6.0 Talent and Glyph Guide

Yeah, I imagined that if we were a 25 man guild, having a third tank there to switch taunting the boss more often and have some help on the adds would do wonders. Seems to be too much of a DPS loss for 10 man, though.

The fights where a lot of stuff is going on at the same time that needs to be done seem somewhat easier on 25 man, even though you probably get a lot more stuff on the ground to run out of.

We tried three-tanking Horridon, but the third tank felt like he was just standing around most of the time and not contributing much at all, so we went back to two tanks and killed it a couple of attempts later.

No point in 3 tanking it. We noticed the little adds on the gates had no real aggro table. No matter how much we tried we couldn't keep them on us, but we could keep all the important ones. I could try to solo tank it, I'd probably use US anyway just because it gives me an average cd on DP of 32-36 seconds. Can always have the two holy paladins HoP me.

Which fights in ToT would you want to glyph Holy Wrath and Focused Wrath for? I was armory stalking Theck just now and noticed he had glyphed those.

I'm guessing they are for the Lei Shen fight? The adds are elementals so holy wrath stuns them? But they don't seem to respond to well aggro (at least to my efforts on LFR), so you'd rather all the damage went to Lei Shen?

Or are there other ToT fights when you'd want to use these glyphs? (They are very interesting glyphs to me but situational.)

Meg hm adds are elementals, so very nice to have the stun glyph to interrupt them, just be careful as they'll go stun immune after a while then stuns won't even interupt them.
I personally never use focused wrath.

I do glyph final wrath for several fights, especially any fight that becomes more dangerous when the boss is at low health.
Iron Qon hm when all 3 dogs are up with low health final wrath is very nice.
Durumu hm stays sub 20% longer than normal due to life drains.
I'm unsure about the maths but I rank final wrath above alabasters shield on any fight where I'm not getting hit all the time.

econ21 wrote:Which fights in ToT would you want to glyph Holy Wrath and Focused Wrath for? I was armory stalking Theck just now and noticed he had glyphed those.

I'm guessing they are for the Lei Shen fight? The adds are elementals so holy wrath stuns them? But they don't seem to respond to well aggro (at least to my efforts on LFR), so you'd rather all the damage went to Lei Shen?

Or are there other ToT fights when you'd want to use these glyphs? (They are very interesting glyphs to me but situational.)

I can't remember which fight in particular I glyphed those for, but it's definitely a situational thing. Focused Wrath is "free" in that it's a minor glyph, so I use it any time I don't want to cleave to adds (for example, in this case it was probably Twin Consorts - no point in cleaving to the meteors, as they're immune to damage).

Focused Wrath would be useful as the boss-tank on Tortos if you have somebody kiting the bats to avoid cleaving to them.

Focused Wrath seems quite useful for any encounter where you'd like to focus damage on a single target, where damage on additional targets is wasted. Also, if you have Final Wrath, it makes sure that all the damage goes on the target below 20% and all possible damage is gained from the glyph, rather than having parts of it spiral off to different targets that aren't in execute range.

The only downside of Focused Wrath is that you can't use HW to pick up several mobs, but I find it pretty weak for picking up groups of mobs anyhow, as the damage output on a group of mobs is quite lowe. Naturally, if you use the Glyph to stun, you want it to hit all targets as well.

Theck, in due course, please could update this guide for 5.4 and/or maybe do a Sacred Duty blog survival guide for the patch? The thing I am most interested in some guidance on is EF vs SS, as that seems potentially to be the biggest change in how we should play. Most of the other 5.4 changes don't seem to imply significant changes in our behavior. I'll probably switch to the tank meta and cloak, stack stamina after capping haste, hit and experience but otherwise keep on doing what I do. Getting used to relying on EF rather than SS would be a big change for me though and I am rather vague on the whys and hows.

EDIT: For clarification, the below comments apply to 5.4. Keep SS during 5.3!

As things are now, EF flat out beats SS even without Tier 16 4 piece, except on the pull, as you can't pre-pull EF.

EF also has some synergy with Tier 15 2 piece, so if you switch to EF, you might consider hanging on to them, until you can jump to Tier 16 4 piece.

You're only vulnerable on the pull. If you spec HA or SW, popping them at the pull should mitigate most of that.

This is a newbie question, but when switching from SS to EF, how do we alternate between SotR and WoG? I only use WoG in an emergency or to recover from a big magic blast. I am pretty scrupulous in keeping up SS thanks to Theck's weakauras, and often refresh it to take advantage of increased vengeance. How should I use WoG/EF?

There's a thread about the SS nerf, which lead to an SS to EF discussion here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=33513

Your question made me think, though. Naturally, you want to cast it at 5 HoPo and 5 BoG. The 5 HoPo part is easy enough, but getting to 5 BoG within 30 seconds is rather tricky.

If you have T16 4pc, you don't care about how much HoPo you have at the moment. You simply want to cast it with as much BoG as possible.

Gonna toss it up as a discussion in the other thread.

econ21 wrote:Theck, in due course, please could update this guide for 5.4 and/or maybe do a Sacred Duty blog survival guide for the patch?

Yes, and yes. Also, I'm planning on an SS vs. EF blog post this week sometime, provided I get time to write it. Don't expect the guide to be updated until next weekend at the earliest though, as I don't want to mislead people into taking EF before 5.4.

econ21 wrote:This is a newbie question, but when switching from SS to EF, how do we alternate between SotR and WoG? I only use WoG in an emergency or to recover from a big magic blast. I am pretty scrupulous in keeping up SS thanks to Theck's weakauras, and often refresh it to take advantage of increased vengeance. How should I use WoG/EF?

The rudimentary sims I posted in the thread Thels linked just used EF as soon as we had 4+ stacks of BoG and less than 2 seconds remaining on the EF HoT. It was no more sophisticated than that. I've fooled around with some more intelligent conditions that improve it a bit though; essentially holding EF until you take a noticeable hit, even if it means that the buff drops off. For example, if you dodge 3 attacks in a row while the buff expires, the sim would wait to re-apply EF until you took some worthwhile damage. That improves EF's efficiency and thus reduces overall spikiness.

My 5.4 WeakAuras set will have EF support, though at this moment it isn't sophisticated enough to factor in Holy Power (it always assumes you use 3). If you want to try them out early, you can grab them from my pastebin.

Thanks for updating the guide, Theck, and also for the Weakauras strings which I am using.

I've been glyphing Word of Glory for the dps now that I've switched to EF, but reading your guide wonder if the dps I'll gain from it will be too small. Do you have a sense of how the numbers stack up compared to rivals for that slot like the nerfed alabaster shield and final wrath?

As a back of the envelope calculation, if you get 3% extra damage per HoPo for 6 seconds after using WoG, and we use WoG with 3HoPo every 30 seconds, that translates into a 1.8% increase in overall damage. (0.03x3x6/30)

That seems very close to what you simmed for rival glyphs pre 5.4.

For example, at 150k vengeance, I read your matlab results as saying that Final Wrath gives you 9% more damage in the enrage, so 1.8% overall. Alabaster shield gave 3.5% when it was a 20% buff, so I infer it would be about 1.8% with the nerf to a 10% buff.

Given that Blizzard wants to balance stuff, it's probably not a surprise if all 3 glyphs are each giving a similar (1.8%) dps buff.

My inference from this is that final wrath is the go to dps glyph (after focused shield) if, as seems often to be the case, dps in the final "enrage" phase of a fight is of special importance. Alabaster shield might be good if there are lots of adds. I guess I probably should stop glyphing WoG.

I don't have any up-to-date numbers that are any more accurate than your guesses. Been too busy lately to finish writing the SimC automation code I've been working on, which should replace the 5.x MATLAB thread stuff.

What's the general consensus on battle healer glyph then?

I ran it this week on Garrosh, and was surprised to see that it was still healing me as well as my raid. I'm guessing he healed me when i was the raid member with least hp?

It accounted for about 20% of my healing done. contributing approximately 10k hps. My thinking is that it's better used to smart heal raid members on low hp than heal me, who has significant amounts of other self healing plus numerous damage reduction abilities.

Edit: Ok, just read Theck's 5.4 post and realized the error of my ways, somehow managed to overlook that whole 30% thing. Oh well, i'll look forward to about 35k hps on myself next time i pull garrosh

Without the nerf, it would probably have remained a good option, reducing our self-survivability somewhat, to increase the raid's survivability. However, the nerf is just way too much.

They changed it from mandatory to don't-ever-take.

Thels wrote:Without the nerf, it would probably have remained a good option, reducing our self-survivability somewhat, to increase the raid's survivability. However, the nerf is just way too much.

They changed it from mandatory to don't-ever-take.

I wouldn´t be that harsh. Tested it together with my co Paladin Tank on some fights, normal and heroic. It´s always good on boss tactics where you don´t take full dmg all the time (e.g. shamans hc, siegetank).
we are doing 25mans,and have not heared complains from the healing side yet.
It remains situational. But if you don´t tank on the very edge of being healabe it´s worse considering takeing a glyph that turns a spell with up to 80% overheal down to 20%. ( http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-i ... 16&e=11764 our siege tank kill for example. sure our hps could have been higher, but the main issue were dropping raidmembers in the aoe phase, all raidhealing that could be contributed would help, I even spreaded some EFs in the raid )

edith: anyone else tested it yet?

I haven't felt the need to use it 'til now (working on spoils HM atm)

but I'm thinking, maybe Thok HM could be BH option.

ramboschox wrote:

Thels wrote:Without the nerf, it would probably have remained a good option, reducing our self-survivability somewhat, to increase the raid's survivability. However, the nerf is just way too much.

They changed it from mandatory to don't-ever-take.

I wouldn´t be that harsh. Tested it together with my co Paladin Tank on some fights, normal and heroic. It´s always good on boss tactics where you don´t take full dmg all the time (e.g. shamans hc, siegetank).
we are doing 25mans,and have not heared complains from the healing side yet.
It remains situational. But if you don´t tank on the very edge of being healabe it´s worse considering takeing a glyph that turns a spell with up to 80% overheal down to 20%. ( http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-i ... 16&e=11764 our siege tank kill for example. sure our hps could have been higher, but the main issue were dropping raidmembers in the aoe phase, all raidhealing that could be contributed would help, I even spreaded some EFs in the raid )

I think you're focusing on the wrong metrics here. The heal that's 80% overheal most of the time that saves you from death once in a while still saves you from death once in a while.

The glyph nerfs a fairly powerful heal by 70%. Sure, it might knock down the amount of overheal, but it turns a fairly powerful self-heal into an anemic raid heal that will be fairly insignificant in a sea of much stronger smart heals.

I'm also a little skeptical of your logic here. You're heavily advocating glyphing Battle Healer to help the raid survive a high-damage AoE situation.... yet taking an awful 5-target Holy Prism heal over Light's Hammer, which is better in almost every conceivable raid-healing situation. I don't understand that decision at all.

theckhd wrote:[...]
I'm also a little skeptical of your logic here. You're heavily advocating glyphing Battle Healer to help the raid survive a high-damage AoE situation.... yet taking an awful 5-target Holy Prism heal over Light's Hammer, which is better in almost every conceivable raid-healing situation. I don't understand that decision at all.

Thanks for the clarification (the part I cut out in []brackets, not a fan of awful long quotes, and too lazy to splitquote).
I never consider using the glyph on try nights I consider dangerous, as were the tries on the juggernaut. All wipes were due to too many lost dps in the aoe phase. No tank deaths. Not even once in a while. Therefor we choosed to give it a try. The healers did not complain. I was a bit more on my toes to trigger cd´s reactively if dropping, as that wasn´t the case, I started to try to time them preemtively again.
To cut it down: I highly recommend using it on fights where you don´t tank all (plus significant raid wide dmg, but thats in a lot of fights) the time AND tank deaths are no issue/you have good tankhealers. But thats a thing one has to figure out for his own raid.


Holy prism was the idea of my co tank: During the aoe phase our raid was kinda scattered (first gathered in one spot to stack oil, then moving on and after the knockback, well scattered), so we couldn´t find a sweet spot for the hammer to be placed. The reason why we tried prism was: to add a tiny bit more raidheal in the aoe phase (it´s targeting is at least smart - lowest health member?).
With correct raid movement hammer wins over prism, hands down.

Does that sound at least a bit reasonable?

P.S:
And were you just a little sceptical or did you not understand it at all or did your opinion change in the very moment you wrote that lines? (just trolling, but you started with eristic rhetoric^^)

mh I try to understand your situation here.

first on juggernaut (I suppose Hm) you need to DPS in Phase 2 to avoid the enrage? wow that is tough. we never DPSed in that phase, jsut stood in the back and waited it out. healing was no problem at all with healing rain, druid shroom, DK AMZ, and 2 Paladins with devo aura. (also you can bubble in P2 to avoid the knockback FYI and take the mines while the rest of the raid is knocked back without getting damage \o/ )

so that is why WE decided that LH would be pretty wasted on a protpally here (nothing to tank in p2, no smiteheal form Battlehealer (IF I would consider it), no vengeance, sad pally )

on P1 everybody is greatly spread out what makes Holy prism first choice here, pretty obvious IMHO. (best possible burst heal support for the raid. nice selfheal after taking a mine)

tanks should be safe as you say, as Hand of Purity is OP in this fight (chaining it even more.)

ramboschox wrote:Does that sound at least a bit reasonable?

More reasonable, anyway. I haven't seen that strategy. On 25H, we stack once for oil and then move and stack again in a different location. We make heavy use of location-based raid cooldowns though, so stacking and piling LH, Barriers, Spirit Totems, etc. is how we survive that phase while continuing to DPS.

That said, on 25H tank damage is pretty severe. We were certainly in danger of dying, because each melee was ~half our health or more:
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[21:33:33.682] Iron Juggernaut hits Theck 370817 (B: 158922)
[21:33:50.576] Iron Juggernaut Flame Vents Theck 558551
[21:34:00.315] Iron Juggernaut Flame Vents Theck 483328

[21:34:22.040] Iron Juggernaut hits Agwyne 404594
[21:34:23.619] Iron Juggernaut hits Agwyne 204291 (O: 209315)
[21:34:30.463] Iron Juggernaut Flame Vents Agwyne 336130

As you can see, even on our kill, we lost a tank (Agwyne) wearing the cloak (so effectively 2 potential deaths w/o cloak). That's why I'm loath to give up SoI during that phase - I'd rather have a full-strength heal to potentially save me than a 30% strength heal that might heal me instead of a DPS.

We also didn't lose many people in the transition once we got our cooldown rotation sorted out. The first two wipes were definitely "couldn't handle aoe phase damage" wipes, but that was due to shoddy cooldown preparation. Once we sorted that out, the transitions were pretty smooth. I'm also not in melee for a good chunk of the transition, since the tanks soak mines, so glyphed BH would be entirely useless for half of the phase. OTOH, I can toss a LH on the raid group while on the run during that phase (and on the melee group during phase 1 - nice since LH is superior healing *and* DPS on the boss than Holy Prism is).

ramboschox wrote:P.S:
And were you just a little sceptical or did you not understand it at all or did your opinion change in the very moment you wrote that lines? (just trolling, but you started with eristic rhetoric^^)

Different things. Skeptical of the logic, because it was inconsistent. LH is generally better for raid healing than HPr is, since both need the players to be clumped in one spot (ground-based for LH, near boss for HPr) and LH is sustained healing over 14s rather than one-shot every 20s. So the logic of "take GoBH for raid healing" seemed strange when simultaneously passing up an even better raid healing option in LH.

Didn't understand the choice of HPr over LH at all because I can't see a situation where HPr is better for that encounter, even after your explanation of how you do the fight.

Schroom wrote:first on juggernaut (I suppose Hm) you need to DPS in Phase 2 to avoid the enrage? wow that is tough. we never DPSed in that phase, jsut stood in the back and waited it out. healing was no problem at all with healing rain, druid shroom, DK AMZ, and 2 Paladins with devo aura. (also you can bubble in P2 to avoid the knockback FYI and take the mines while the rest of the raid is knocked back without getting damage \o/ )

so that is why WE decided that LH would be pretty wasted on a protpally here (nothing to tank in p2, no smiteheal form Battlehealer (IF I would consider it), no vengeance, sad pally )

on P1 everybody is greatly spread out what makes Holy prism first choice here, pretty obvious IMHO. (best possible burst heal support for the raid. nice selfheal after taking a mine)

tanks should be safe as you say, as Hand of Purity is OP in this fight (chaining it even more.)

See, I had a totally different experience. We DPSed phase 2 for sure on 25H, though we didn't come very close to enrage on the kill either. Not sure if we would have w/o that phase's DPS or not.

OTOH, LH was still superior to HPr here. HPr is a single-target heal on range, because they're too far away from the boss to receive the smart heal effect if you use it to damage the boss. I never single-target heal anyone in 25-man, so it would be a waste. On the other hand, LH is better boss DPS and better raid healing when dropped on the melee group, and it was virtually required for phase 2 (almost every holy/prot paladin in our raid just takes LH baseline, because we all save/use them for "group up and raid heal" situations).

And in our case, tanks weren't safe at all, so we stuck with Unbreakable Spirit for extra DP coverage. The T16 2-piece HoT isn't too bad in these circumstances either, where an extra HoT tick or two can make a big difference. I didn't even think about Hand of Purity - I guess that would be for the fire DoT? I found having DP every time was really useful, not sure I'd want to give that up for a situational help in HoP.

Then again, it only took us 5 attempts total from first pull to kill, so we didn't really think about it too hard regardless. We just focused on the obvious weak points (raw tank spike damage from melee+flame, raw raid healing throughput during p2) and the boss sort of fell over.

Mh I guess this fight is REALLY different on 25m compared to 10m.

no one except our paladinhealer is in 30 yard range of the tank (except the second tank before taunting)

so everybody is so far spread out that LH would just do nothing whereas HPr can reach EVERYBODY. (hit the Boss and reach potentially every player in 40 yard radius around the Boss.)

no LH needed in P2 as I said the damage here is negligible when you wait it out.

and Meleehits are pretty laugable in 10m the one thing that hits like truck is the FireDoT. so HoPurity takes care of this.


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just checked my logs, Ignite Armor is about 200k dmg every second with 3 stacks, combined with everything else it helps a lot to reduce this with HoPurity.
his melee hits are about the same size. ~200k ish. so niceley managable. (1st time tanking I took HA, second time tanking I kept GoAK and so on.)

theckhd wrote:

ramboschox wrote:Does that sound at least a bit reasonable?

More reasonable, anyway. I haven't seen that strategy. On 25H, we stack once for oil and then move and stack again in a different location. We make heavy use of location-based raid cooldowns though, so stacking and piling LH, Barriers, Spirit Totems, etc. is how we survive that phase while continuing to DPS.

That said, on 25H tank damage is pretty severe. We were certainly in danger of dying, because each melee was ~half our health or more [...]

Thats what we want do to, as we execute the tactic better and thus stack closer, I´ll try LH again.
Regarding the danger of tank deaths: If you can cover every breath with a CD (I found Thoks on use effect pretty nice on this fight, plus the bonus health gives some more puffer) tankburst in p1 is not a real issue: Thok on use/DP unglyphet on second, GoAK or AD on third. 5 BoG EF ready on top of it and one breathphase can be covered totally by HA. I´ll have to check what CD I really need on DP, but Hand of Purity sounds appealing.

theckhd wrote:[...] The heal that's 80% overheal most of the time that saves you from death once in a while still saves you from death once in a while.

The glyph nerfs a fairly powerful heal by 70%. Sure, it might knock down the amount of overheal, but it turns a fairly powerful self-heal into an anemic raid heal [...]

Having your last 2 posts re-read, that stays a very convincing argument: Don´t reduce your own potential by 70% to do some elses job a tiny bit better.