Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2014 18:08:05 GMT
Since much of what I go into when tutoring people relies on number crunching, I recognized a need to explain how I use the creative side of my brain when dealing with this stuff. Here's a few things to identify to teach you how to play a new class. This post is a more concise and coherent summary of my last class workshop which got bogged down in the example of my thought process in learning one class/spec - poor preparation on my part.
1) Resource Management
You want to understand the resource your class/spec uses. Originally, almost every class used mana as its resource. Now you have Runes, Runic Power, Energy, Focus, Holy Power, Burning Embers. You want to get an understand of how this system works. Classes that use mana still are very straight forward, don't run out of it and you're fine. Pretty much all the others have some sort of seesaw action going on where you build up the energy bar and then spend it. In some cases you have a dual resource system, ex: Paladins who have a mana bar and Holy Power. Their abilities have a mana cost and certain ones build Holy Power while others cost Holy Power. In this case, the mana management is relatively unimportant (for Ret and Prot anyway), and the focus is on building and expanding this secondary resource. Said secondary resource generally accesses the most powerful abilities.
2) Passive Abilities
The Cataclysm redrafts of classes brought the rise in prominence of passive abilities. Originally when almost every class used mana, gear and talents were the determinant for things. This system was eventually seen as flawed and caused so many of the redesigns we've seen in the past few years. In the old system certain specs were unplayable until you reached a certain level, ex: Balance Druids were not viable until level 50 when they acquired their Moonkin form that boosted spellpower. Cataclysm made it such that all specs were viable from level 10 and had the tools needed to follow their playstyle. Passive abilities is how this was accomplished.
When you look at a rotation, many of you see a list of things to memorize and an order of priority. Think of the abilities as the bones of your body, the passive abilities are the muscles that hold them together and determine how they move. Each ability has a cost, a cast time, a duration, a cooldown and a numerical effect. Think of these as variables in an equation. There are a myriad of combinations, but in reality, all that's going on are some numbers being shifted. There is nothing inherent about one thing or the other that makes it feel like a Death Knight or a Priest. If you string together any 5 of those abilities you're just gonna see varying numbers that don't interact with one another. Passive abilities are what give those numbers context and meaning.
More importantly, they are what related things to another. This is a very important concept about rpgs and gaming in general, look for abilities that complement each other and create synergy. Passives are where that happens. Examples: As a Marksman Hunter I have a slow cast/high damage ability called Aimed Shot which contrasts with an insta-cast/low damage spell, Arcane Shot. How do I know which to use? Well, I have a passive that tells me if I use Aimed Shot on a target over 80% health, I have a 60% bonus to critically hit (double damage). This empowers what is already a hard hitting attack making it the clear choice for damage, but only in that particular instance. I also have a passive wherein all of my critical hits inflict a bleed attack on my target based on the initial damage dealt. Well, if that Aimed Shot is all but guaranteed a critical hit, it hits extra hard and now also inflicts bleed/dot damage to my target. This same passive creates bonus damage effectively and becomes a big determinant in critical rating being on the defining stats for my spec.
Passives that directly address crit or haste generally indicate it is a desirable stat for your build. I should mentioned Mastery here as well. Treat your mastery as a passive ability for your spec. It is unique to your spec and it does something without you controlling it. What makes it unique is that it scales based on your gear. What determines the value of your mastery is its conversion rate. Stats like Crit and Haste are universal. 600 crit means 1% crit rating for all class/specs. However, 600 mastery may mean 1% mastery for one spec and 4% mastery for someone else. That conversion will make your mastery central to your class or make it ancillary.
In short, read your mastery and all the passive abilities you get and look for connections, things that reference stats or other abilities. Repeated mentions means more important.
3) Classify Your Abilities
I discussed above how every ability is just a random set of numbers. Well, not all abilities are created equal to each other. If they were, there'd be very few combinations and all abilities would feel the same. Instead, a class/spec is balanced around several of those equations equaling to a specific number, a number equal or close to every other class/spec's number. So, within that collection you want to identify a few important things.
A - What is the hardest hitting ability you have relative to its cast time? Proper management of this ability will make or break your dps. Since the goal is to stack as many bonuses together to generate the biggest effect, you'll be directing those bonuses towards this ability since it will benefit the most. Treat this ability as the Sun of the solar system of your abilities. All your other abilities are planets which revolve around it. To help identify this ability, you can refer to my post under the Guides sub-forum "DPS Class/Spec Analysis in Brief."
B - What is your filler? Your hardest hitting spell is going to have a limiting factor, be that cooldown or scarcity to pay its cost. But you will have an ability somewhere that has no cooldown and is probably cheap. This will be your default to spam. Consider this the planet furthest from the Sun. It is only used when nothing else is viable.
C - What needs to be maintained at all times? This can be a DoT/HoT or a buff of some kind. The damage on these abilities is often quite high, but it is staggered over a 15 second or so period. They need to be refreshed and sort of kept in the air like juggling a ball. You only use them when a target will be alive for most of the ability's duration, otherwise the ability never has time to yield its investment.
D - What ability has a 5-30 second cooldown? These abilities aren't spammable, they are limited in their use by how often you can put them out. They are more powerful then your filler spell and so take priority. They trade priority, or proximity to your sun depending on the length of the fight. The longer the fight, the more these sort of abilities gravitate to the outer solar system and the maintained abilities gravitate inwards. The shorter the fight, the reverse becomes true. The best way to refer to these abilities is like playing Whack-a-Mole. The second it's available, you want to throw it out there. The best way to respond to them isn't to react but to anticipate them being available.
4) Line Up Your Cooldowns
Cooldowns is jargon for abilities that are high damage attacks and/or offensive or defensive bonuses with long cooldown timers, re: 1 minute or longer.
Defensive bonuses are used individually and timed to react to periods of high damage. It is better to get a 30% reduction in damage taken when you are getting hit for 300k damage (100k prevented) vs 100k damage (33k prevented). To use these properly you need to be able to anticipate these spikes of damage, and that means learning the fight and getting the timing down. DBM is useful to track these things.
Offensive cooldowns are designed to be stacked like blocks. When multiple cooldowns are used together, the whole becomes greater then the sum of its parts. This means bigger numbers => more gooder. A better and more indepth explanation of this concept can be found in the post "How to do Top DPS" posted by Konto in the PVE sub-forums. Fast forward to the 6-minute mark of the video and finish it out.
Every class has at least 1 offensive cooldown, some have several. Abilities like Bloodlust (massive Haste bonus), Stormlash Totem (chance to proc bonus damage), Shattering Throw (lower's enemy's armor by 20%) and Skull Banner (bonus crit chance) are cooldowns that affect the whole raid. Your trinkets are cooldowns, you just don't think of them as such. More on trinkets in a moment.
When identifying your class' cooldowns, look carefully at the times associated. If 2 of them have 2 min timers, they are ideal for stacking together since they are in synch. When this happens, these abilities are best managed by macro'ing them together so you click one button instead of 2. If one of them has a 1 minute timer, this also lines up neatly since 1 min increments evenly into a 2 minute timed cooldown. It is feasible to add this one also into that macro. Awkward cooldowns are ones that don't line up, say a 2 minute cooldown and a 1.5 minute cooldown. These won't line up together often making it difficult to create the benefits of stacking.
Trinkets are very powerful and one of the biggest determinants in having average vs superior dps. Consider that for my Hunter, my Agility is at about 23k. Each of my trinkets gives me about 12k, roughly a 50% bonus to the stat that makes up the lionshare of how much damage I deal. If both of those are stacked together, I am doing about twice as much damage while they are active. To put this inperspective, a Flask yields a 1k bonus to my agility and those super-expensive weapon enchants people fiend over only yield 1.6k agility - mere fractions really. A consumable potions grants me 4k Agility. Said potion is also a cooldown btw.
Prior to 5.4, you always had 2 types of trinkets, proc-based and use-based. Proc-based trinkets generally had a 2 minute cooldown and would randomly go off. A use-based trinket had between a 1-2 minute cooldown that you actively controlled through the use of a macro. Use-based trinkets were easy to stack since you could add them to your existing macro for your class abilities. Then you could ignore your proc-based trinket and still pull solid dps since you had lined up most of your cooldowns anyway. Well, that's gone now and may stay that way. Now, both of your trinkets are proc-based. The old-style proc-based trinkets are still around with their 2 minute cooldowns, but now we've got a new type. You'll see these described as having .92 procs per minute (number varies). These trinkets have no internal timer determining when they can go off again. Instead they have a baseline chance to go off that increases over time thus ensuring a mathematical average of how often it procs while still being random.
So...what does all that mean? It means that you need to respond to your trinkets instead of mindlessly managing them. This requires a new level of skill and awareness from all dps players. To do top dps, you need to react to your trinkets by triggering all your class cooldowns. I've personally picked up a new addon, extracds, to manage this better. With that addon I have a more visible display of when my trinkets are active, but I can also display when they're off cd and likely to proc so I know to be ready. Once more, we see the theme of anticipation, not reacting being key.
In short, stack your cooldowns - macro together your class abilities where possible, react to raid-wide cooldowns and your trinkets by triggering your class abilities. Don't forget your potions.
5) Talents and Glyphs
Handle these last. Read through all of your options before making decisions and don't follow online guides mindlessly. Moreover, don't be afraid to make changes back and forth on a regular basis, you're supposed to. These are meant to enhance and complement YOUR play style, not conform to the must-have build. Both of these customizations have undergone extensive revisions in the past few years to ensure that this is how they work - players have been slow to grasp that. In the case of talents, there is a mathematical right and wrong answer for some of them. Trust me on this, these mathematical differences are generally very small, like 1% difference in dps. The talent you can use well because it fits your play style will always trump the mathematically superior choice you fumble with. If you want to view the math, look at Noxxic's talent calculator. If you want a thorough discussion of the pros and cons of each talent and glyph, look at IcyVeins.
A few last things:
Each class and spec has a distinct feel and playstyle. Many of them will feel foreign and awkward to you, this is ok. Don't marry yourself to a class that doesn't suit you, it will only hold you back and make you doubt yourself as a player. I believe the best way to do this is to try every class for at least a few levels and feel the differences in how they handle the way you would test drive a car. Next time you're in game on your main, type /played. Before you commit yourself to that many hours, make sure the fit is comfortable. You wouldn't drop $15k on a new car that felt uncomfortable to drive. The more class/specs you try out, the more you'll get an intuitive sense of how a class feels.
Ask yourself this question - Where is the difficulty in this class? Gameplay is a balance of these 3 skills - Rotation Complexity, Resource Management and Movement. Each class and spec has a different balance of how much skill it asks of a player in these areas. With 33 class/specs in the game, there will be many variations on these. Some will gravitate towards requiring high skill in all areas, with some having almost none in all of them; others focus almost entirely on one or two skills etc. Honestly assess your skills as a player, which of these 3 skills are you good at? Find the class/spec that suits your strengths and weaknesses.
Ask yourself these questions:
Are there a lot of abilities in the rotation? How much juggling is there? Is it mostly filler?
How much do I need to be watching my resource bar to access my abilities? Do I need to count charges to expend? Can I simply ignore my resource bar entirely and just focus on rotation?
Can I cast and move? Does my class have options for moving quickly so I can react without losing dps during a raid? Am I standing in melee where I need to watching for more abilities splashing on to me? Do I need to be positioned behind my target for top dps?
1) Resource Management
You want to understand the resource your class/spec uses. Originally, almost every class used mana as its resource. Now you have Runes, Runic Power, Energy, Focus, Holy Power, Burning Embers. You want to get an understand of how this system works. Classes that use mana still are very straight forward, don't run out of it and you're fine. Pretty much all the others have some sort of seesaw action going on where you build up the energy bar and then spend it. In some cases you have a dual resource system, ex: Paladins who have a mana bar and Holy Power. Their abilities have a mana cost and certain ones build Holy Power while others cost Holy Power. In this case, the mana management is relatively unimportant (for Ret and Prot anyway), and the focus is on building and expanding this secondary resource. Said secondary resource generally accesses the most powerful abilities.
2) Passive Abilities
The Cataclysm redrafts of classes brought the rise in prominence of passive abilities. Originally when almost every class used mana, gear and talents were the determinant for things. This system was eventually seen as flawed and caused so many of the redesigns we've seen in the past few years. In the old system certain specs were unplayable until you reached a certain level, ex: Balance Druids were not viable until level 50 when they acquired their Moonkin form that boosted spellpower. Cataclysm made it such that all specs were viable from level 10 and had the tools needed to follow their playstyle. Passive abilities is how this was accomplished.
When you look at a rotation, many of you see a list of things to memorize and an order of priority. Think of the abilities as the bones of your body, the passive abilities are the muscles that hold them together and determine how they move. Each ability has a cost, a cast time, a duration, a cooldown and a numerical effect. Think of these as variables in an equation. There are a myriad of combinations, but in reality, all that's going on are some numbers being shifted. There is nothing inherent about one thing or the other that makes it feel like a Death Knight or a Priest. If you string together any 5 of those abilities you're just gonna see varying numbers that don't interact with one another. Passive abilities are what give those numbers context and meaning.
More importantly, they are what related things to another. This is a very important concept about rpgs and gaming in general, look for abilities that complement each other and create synergy. Passives are where that happens. Examples: As a Marksman Hunter I have a slow cast/high damage ability called Aimed Shot which contrasts with an insta-cast/low damage spell, Arcane Shot. How do I know which to use? Well, I have a passive that tells me if I use Aimed Shot on a target over 80% health, I have a 60% bonus to critically hit (double damage). This empowers what is already a hard hitting attack making it the clear choice for damage, but only in that particular instance. I also have a passive wherein all of my critical hits inflict a bleed attack on my target based on the initial damage dealt. Well, if that Aimed Shot is all but guaranteed a critical hit, it hits extra hard and now also inflicts bleed/dot damage to my target. This same passive creates bonus damage effectively and becomes a big determinant in critical rating being on the defining stats for my spec.
Passives that directly address crit or haste generally indicate it is a desirable stat for your build. I should mentioned Mastery here as well. Treat your mastery as a passive ability for your spec. It is unique to your spec and it does something without you controlling it. What makes it unique is that it scales based on your gear. What determines the value of your mastery is its conversion rate. Stats like Crit and Haste are universal. 600 crit means 1% crit rating for all class/specs. However, 600 mastery may mean 1% mastery for one spec and 4% mastery for someone else. That conversion will make your mastery central to your class or make it ancillary.
In short, read your mastery and all the passive abilities you get and look for connections, things that reference stats or other abilities. Repeated mentions means more important.
3) Classify Your Abilities
I discussed above how every ability is just a random set of numbers. Well, not all abilities are created equal to each other. If they were, there'd be very few combinations and all abilities would feel the same. Instead, a class/spec is balanced around several of those equations equaling to a specific number, a number equal or close to every other class/spec's number. So, within that collection you want to identify a few important things.
A - What is the hardest hitting ability you have relative to its cast time? Proper management of this ability will make or break your dps. Since the goal is to stack as many bonuses together to generate the biggest effect, you'll be directing those bonuses towards this ability since it will benefit the most. Treat this ability as the Sun of the solar system of your abilities. All your other abilities are planets which revolve around it. To help identify this ability, you can refer to my post under the Guides sub-forum "DPS Class/Spec Analysis in Brief."
B - What is your filler? Your hardest hitting spell is going to have a limiting factor, be that cooldown or scarcity to pay its cost. But you will have an ability somewhere that has no cooldown and is probably cheap. This will be your default to spam. Consider this the planet furthest from the Sun. It is only used when nothing else is viable.
C - What needs to be maintained at all times? This can be a DoT/HoT or a buff of some kind. The damage on these abilities is often quite high, but it is staggered over a 15 second or so period. They need to be refreshed and sort of kept in the air like juggling a ball. You only use them when a target will be alive for most of the ability's duration, otherwise the ability never has time to yield its investment.
D - What ability has a 5-30 second cooldown? These abilities aren't spammable, they are limited in their use by how often you can put them out. They are more powerful then your filler spell and so take priority. They trade priority, or proximity to your sun depending on the length of the fight. The longer the fight, the more these sort of abilities gravitate to the outer solar system and the maintained abilities gravitate inwards. The shorter the fight, the reverse becomes true. The best way to refer to these abilities is like playing Whack-a-Mole. The second it's available, you want to throw it out there. The best way to respond to them isn't to react but to anticipate them being available.
4) Line Up Your Cooldowns
Cooldowns is jargon for abilities that are high damage attacks and/or offensive or defensive bonuses with long cooldown timers, re: 1 minute or longer.
Defensive bonuses are used individually and timed to react to periods of high damage. It is better to get a 30% reduction in damage taken when you are getting hit for 300k damage (100k prevented) vs 100k damage (33k prevented). To use these properly you need to be able to anticipate these spikes of damage, and that means learning the fight and getting the timing down. DBM is useful to track these things.
Offensive cooldowns are designed to be stacked like blocks. When multiple cooldowns are used together, the whole becomes greater then the sum of its parts. This means bigger numbers => more gooder. A better and more indepth explanation of this concept can be found in the post "How to do Top DPS" posted by Konto in the PVE sub-forums. Fast forward to the 6-minute mark of the video and finish it out.
Every class has at least 1 offensive cooldown, some have several. Abilities like Bloodlust (massive Haste bonus), Stormlash Totem (chance to proc bonus damage), Shattering Throw (lower's enemy's armor by 20%) and Skull Banner (bonus crit chance) are cooldowns that affect the whole raid. Your trinkets are cooldowns, you just don't think of them as such. More on trinkets in a moment.
When identifying your class' cooldowns, look carefully at the times associated. If 2 of them have 2 min timers, they are ideal for stacking together since they are in synch. When this happens, these abilities are best managed by macro'ing them together so you click one button instead of 2. If one of them has a 1 minute timer, this also lines up neatly since 1 min increments evenly into a 2 minute timed cooldown. It is feasible to add this one also into that macro. Awkward cooldowns are ones that don't line up, say a 2 minute cooldown and a 1.5 minute cooldown. These won't line up together often making it difficult to create the benefits of stacking.
Trinkets are very powerful and one of the biggest determinants in having average vs superior dps. Consider that for my Hunter, my Agility is at about 23k. Each of my trinkets gives me about 12k, roughly a 50% bonus to the stat that makes up the lionshare of how much damage I deal. If both of those are stacked together, I am doing about twice as much damage while they are active. To put this inperspective, a Flask yields a 1k bonus to my agility and those super-expensive weapon enchants people fiend over only yield 1.6k agility - mere fractions really. A consumable potions grants me 4k Agility. Said potion is also a cooldown btw.
Prior to 5.4, you always had 2 types of trinkets, proc-based and use-based. Proc-based trinkets generally had a 2 minute cooldown and would randomly go off. A use-based trinket had between a 1-2 minute cooldown that you actively controlled through the use of a macro. Use-based trinkets were easy to stack since you could add them to your existing macro for your class abilities. Then you could ignore your proc-based trinket and still pull solid dps since you had lined up most of your cooldowns anyway. Well, that's gone now and may stay that way. Now, both of your trinkets are proc-based. The old-style proc-based trinkets are still around with their 2 minute cooldowns, but now we've got a new type. You'll see these described as having .92 procs per minute (number varies). These trinkets have no internal timer determining when they can go off again. Instead they have a baseline chance to go off that increases over time thus ensuring a mathematical average of how often it procs while still being random.
So...what does all that mean? It means that you need to respond to your trinkets instead of mindlessly managing them. This requires a new level of skill and awareness from all dps players. To do top dps, you need to react to your trinkets by triggering all your class cooldowns. I've personally picked up a new addon, extracds, to manage this better. With that addon I have a more visible display of when my trinkets are active, but I can also display when they're off cd and likely to proc so I know to be ready. Once more, we see the theme of anticipation, not reacting being key.
In short, stack your cooldowns - macro together your class abilities where possible, react to raid-wide cooldowns and your trinkets by triggering your class abilities. Don't forget your potions.
5) Talents and Glyphs
Handle these last. Read through all of your options before making decisions and don't follow online guides mindlessly. Moreover, don't be afraid to make changes back and forth on a regular basis, you're supposed to. These are meant to enhance and complement YOUR play style, not conform to the must-have build. Both of these customizations have undergone extensive revisions in the past few years to ensure that this is how they work - players have been slow to grasp that. In the case of talents, there is a mathematical right and wrong answer for some of them. Trust me on this, these mathematical differences are generally very small, like 1% difference in dps. The talent you can use well because it fits your play style will always trump the mathematically superior choice you fumble with. If you want to view the math, look at Noxxic's talent calculator. If you want a thorough discussion of the pros and cons of each talent and glyph, look at IcyVeins.
A few last things:
Each class and spec has a distinct feel and playstyle. Many of them will feel foreign and awkward to you, this is ok. Don't marry yourself to a class that doesn't suit you, it will only hold you back and make you doubt yourself as a player. I believe the best way to do this is to try every class for at least a few levels and feel the differences in how they handle the way you would test drive a car. Next time you're in game on your main, type /played. Before you commit yourself to that many hours, make sure the fit is comfortable. You wouldn't drop $15k on a new car that felt uncomfortable to drive. The more class/specs you try out, the more you'll get an intuitive sense of how a class feels.
Ask yourself this question - Where is the difficulty in this class? Gameplay is a balance of these 3 skills - Rotation Complexity, Resource Management and Movement. Each class and spec has a different balance of how much skill it asks of a player in these areas. With 33 class/specs in the game, there will be many variations on these. Some will gravitate towards requiring high skill in all areas, with some having almost none in all of them; others focus almost entirely on one or two skills etc. Honestly assess your skills as a player, which of these 3 skills are you good at? Find the class/spec that suits your strengths and weaknesses.
Ask yourself these questions:
Are there a lot of abilities in the rotation? How much juggling is there? Is it mostly filler?
How much do I need to be watching my resource bar to access my abilities? Do I need to count charges to expend? Can I simply ignore my resource bar entirely and just focus on rotation?
Can I cast and move? Does my class have options for moving quickly so I can react without losing dps during a raid? Am I standing in melee where I need to watching for more abilities splashing on to me? Do I need to be positioned behind my target for top dps?