Posts with tag debuffs

One of the changes that will have a pretty significant impact on how we play both in PvE and PvP is that many buff and debuff spells are being changed or removed. It can all seem a bit complicated at first viewing, what with all the class specific changes, but it's really fairly easily broken down and it won't directly affect how you play all that significantly. We're going to go over the changes and explain what they are and how they'll change how you play, if they do.

First up is the Weakened Armor debuff. Essentially, this is the old-school Sunder/Expose Armor affect. It's gone entirely. Rogues no longer have Expose Armor, warriors no longer have Sunder Armor and the Devastate prot warrior ability no longer applies Weakened Armor. In addition, the druid ability Faerie Fire now applies Physical Vulnerability instead, increasing all physical damage taken by its target by 4% for 30 seconds. This is because it was thought that having both Weakened Armor and Physical Vulnerability was excessive, since they did basically the same thing. What this means in terms of how we play? Almost nothing. If you're a rogue, you won't use Expose Armor anymore because it's gone. A warrior tank will hit Devastate the same as they always did. Druids are still going to use Faerie Fire to debuff things. Hunter pets that had similar abilities will no longer have them.

Next up is the Weakened Blows ability that almost all tanks had - it reduced incoming damage. The abilities that provided it still exist, they simply don't provide it anymore. Thunder Clap is an example of an ability that currently provides the debuff, but won't in Warlords. Since all tanks applied this debuff, it basically wasn't very meaningful, and instead monsters will simply be tuned to do less damage to compensate for its removal. What changes for players? Nothing. You won't apply the debuff, but you'll still use those abilities that did once apply it.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses how to handle one, some, or many whelps.

Before BlizzCon, I left off with the beginnings of how to put together your UI. While it would be easy to generate a post of macros and Weak Auras import strings, that wasn't my intent. User interfaces in WoW are varied and can be unique to the player, so I think it's a greater lesson to learn how you can design your UI to help you, rather than to help patchwork import settings together for you.

So while the setup of unit frames may have seemed incredibly basic to some readers, knowing where some set frames are helps you take control of how your targets are presented to you. Much like healers considering a raid frames grid to be a central part of a healing UI, having damage targets at the ready is a central if often subconscious part of a DPS UI. Today is another basic topic, but it too has a subtle effect on how a proper UI setup can aid in DPS.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill extends her thanks to her guildmate @FinalflameWoW for his 'copter flying.

I started part one as an introduction, to set everything up. While "yaw" (keybinds and macros) and "pitch" (procs and cooldowns display) are important parts of a UI, you can't start doing your damage dealing job without a health bar to take down. So this week, we're going to look at all kinds of health bars you can find on a warlock's UI.

You can see all my unit frames in action here in the full version of the header image. Remember: I'm using the addons I use as examples, because it's easiest to draw from what I know. You can be an accomplished DPSer with minimal addons on a mostly default interface, if you so wish.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is almost free for summer. Almost.

The last two weeks have been on simple topics like glancing at a raid parse on World of Logs (WoL) or looking at the various graphs WoL has. Before we dive into the actual combat log itself with the expression editor, I'm going to take a stop at what buffs and debuffs are going on in the fight. This information is still broad in scope and can apply to almost anyone, but it's still important foundation knowledge for warlocks and logs.

Debuffs help us beat bosses, but not all debuffs are created equal. Over WoW's eight years, debuffs have dealt extra damage, prevented damage, healed us, given us mana, slowed boss attacks, sped up our own, and helped us to hit harder.

Some are more powerful than others, but today those concerns are meaningless. Applying every possible debuff and keeping it active is a critical component to success.

Believe it or not, however, there was a time when your raid leader would yell at you for doing exactly that. Your weaker debuffs weren't just considered useless -- using them was a dire liability.

Eight is not enough

Vanilla WoW had an interesting, longstanding, and highly criticized technical limitation. A raid of any size could only apply a maximum of eight debuffs to a boss. As you can imagine, forty-player raids had many, many debuffs at their disposal, but only eight could ever be active at one time.

To make things worse, the game didn't differentiate between debuffs. The latest one that was applied would knock off the oldest one, regardless of type or power. It's not difficult to figure out how this could become a huge problem.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once a lonely tauren shaman in a bad Scarlet Crusade-themed transmog set, Josh Myers
I'm doing my best not to be excited for Mists of Pandaria yet. This is partly because we've not even seen a hint of the beta starting yet and thus have a few more months of patch 4.3 to play before MoP comes out. This is also partly due to the fact that my new guild just started heroic Spine of Deathwing attempts, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to look forward to anything ever again. Ever.

Even though I'll never be excited for anything ever again, Blizzard has released some juicy new MoP information over the past two weeks, and a good chunk of it pertains to enhancement shaman. If you still have the ability to be excited for things, this something you want to read. If you're also progressing on heroic Spine of Deathwing, you probably still want to read this ... if only to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Ghostcrawler has continued his series explaining some of the system changes coming to World of Warcraft in Mists of Pandaria. The newest blog post discusses which buffs players will be bringing to groups as well as which debuffs certain classes can inflict on enemies. Blizzard is giving a variety of classes each category of buff and debuff in order to make setting up 10- or 25-man raids a breeze.

First, Ghostcrawler outlined the main design goals of the new buff and debuff categories, saying that making the player feel more powerful in a group as well as making group-building easier were two of the biggest reasons for the changes. DPS classes should be excited to know that buffs and debuffs will vary per role rather than spec, so a DPS warrior will bring the same utility whether he is arms or fury.

After discussing the design goals, Ghostcrawler gave some notes with regards to the new categories of buffs and debuffs, with the new categories as the big finish. Check out all of the categories in Ghostcrawler's post after the jump.

Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same.

One of the great joys of writing Addon Spotlight is watching the evolution of addons and their relationship to World of Warcraft over time and how the effectiveness and usefulness of certain addons wanes and waxes like the phases of the moon. Blizzard's new raid frames have not replaced my own custom job, but they have been getting progressively closer to a complete package, as I discussed only a few weeks ago. But there are ways, friends, of adding on to even the Blizzard default raid frame setup to give them just a bit more substance.

Today, I've got three little additions to the default Blizzard raid frames that can help you with targets, marks, and debuffs. If you like options, these addons will add a ton of them to the Blizzard standard setup, making the entire package look a little more like Grid. So sit back, relax, and check out these new additions to the Blizzard default raid frames.

Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

Reader UI is no stranger to UI crashes and corruption issues. Believe me, I've had my fair share of UI crashes that completely and utterly obliterated my entire setup. It is a sad state of affairs when your settings just decide to up and leave on you. Not fun, right?

Losing your user interface in a crash or through some corruption issue is annoying and demoralizing, to be sure. However, rebuilding usually takes less time than you think and sometimes adds new and unique aspects to your UI that weren't there before. In destruction comes organized rebirth, or something like that.

Icewalker sent in his UI with the sad tale of UI failure and starting over, which I felt for. Poor, innocent UIs getting corrupted, probably from Old God influence, just puts me in a bad mood. So today, we will take a look at Icewalker's new, basic UI and grieve together for all of those user interfaces lost in senseless crashes and the wanton ways of home computing.

Addon Spotlight is a collaborative effort on occasion, when you fine community folks send me addons in my email or over Twitter to use for the column. Sometimes, a guildmate or Mumble compatriot will fire off some addons that they find particularly useful. One such compatriot is hunter extraordinaire and begrudging worgen Bliky. We have a special relationship; Bliky gives me misdirects, and I send him awful and weird whispers. It's a balanced relationship.

When I asked Bliky for a few of his favorite addon utilities that might be able to help out my readers, he was happy to oblige, since he scours my columns each and every week to see if I made another terrible hunter joke about him. No, there will be no hunter jokes or snipes today. Instead, I will celebrate these recommendations, since they are some pretty cool utilities that everyone can benefit from.

Addon Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. We'll look at everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your interface folder will never be the same! This week, we look at a different style of cooldown, debuff and buff tracker.

In a previous Addon Spotlight, I reviewed Sexycooldown, a timeline-style buff/debuff/cooldown timer that brings with it functionality and an awesome look and feel. This week, I wanted to showcase another of my new favorite addons that performs certain tasks similar Sexycooldown/ForteXorcist, but does so in a different style. A few emails that I have received have asked for a bar-style cooldown and debuff tracker. Well, here is your answer: NeedToKnow. I've tried my absolute best to avoid a dumb joke about "you're on a need-to-know basis," but you do need to know about NeedToKnow! NeedToKnow.

We've spent the last two weeks talking about the core raiding buffs, the eclectic raiding buffs, and how those combine to create synergy in your raid. The final step of that Voltron-esque sum-being-greater-than-the-parts are the host of debuffs that your raid can put out.

The thing about debuffs, though, is that many have to be actively applied. Sure, folks like paladins spam their Judgments at all costs, so the debuff associated with that spell is certainly going to be nearly always present. But what about a rogue's Expose Armor? Does that really have a solid place in their rotation?

If a rogue has to go out of their way in order to Expose Armor (and they do), then you have to sort out how much DPS you lose from the rogue changing their rotation. Is that loss really worth having the debuff present for your raid? Equations like that is the stuff Elitist Jerks is made up of.

Nonetheless, if you can manage to squeeze in all of your debuffs (or even most), your raid is going to have a vast performance improvement. Let's take a look behind the jump, and see who lays which debuffs down on the hapless and helpless boss.

I rarely notice buffs when I'm running heroic dungeons. Granted, every buff helps in maximizing DPS or survivability, but I personally don't find it really necessary. Do you absolutely have to have Blessings of Kings or a Prayer of Fortitude? I've had players who have absolutely refused to pull until they get all the buffs they want. I'm sitting there looking at their health and their gear and it isn't like they're fresh 80s or anything. We're talking tier 9 level stuff or higher. I don't think having Dalaran Brilliance is going to shave off a significant amount of time in a run personally.

Now when it comes to raiding, I make sure I have everything. On progression raids, I always check to make sure every buff that is available is active. At the same time, I'm a little more relaxed about it when taking on trash. I don't drop a Fish Feast for the trash leading to Lord Marrowgar, for example. I wait until we get to the boss itself before laying out one of these.

What? The feasts are expensive!

Anyway, what about you guys? Do you require every buff before tackling anything in a heroic? Are there certain buffs you can live without during raids?

One of the big UI changes coming in patch 3.3 is an option to Consolidate Buffs. It appears that when the feature is enabled, specific short term buffs like Replenishment and longer duration buffs like Gift of the Wild or Arcane Brilliance will be tucked aside and hidden in a buff box. When you mouse over it, the box will expand and display the buffs within. In other words, we can get more real estate back!

On the other hand, certain important buffs that may be critical to the operation of your class will always be displayed. For example, Art of War procs on my retribution paladin will always show up so I know when to slam Exorcism. (Don't hate on me because I have ret paladin now!) Heroism (or Bloodlust) and other similar cooldowns will be shown as well as range limited buffs like totems and paladin auras.

From the debuff side of things, there's another option called Castable Debuffs. When it's enabled, all it will do is show debuffs that you apply. My elemental shaman will throw Flame Shocks and that's all that will appear. I won't see a shadow priest's Misery or a rogue's Rupture. It's an interesting way to cut down on screen clutter.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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One of the major overhauls heading from Burning Crusade into Wrath of the Lich King was the consolidation of buffs and debuffs. In an attempt to keep raid groups from thinking they had to bring one specific class to get one specific buff or debuff, Blizzard switched some spells up, gave buffs to more classes, and made them unstackable, the result being that one can take one of a certain handful of class and specs to get the buff or debuff they desire, in theory giving a raid more choice about who they bring.

Still, the buffs and debuffs remain, and Ghostcrawler has been having some pretty interesting discussions about them in the past few days. To start with, he came out and said it pretty plainly: Replenishment is Mandatory. Blizzard will balance fights under the assumption you have Replenishment much as they do under the assumption you have a tank. In the short term, this means your raid is probably going to want to find a Shadow Priest, Retribution Paladin, or Survival Hunter if they haven't already.