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oh for crying out loud
Aug. 9th, 2010 02:09 pm...I'm chugging along on my mage (75, and 2/3 of the way to the next level), and doing random dungeons. Now, for solo play while leveling, I like frost -- ice barrier is love ♥ -- but I've dual-specced to be arcane for dungeons (or really any group play with a tank).
I did a random dungeon yesterday, switching to arcane, and my dps output was abysmal. As in, not just bottom of the dps meter, but abouit a quarter or less of the damage output of the next person above me, and averaging 350-ish dps.
For scale purposes, the dungeon I just did, the *healer* was averaging 123 dps. So my cute little mage, who is supposed to be dps (and mages tend to be high dps, albeit very fragile if anything so much as looks at them), spamming damage spells as much as possible, was doing only twice as much damage as someone who throws occasional lightning bolts in between heals.
This /did not add up/. At all.
I whined in guild chat, and amanda gave me some arcaning advice (simplified to "spam arcane barrage until missile barrage procs, then arcane missiles, with blizzard for aoe"), which helped, a little -- I think I got up to 385 dps -- but it still made no sense. And one of the people in my party asked if I was planning on pulling my weight. I said it was gear stuff. I didn't have any other explanation.
So. Fastforward to today. I finally got around to installing RankWatch, which monitors for underleveled spells. I turned off the notify options, because I mainly want it for myself, to make sure I didn't forget to train stuff, which I hadn't so far (and yes I'd checked the trainers).
Some of you may guess where this is going.
It was nice and happily quiet while I was frost-specced; but as soon as I went into a dungeon and switched to arcane, it started flipping out and giving me warnings.
So I checked, and ... so, okay, if I have Spell X on my bar, and train a new level of that spell, the bar automatically updates. But apparently, it doesn't update the other-spec bars. At all. And I'd generally trained in frost spec.
Turns out, in arcane spec, I'd been larking about with rank 3-5 of skills that I'd trained up to ranks 12-15.
Rank 5 of arcane missiles does 117 damage every second.
Rank 12 does almost twice as much.
........yeahhhh. So very not good.
(I got the exact same dungeon today, and -- armed with the proper ranks of skills -- ended up with top dps at 1527. That makes me feel so much better.)
I did a random dungeon yesterday, switching to arcane, and my dps output was abysmal. As in, not just bottom of the dps meter, but abouit a quarter or less of the damage output of the next person above me, and averaging 350-ish dps.
For scale purposes, the dungeon I just did, the *healer* was averaging 123 dps. So my cute little mage, who is supposed to be dps (and mages tend to be high dps, albeit very fragile if anything so much as looks at them), spamming damage spells as much as possible, was doing only twice as much damage as someone who throws occasional lightning bolts in between heals.
This /did not add up/. At all.
I whined in guild chat, and amanda gave me some arcaning advice (simplified to "spam arcane barrage until missile barrage procs, then arcane missiles, with blizzard for aoe"), which helped, a little -- I think I got up to 385 dps -- but it still made no sense. And one of the people in my party asked if I was planning on pulling my weight. I said it was gear stuff. I didn't have any other explanation.
So. Fastforward to today. I finally got around to installing RankWatch, which monitors for underleveled spells. I turned off the notify options, because I mainly want it for myself, to make sure I didn't forget to train stuff, which I hadn't so far (and yes I'd checked the trainers).
Some of you may guess where this is going.
It was nice and happily quiet while I was frost-specced; but as soon as I went into a dungeon and switched to arcane, it started flipping out and giving me warnings.
So I checked, and ... so, okay, if I have Spell X on my bar, and train a new level of that spell, the bar automatically updates. But apparently, it doesn't update the other-spec bars. At all. And I'd generally trained in frost spec.
Turns out, in arcane spec, I'd been larking about with rank 3-5 of skills that I'd trained up to ranks 12-15.
Rank 5 of arcane missiles does 117 damage every second.
Rank 12 does almost twice as much.
........yeahhhh. So very not good.
(I got the exact same dungeon today, and -- armed with the proper ranks of skills -- ended up with top dps at 1527. That makes me feel so much better.)