery gears, since we already achieve our tier-set bonus automatically from the 8 pieces of plate.

and then things became even better during HFC. our class trinket is useful in all 3 specs and 1h weapon/shield is also use-able for both prot/holy spec at the same time, and we can also buy the legendary ring for all 3 specs. that makes us almost capable of performing a high 70% of our offspec role immediately upon demand.

i remember my role during mythic HFC progression is rather chaotic because im being requested to switch between retribution and holy as and when needed. just for your info, this constant switching between ret and holy is very bad due to the first floor of HFC. the healing requirements of the bosses in first floor is very inconsistent.

for example:- mythic progression

assault - 4 heal
iron reaver - 5 heal
kormrok - 3 heal
council - 5 heal
kilrogg - 4 heal
gorefiend - 5 heal

that means im required to switch my role every alternate boss, such as healing reaver, switch dps for kormrok, and healing council, switch dps kilrogg, then healing gorefiend. some nights, i heal 3 out of 6 bosses, sometimes 5 out of 6 bosses.

my raiding role initially is very confusing because i feel that im healing way more often than i dps, but healing is only my offspec, and my loot priority is on dps gears, not healing. the overall feeling is pretty bad until we progress into the second floor of HFC, where majority of the fights will be 4 heal, exception of Xhul being 3. when first floor is finally on farm easily, we can cut down healers and that is when i became a full-time dps raider.

and now i've been playing Legion alpha for a while, i notice some changes in the jewellery gears:
Neck - ITEM
Ring - ITEM
neck and ring slot has no more primary stats!
Cloak - ITEM
and the primary stats on our cloak is transformable now!
seems like blizzard is moving one step further with our gears. that means trinket is the only slots we need to collect for off-spec in Legion.

another good news is that the cost of switching specs is going to be free in Legion. changing specs and talents will be so similiar to D3. personally, i enjoy all the 3 specs of paladin, and have also invested a lot of time into playing them well, so i definitely welcome such a friendly change. Legion is around 6 months away so things may still change, but so far it feels like Legion will benefit hybrid players even more than WOD did.

my only concern will be the off-spec artifact. of course blizzard mention that we are able to get off-spec artifact as well (although this is not available in alpha), i'll assume the off-spec artifact to progress much slower than our main spec because we will be spending all the relic and ancient powers on our main-spec artifact first.

Friday 15 January 2016

Mythic HFC Talents and Trinkets

i notice in my guild that different players have different objectives when farming contents.

1) some enjoy going for speed kills
2) some like to min-max to achieve better dps ranking
3) some prefer to gear their alts during farming
4) a few wanted to perform better execution and strategy

since my guild have a mix of all these players, although we are in the same raid, we each have our own ways to play, hue hue hue

but when we started to wipe too often, all of us eventually align our thoughts towards (4) better execution just to kill the boss first, and leave out the desires for "next week"

while progressing mythic HFC, i remember i rarely use LOV other than iron reaver, fel lord and tyrant, because when raid overall dps is slow, a lot of hard target switching is necessary. but once we enter farming mode, i find that i don't really need to perform hard target switch that often and LOV is doing great for a lot more bosses now.

every guild progress differently. for example, my guild is slow at killing doomlord and infernals during progression. the raid leader always request everybody to hard switch, and it is also common for the doomlord/infernals to be out-of-range from boss. it takes around 1 month of farming before LOV can be use comfortably. therefore, the heirloom trinket is actually pretty good for both mythic mannoroth and archimonde.

Mythic Archimonde

Seal of Righteousness

Long Arm of the Law - handle shackles and dance
Unbreakable Spirit
Sanctified Wrath
Execution Sentence
Final Verdict

Libram of Vindication
Empty Drinking Horn

Tuesday 12 January 2016

LOV Opener - Retribution Paladin

i believe most guild love to use the legendary ring on pull. unfortunately, both our LOV trinket and seraphim takes a long time to ramp up because it requires 5 holy power and 3 crusader strikes. by the time we have all the engines going, both wings of liberty and legendary ring is over soon T_T

but during some of our pulls, i've notice that rogues sometimes uses their Shroud of Concealment so melee could actually start the fight directly on the boss instead. i find that this is very helpful because we all know starting the fight with a crusader strike is optimal.

starting with a crusader strike can help us ramp up 3 LOV stacks way faster and in addition, the dps rotation for seraphim will be much smoother too.

Opener A: ES > H > C > H > ...

Opener B: C > ES > H > C > H > ...

opener B is "almost always" better than opener A but the problem is that it takes a bit of time to run towards the boss. to produce similar effects without rogues, i decided to use Speed of Light for more bosses now, especially single-target fights such as iron reaver, tyrant velhari and fel lord. with the speed of light buff, it should be quite easy to land the crusader strike around 0.7 second. which is good enough to win opener A.

i also did some opening with spreadsheet which you can take a look here in the url below:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AUC-uxA0ToxCS8M2gTePdJoC0ANCTTksUUbnulLvAvc/edit?usp=sharing

for viewing purpose, i don't want the spreadsheet to become too complicated, thus some parts are simplified using my own char stats. anyway, the result will still be the same as what everyone already know by now.

1) it is always better to run into the boss and hit crusader strike at the beginning, as long as you can land the crusader strike within 1 second on pull.

2) even though the beginning is out of sync for seraphim, the dps for seraphim already catch up to FV after 30 seconds of the fight.

3) if guild strategy is to use the ring on pull, and you already use AW as planned, yet the ring user forget and delay the ring by 1-6 seconds. for this case, it is perfectly fine for seraphim, in fact that is better for us, it is still a dps gain even though the first few seconds of AW did not get the ring benefit.

Tuesday 5 January 2016

PVP Rated Battleground

happy new year, and this is the first post of the year. i have been pvp-ing with the guild during the spare time. rated battleground is actually quite fun!

some random pvp achievements :p

our group photo after getting first sergeant :)

we are still a pve guild but there is really nothing much to do nowadays. since mythic HFC is just a one night raid, we end up having a lot of time for alt runs, leveling new chars, farming achievements, and pvp, etc.

Starting from Ground Zero

legendary ring don't work

tier set don't work

pve trinkets don't work

pve gears are all scale down to level 725 (worse than blue pvp gears)

0 versatility

we keep losing initially, in fact we are basically getting raped every match lol. that is expected of course, without any pvp coordination and experiences on our part, and without any pvp gears, and without knowing the maps well, there is no way we can survive in a rated battleground.

after playing a few rounds, we began to form up our own strategy for each maps, and also begin to play more in-sync with each other. our mmr drop after losing few rounds, and we start to collect more pvp gears, things became more "meaningful" now.

PVP Gearing

pvp gearing is very simple & straight forward

the priority is trinkets > weapons > pvp set > off-pieces

pve trinket is totally useless, nothing more than just a stats stick. and yet pvp trinket is so powerful. so logically, it is top priority.

weapons is our best dps slot, and became our next priority.

from then on, we try to get as much versatility as we can, from gears and enchants.

PVP Addon

i didn't know there are useful addon for pvp, until someone pointed out that we should use them.

battleground targets
http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/battlegroundtargets

healers have to die
http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/healers-have-to-die

with the help of these addon, we can easily see who are the enemy healers and everyone can switch to the same target quickly as and when we need to focus down a specific healer.

Gearing Up Choices

as mentioned previously, our 2 trinkets and weapons is the most important upgrade initially.

priority upgrades

1 Trinket x 2
2 Weapon

after these, i decided to came up with my own list of gears changing priority. surprisingly, sockets still work in rated battleground.

our pve gears - scale down to level 725
honor pvp gears - level 730
conquest pvp gears - level 740

however, if the 725 came with a socket, it is potentially better than the 730 pvp gear. since we only play rated battleground, we should be earning more conquest points than honor points too.

using honor points (gears without socket)

1 Shoulder
2 Glove
3 Boot
4 Cloak
5 Bracer
6 Ring

using conquest points (gears with socket)

1 Chest - socket
2 Helm - socket
3 Legging - socket
4 Belt - socket
5 Neck - socket
6 Ring - socket

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