Forged Alliance

 Forged Alliance has downed the Hard mode only forum boss "Coaching". Man oh man that is some mechanic the dev's worked up. I don't know how we managed to do it but I'm sure we'll be able to repeat next week.

Congrats to Wapau for his shield. Hopefully he will be able to equip it soon :O

 I did the naked dps experiment... I think the hard part will be to factor in all the "misses".  I went thru several rounds till OOM against the lvl80 target dummy and had dps (according to skada) of 450ish when missing a lot to 820ish when not missing much... this was with imp.  That is a pretty big range.  I did occasionally spike to a little over 900.. but that was with random crits and less missing. Also, without the haste, my timing was a little off.  I am not used to full casting times so my mad mashing was a little less than ideal. I would be curious to see what others are seeing.

The purpose of the naked DPS experiment is to impress upon raiders that gear is a second priority to proper PvE spec (including glyphs) and proper DPS rotation. The second component to impress is that +hit scales the fastest in terms of improving DPS.  If you're not at the hit cap, for equivalent iLvl gear, +hit > +spellpower (e.g., 19 spellpower from a gem does not beat the extra 16 hit from the equivalent gem).  If you're missing all the time, you're doing zero DPS.  Note that this is among equivalent iLvl gear; if you're using lvl 60 epics in your lvl 80 gear set, you're probably not making a good tradeoff even if the old gear had +hit. I concur with your observation about haste.  For a shadow priest, since a lot of the abilities in the DPS cycle have cooldowns or fixed DoT duration, whenever my haste changes, I end up having to adjust the cycle so that I'm not hitting a button that is still on CD.  This becomes very important because it means that you need to practice adjusting your DPS cycle to maximize effects like heroism. DPS is hard.  It's very important to nail down and improve on your static DPS cycle so that it becomes second nature.  Ulduar has a lot of fire to stand in and when you're responsible for spell interrupts, dispelling the boss, AEing/snaring adds, and repositioning to stay alive on top of just doing DPS, it is very important for your DPS cycle to be second nature. -HP

Sinistyr wrote I would be curious to see what others are seeing.

I may need to find a better DPS addon.  The realtime recount graph shows me peaking between 1.2 and 1.6k, but my sustained DPS is around 1k.  The OOM while naked is a problem in terms of being able to apply DPS for the full duration of my longest DoT. -HP

Yeah.. being an affl spec lock, I was OOM before all dots had fully ticked from the first application. I would say the naked DPS per class/spec is only really good for comparison benchmark purposes.