Level 70

[BrianStephan]

Hi Guys I have finally reached lvl 70 after god knows many months now my question is I have got the first key fragment and now need to get the second and third I am at the moment a DPS warrior now to get into instances more or raids would u guys recommend I change to full prot spec or can I stay a full fury DPS?

 

[Pitbull]

Hi Guys I have finally reached lvl 70 after god knows many months now my question is I have got the first key fragment and now need to get the second and third I am at the moment a DPS warrior now to get into instances more or raids would u guys recommend I change to full prot spec or can I stay a full fury DPS?

Depends mainly on the Guild your in.

But always have 50g spare to respec if needed

 

[kHayne]

Best bet is prot. People *always* needs tanks. People rarely need bad* dps that can't cc though.



*gets better, but only at t5/t6 level.

 

[werries2]

Grats on 70!
To change to prot or stay fury is up to you. Prot gives you an easy way to find groups for instances, but you will need to build your tank set fast. Fury like said before have quite low dps early on, but jumps up quite fast as your gear improves. If you have a few well geared tanks in your guild and you party with them a lot, stay fury.

 

[JoseQuervo]

Best bet is prot. People *always* needs tanks. People rarely need bad* dps that can't cc though.



*gets better, but only at t5/t6 level.

Agreed, our guild has Karazhan on farm status and the only melee DPS class that we take with us is Rogue and even then we only allow one Rogue to come with us. Basically the game's instances are best suited for ranged DPS and thus you will almost always have Mages, Warlocks, Hunters, Shadow Priests, Elemental Shamans and Moonkin druids picked before you.

Unfortunately in fights like Maiden and Prince, melee DPS is useless since they're usually the first to die because the healers will be priorotising their heals on tanks. Basically this means that your chances of dying early during a boss fight are very high, thus turning it into a 9 man raid. In the case of ranged DPS, they're far away from the damage and thus the healers rarely have to waste mana on them at all.

The limitations of melee DPS are not only related to Karazhan, any group that wants to increase their chances of success will always take ranged DPS over melee DPS for just about any instance in the game. As long as ranged DPS watches their aggro, the healer will be able to focus healing on the tank only. Add to that, just about all ranged DPS has one or more crowd control abilities, basically means that DPS warriors, Ret Paladins and Cat druids are the bottom of the choice list when they're trying to fill the spots for DPS in any group.

As kHayne suggested, you will probably wish to go tank if you want to increase your chances of getting into heroics and raids. Tanks are always in short supply. I have a level 70 epic geared warlock and a level 70 blue/epic geared tank and I have way more invites to go to instances and raids with my tank. Theres way too much DPS classes out there, thus tanks and healers will always have the biggest demand.

Just remember, if you're going prot, other classes can get by on mediocre gear, tanks on the other hand need to get the best gear as fast as possible. You've probably figured out by now that when the tank dies, theres a 90% chance that the rest of the group is going to be dying next. Do not start heroics or even consider entering karazhan until you have gotten rid of all your green items and ensure that any blue items that you do have are level 70 at minimum.

 

[BrianStephan]

Thanx Guys

Will change over to Prot then will need to do a full gear reshuffle and get new gear but thats all part of the fun

 

[Pitbull]

Unfortunately in fights like Maiden, melee DPS is useless since they're usually the first to die because the healers will be priorotising their heals on tanks. Basically this means that your chances of dying early during a boss fight are very high, thus turning it into a 9 man raid. In the case of ranged DPS, they're far away from the damage and thus the healers rarely have to waste mana on them at all.

As long as you only have 3 Melee on Maiden no one dies

Nightbane same thing

Illhoof - I would like to see you kill him without hard melee on the chains (Sacrifice) Mages and Pala's have no issues with the Chains. But every other clothy goes squish.

I guess it depends on what you like most. But Melee DPS is perfect just on 1 fight you can't have more than 2 melee DPS + 1 Tank and that is Maiden

 

[JoseQuervo]

As long as you only have 3 Melee on Maiden no one dies

Nightbane same thing

Illhoof - I would like to see you kill him without hard melee on the chains (Sacrifice) Mages and Pala's have no issues with the Chains. But every other clothy goes squish.

I guess it depends on what you like most. But Melee DPS is perfect just on 1 fight you can't have more than 2 melee DPS + 1 Tank and that is Maiden

Well maiden is generally an easy fight, but for kara first timers I'd still say that ranged DPS is always preferred there compard to melee.

Our group for Illhoof has 2 tanks as the only melee in the raid, one tank(Warrior) focuses on Illhoof, the other tank(Bear Druid) focuses on his minion and then focuses on the chains until the imp respawns. The rest of the group would be 3 healers (Paladin, Resto Druid, Holy Priest) and 5 DPS (Hunter, Warlock, 2 Mages, Shadow Priest) and we have him on farm with that group. We don't even consider ourselves to be good at stuff like this since we're a casual guild and in the past we often found ourselves alt+tabbing to wowwiki in the middle of raids to figure out tactics on boss fights. So I don't see why any guild dedicated to raiding would have a problem with their clothies dying in this encounter.

Basically we all just macro "/target Demon Chains" before the fight, as people get sacrificed all DPS switches to the chains and people are out long before they know it. I'm usually there as my warlock because of the seed of corruption tactic and I've been in an encounter with him where I was chained 4 times and I never got close to being 'squished'.

As far as the Prince fight goes, if the melee DPS there gets enfeebled and they dont run back fast enough they'd be dead in a heartbeat. Ranged DPS never has that problem

 

[Next Thing]

Agreed, our guild has Karazhan on farm status and the only melee DPS class that we take with us is Rogue and even then we only allow one Rogue to come with us. Basically the game's instances are best suited for ranged DPS and thus you will almost always have Mages, Warlocks, Hunters, Shadow Priests, Elemental Shamans and Moonkin druids picked before you.

This is only really true for the 5 and 10 mans. On our kara runs we take some melee with us. It does help having a properly balanced group.

Group 1
--------
MT = Feral
OT = Feral / Warrior ( Prot/DPS Spec )
Rogue
Tree
DPS War/Rogue/Pali/Shaman

Group 2
--------
Lock
Lock
Mage
Priest
Pali/Shaman/Priest ( You need the pali for certain fights to make it easier , but not totally needed )

In 25 man you need a balance raid as that is what the fights demand. In some of the fights if you have an excessive ranged build raid , you will come unstuck.

If you have a well setup Melee group in 25 man, EVERYONE in that group will be doing 1000+ dps. You need to use the best of each classes abilities to boost everyone else. With the 2.4 change that all bosses will bleed I can see more use for ferals in the dps groups.

 

[BrianStephan]

Lvl 70

The thing is I hate being a tank I prefer to be a DPS but if getting into raids and instances its better to be a Prot speced I will do it.

 

[Pitbull]

The thing is I hate being a tank I prefer to be a DPS but if getting into raids and instances its better to be a Prot speced I will do it.

Prob with being a Pala is this

You will either OT/MT or Heal

There is no DPS space for a non CC DPS

 

[TheShogun]

Prob with being a Pala is this

You will either OT/MT or Heal

There is no DPS space for a non CC DPS

Just an Amendment, there is no DPS space for non CC BAD DPS.
Ret is better then it was but the group utility it gives isn't as good as an Enhancement Shammy and their DPS isn't as good.

There are a few players who manage to pull some amazing tricks with Ret but they're the exception to the very large rule.

 

[Pitbull]

we had an echance Shammy in our raid on Wednesday

Those bloody things are insane, The tank who is really good had a very hard time keeping aggro. The Shammy had to keep himself in on just about every fight.

I would say Enchance Shammies are currently the top DPS'ers

 

[kHayne]

Thing is, don't sideline your melee dps too much at early-raiding, because at lategame raiding their scaling is very strong, and they begin to overtake casters as your guild's primary source of dps. The amount of damage rogues and fury warriors push out later on is really imba.

I'd love to have a T5 geared raiding dps warrior but fact of the matter is getting there is not easy, people generally aren't patient to drag along a slacking dps warrior in the early stages of raiding, so either you tank and hope to ninja rogue loot on the side, or you pvp like crazy for S3/Honour epixx and gem for +hit everywhere you can and hope to get into a 25man raiding guild. We have a fury warrior that did that(mostly pvp epixx), he does pretty well, often top 5 on 25man stuff, and that'll probably start increasing once he gets some good t5/ZA drops.

*edit* - Naw, enhance is good I won't argue, but there is simply nothing that beats an appropriately geared rogue.

 

[kHayne]

btw Ret can do 'ok' but it needs an enhance shaman for windfury.

 

[Pitbull]

Thing is, don't sideline your melee dps too much at early-raiding, because at lategame raiding their scaling is very strong, and they begin to overtake casters as your guild's primary source of dps. The amount of damage rogues and fury warriors push out later on is really imba.

I'd love to have a T5 geared raiding dps warrior but fact of the matter is getting there is not easy, people generally aren't patient to drag along a slacking dps warrior in the early stages of raiding, so either you tank and hope to ninja rogue loot on the side, or you pvp like crazy for S3/Honour epixx and gem for +hit everywhere you can and hope to get into a 25man raiding guild. We have a fury warrior that did that(mostly pvp epixx), he does pretty well, often top 5 on 25man stuff, and that'll probably start increasing once he gets some good t5/ZA drops.

*edit* - Naw, enhance is good I won't argue, but there is simply nothing that beats an appropriately geared rogue.

I greeted u guys at Kara stone last night
and chatted to a guy called unbreakabull or something

 

[kHayne]

Heh, he's da boss. Cheesy name ftw .

 

[diabolus]

With the 2.4 change that all bosses will bleed I can see more use for ferals in the dps groups.

Hmm i didn't actually look at this, but how many bosses does not bleed ? I know Kara is a big waste on the trash , as everything is undead...immune to lacerate, immune to all bleeding attacks . It has annoyed me endless being a feral tank that can't use lacerate..nevermind the loss of half of my cat abilities in almost an -entire- instance!

 

[Next Thing]

Hmm i didn't actually look at this, but how many bosses does not bleed ? I know Kara is a big waste on the trash , as everything is undead...immune to lacerate, immune to all bleeding attacks . However the bosses in Kara seems to be more often than not bleedable ?

The change

Non-corporeal Undead and Mechanical creatures are now susceptible to bleed effects.

This makes up a lot of the bleed immune bosses/elites in many instances. soz I am talking wider , not just kara

As long as one of the ferals is keeping up

For both Bear Form and Cat Form, Mangle causes the target to take 30% additional damage from Shred and bleed effects for 12 sec.

then I can see a lot more love for the animal lovers

 

[TheShogun]

we had an echance Shammy in our raid on Wednesday

Those bloody things are insane, The tank who is really good had a very hard time keeping aggro. The Shammy had to keep himself in on just about every fight.

I would say Enchance Shammies are currently the top DPS'ers

Top Melee DPS is still Rogues and thats likely to stay the same as long as WoW is around.
Enhancement Threat used to be considerably worse pre 2.3 and pre-WF nerf. You still need to be careful though.
For example on VR the other night (Melee pwns this fight if your Raid healing can compensate for the Pounds) Top 2 DPS were the Rogues, then me and then the other Enhance in the Raid. Even though the Rogues were Top of Damage, I was topping the threat.
It's a big dps limitation and it's not likely to change.

Top Ranged is either good Huntard or a Lock. Unfortunately good Huntards are harder to find then a good Lock so our main Destro lock pretty much makes the Raid cry most fights.