For the past 2 months I have been two manning rares on Isle of Thunder for about 2-3 rotations daily. I'm a human frost mage and my ilvl is currently 498 and my tanking partner is a belf DK, his ilvl is 499 tho at other times i also partner with either warlock, shadow priest, fury warrior or another mage (arcane). From our experience and experimentations with the rares, below is what i can say about each rare that might help you with encounters on your warrior or boomkin tho i do think by now, you should alreadyknow what works and what doesnt.

i) Goda - the best way is to fight him in the tree trunk so his spinning wont throw you into other useless potential hazards ie slateshell wanderers or worst case getting too close with the zandalari patrol team/ mighty devilsaur. If its possible to dispel his Crystaline shield, then you can do extra magic damage as the shield actually protects him from spell damages.

ii) Lu-Ban - the best way is to stay close to him at all cost so he wont 3-bolt you to death, but since you want to play warrior that would be easy. But for range you might wanna stay close.

iii) Altabim - DPS nightmare as he casts Omen on you and I do think it cannot be dispelled because I tried. Omen will lasts for 2 mins and once its over, its a 400k damage pronto and you might die. You have to kill him under 2 mins after he first cast Omen - possible to solo on frost mage. His meatballs spell it seems doesnt do much on melee, i do think because of the range.

iv) Backbreaker Uru - as his name suggests, yes he breaks your back when he does the ground slam and you'd be cripple and unable to move/cast ie like stun and it has a very wide range, so you might wanna stay away - tip/edge dpsing, but for melee dps, it's truly going to hurt.

v) Molthor - his horrific visage is the worst thing that he could do to you coz then fears you and he'll tag along to do damage while you run. His scarab buddies doesnt hurt. Owh you might wanna keep moving, try not to stay in front of him when he does the floor slam thing.

vii) God Hulk-Ramuk aka GHR - i'd say easiest of the bunch, moreless like tank and spank, i've seen a rogue tried. The only thing you wanna watch out is his crouch spell coz thats when he selfheal, so just interrupt, and you should be ok. I never tried soloing him, but i do think it's possible.

viii) Progenitus - pretty much soloable if you can wedge yourself tightly between the bone and the torch - his knockbacks wont throw you off, but it would move you a bit from time to time, just try to get back to the safe spot if you can when that happens. Can be soloed on a mage if you find the right tight spot.

ix) Haywire - I just hate it when he zaps because that's when he does a lot of damage. We normally fight him in the ocean so that the seadragon wont get in the way.

x) Skyclaw and pet - terrorwing easy kill but while engaging skyclaw the best way to fight him in to stay rather close to him if you are range. Something like Lu-Ban but instead of bolting you with spells, he jumps on you. So either run/move around when he does that or, just stay close. And when he does that blade spin, just give him a bit of space to turn so he wont hurt you.

xi) Last but not least - Mumta, we hate him. Simply because it's hard to get to him, not worth the trouble and he spirit bolts you to death in 3 casts unless you hide behind a pillar tho during this time i read taht melee should be hitting his spirit friend. So normally we'd skip him. But from forums, he was soloed by a fire mage before.

So from all these, what i can say is, warlocks are 2nd best in soloing rares after dk. That's due to their voidwalkers. I've never partnered with hunter or pally or shaman so i cant tell how they fight. The rest well, depends on the mechanics and what sort of rare it is ie caster/melee/elemental, it all varies but to say that the specs are not balanced, each one has it's own capabilities, truly it's just the matter of preference. If soloing is a problem, then try two manning, coz i think it works just fine just as long as both of you know what to do.

From my own experience at 90 with a good 476 and above ilvl majority BC/ some WTLK raid contents are soloable but for Fireland, I dont think so but then again there's always somebody that tries to solo a boss somewhere. A good thing would be to study videos on solo raid fights at 80/85 for the old content and try to adapt it to your style as ppl fight differently even in the same build. It might take a day or it might take a month before you find what works and what doesn't for you. Just remember each fight is differently designed and some need more than one person to do it due to extra duties during engagement. If you ask me from 73- 85 its really fast actually so it shouldnt be an issue even if you wanna level up both toons.

Now to talk about blood dk well, i have a dk but she's 86 frost build and as far as I know it would be useless for blood doing DPS because it would defeat the purpose of a tank spec. Blood dk is all about damage mitigation and survivality either mastery or avoidance. You can DPS but it would be a slow DPS and you cannot expect DPS burn. It all comes back to the principle of roles, there's tank, there's dps and there's healer and then those inbetween hybrids like healer-dps. There's a reason why you have roles so that ppl can do their jobs effectively in raids and stuff which is kill mobs - get to boss- kill adds- kill boss - get loot/ach - and to stay alive while doing it. I can understand where you are coming from, you wanna get all the raids done solo so you dont have to wait for ppl because waiting is a pain in the hiny, that's why you want to have a blood dk so that you can tank, do damage and live. However you cant have every role all in one. You can have 2 i think but not all. But then again this is just from my 2cents, ppl do things everyday, so try checking out wow forums, try studying videos to see what works and what doesnt to suit your purpose and always remember to master a class and it's build takes a while and a lot of practice. Have fun.

I dont know what your mage's ilvl is but i do think you should be able to do more dps. You might wanna try using icy-vein's instead of noxxic as sometimes noxxic can get a bit inaccurate. Icy-vein also has an app called Ask Mr. Robot (you can find it when you scroll down in the gearing up section). It will calculate your toon's armor performance and will give suggestions if it needs tweaking and trust me you will see a boost in your performance.

Too bad for your server, as for my server there are a few regulars who are always waiting for partners to come up and not necessarily a group (for me the lesser the less mess). Maybe ppl dont go around killing rares much because they dont drop anything other than the lesser charms, golds, occasionally ritual stone and once a week drop - key to the palace of lei shen which will give you the extra xp with shado pan if you are lucky and of course the 15VP per rare killed which can be capped in 3 days if you are not doing anything else and if there is no rotation competition. Could be ppl didnt know they give the 15VP too. Anyway, you can always try and experiment.

Lolz arwenz, there's always skype since there is in game faction language barrier so skype, vent helps with coordination, I've helped a horde party that needed help with Echo of Kros fight because they didnt have enough ppl, even though I didnt get anything out of it i still get to learn how to fight it. And on Isle of Thunder rare fights, it doesnt matter which faction kills it, you will still get loot, vp if you tag it.

I know all of the websites would have their say in their guides however, Ask Mr. Robot is a gear optimizer app in Icy Veins that will help optimize your toon to full potential according to your build, to your armor, enchantments, stats. Each time you change something in your armor the stats would differ and it's almost a constant trip to the reforger. Some ppl say it's inaccurate but for the ppl that i know, AMR works/helps a lot.

Regarding the question on how i two man with a warrior or another mage simply would be buff-take turn on damage-take turn healing-cd management-try to keep the engagement if one of you dies so taht the boss dont reset. So what would help on survivality would be potions, bandages and other self healing abilities (i do herbalism so i get my extra heals from life spirit). As a frost mage, what helped out what frost nova+deep freeze/frostjaw other than your water elemental and mirror images. Hmm somewhat like soloing bosses in old raid contents. The other thing to consider is that both of you should have about the same amount of dps because you woulndt want to constantly top aggro - you want to be able to shift the agro to from one another to buy time. Communication is key tho. But sad to say, this partnership hasnt work well on some of the bosses like haywire. But then again if what you want is just the key, might as well go for trove hunting around the isle tho it's almost always an accident whenever i find a trove but I'm guessing there's a guide somewhere if you want to look for the troves.

hmm maybe i should go back to fire and see what the DPS is like now. It's about time they brought back Fire spec coz seems a bit awkward with previously fire ranking far too low from its fellow builds.

[quote=Shopboy,Jun 4 2013, 03:19 PM]
I tried AMR before, he ask me to pay me say no thanks

eh nobody has to pay for AMR, what you have to do is just fetch the stats from armory and it will do the rest for you.Me and my friends use AMR all the time and we didnt have to pay anything, so I'm not sure what are you talking about. If you are using Icy-Veins as one of your guides you should know that AMR works very closely with icy-veins.

It's been a while since i played fire but i do think your rotation is correct. However there's a whole bunch of missing info. just give me your toon's name so i can have a look at it on AMR and see what's your stat like.

cool, thanks for the info. i tried simcraft yesterday to test with a few different perimeters and yes it's rather accurate for reference and i do think with using world of logs and in game recount graph details would be able to tell us what's wrong with our DPS if it's somewhat under performing. The other thing would be why i prefer icy-veins than noxxic is that mage guide in icy-veins is approved by blatty - one of the world's top performing mages who is in Method.

Ok, I managed to check out your stats on AMR http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/tw/wrat...nger/victorique and its updated to your arcane spec. However from what i can see once I looked at the optimize armor performance analyzer, you have a lot of regemming and reforging to do which is about 40-50% change. You said you changed to arcane and can maintain between 3-10 top dps right, well lets see if AMR is accurate if you follow the optimizer, I do believe that you actually could get a steady 5-7 top dps spots if you reforge and regem. I'm seeing you still yet to reach the cap of 15% on hit with 14.41% on your current stats which would definite have effect if you are DPSing since hit cap of 15% is the 2nd priority for mages. And since for arcane the third priority is mastery, on your stat it's at 45% buffed and at 36% (unbuffed) but once optimized you'd gain up +17% on mastery. As a reference you can also cross ref with blatty's stats http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/eu/twisting_nether/blatty. However, it is all the matter of preference and AMR is just a helpful guide in learning the maximum potential of your toon based on the armor set it currently has. Performance is still effected by player skills and also other things such as racial/profession buffs, latency,macros.

About playing fire, well from experience, not only the rotation that matters but also to gain a steady flow of HU and HU upgrade to Pyro procs would be the biggest challenge of all coz once you have that going, you add in your combustion + alter time macro (to get that extra free pyro in queue from Presence of Mind)you can see a jump in your dps. yep, for a lot of fire mages, maintaining the flow makes it even more challenging. I'm sure when playing fire you can see that arcane and frost had it easy. Regarding the extra 5% crit, yes i do think that 5% rate (ontop of his 4p bonus) is powerful since for fire it's always Crit>haste>mastery. But then again i couldnt see your stats in fire so I'm not sure if you capped your hit stats and also I cant see his full stats too to make full stats comparison based on armor sets. Just play around with AMR along with SimCraft/Raidbots (like Thi13en linked) to have a bigger and in depth pic of your toon's max potential.

This post has been edited by areix: Jun 5 2013, 09:03 PM

Could be, anyway happy experimenting.

Mmhmm burn baby burn, it's tricky to play but when you see those fireballs - pyroblast hurling across the room landing with high crit damage followed by multiple living bombs exploding, its like fireworks on 4th of july.. we didnt get the pyromaniac passive for nothing