Medley of Things

Cataclysm Talents

With the latest patch we've seen two iterations of the 31-point talent trees (the latest is here, as of publishing). Thus far, resto shaman look to be in a decent place. After picking up every talent that seems 'mandatory' plus Telluric Currents (because it looks amazing), I'm left with four points to spread around between Concussion/Convection for better ROI on Telluric Currents, Elemental Weapons for the rather dull spellpower boost, finishing Nature's Blessing for better tank healing, or a few other peripheral talents in the resto tree such as cheaper totems or the bizarre shocks-interact-with-heals-now talent.

I'm guessing that at the start of the expansion, I'll pick up Elemental Weapons and max out Nature's Blessing. Further in, and depending how much tank healing I end up doing, I can easily see moving those points around. Pulling Ancestral Swiftness (and presumably making Ghost Wolf instant cast baseline at long last, oh frabulous day!) and rejigging the low-tier elemental and enhancement talents has opened up the options considerably.

I still think the trees need to be a little fatter, mind. There were very few choices that weren't painfully obvious to me when investing the initial 31 points, the only real debate being whether 3/3 Nature's Blessing beats 1/3 NB + 2/2 T. Currents. It'd be nice to be in more situations where I want utility talent X and utility talent Y, but only have sufficient points to get one before unlocking even better talents deeper in the tree.

For my PvP shaman the situation is better. I don't have anything like enough talent points to grab everything, and there are some fairly tricky decisions. I think I want Elemental Warding, which means I can also grab up to two points in the hit and spirit-to-hit-rating talent. Being hitcapped for PvP without actually wearing any hit would be nice, depending how much spirit I end up with.


Healer DPS - Telluric Currents

This seems likely to be a choice dictated by play-style and content, but certainly when levelling it's a no-brainer to get mana-positive lightning bolts. I'll be pushing for this to work as a huge improvement to my quality of life while healing, although some healers have entirely valid points about not picking a healing spec in order to do sub-par DPS. That the resto shaman tree admits both viewpoints within the 31 point requirement, and for me at least the trade-off is acceptable, is a great start. It gives me hope that Archangel/Evangelism, Fury of Stormrage and whatever madness they come up with for paladins will also be both fun and optional. Really can't stress the latter enough; the amount of rage sloshing around in the hearts of some healers at being 'forced' to deal damage is considerable. It has to be a choice in order for this to feel like anything other than a punishment for those players.


Whoa, Enough About Resto Shaman Already

Fine, fine. My other characters and specs are a mixed bunch.

Elemental shaman still have to spend points in 'more mana' or 'more mana' on the first tier. Currently, this is somewhat a risible idea as elemental has no issue with mana in any sensible situation. In Cataclysm, DPS are expected to not run OoM despite having no spirit-based regen, so I'm of the opinion that infinite mana will still obtain. Not sure what can be done about this, but I'd rather have some options here - a talent to make fire-Bob less stupid would be nice.

Enhancement shaman appear to be doing fine. There's not a huge array of choice, and much like Elemental they have to spend some points in saving mana before getting to some tasty things on the second tier of their default subspec tree.

Mages saw very few changes apart from a lot of spells randomly altered in respect to level learned. There are some annoying aspects to their talent trees - Torment the Weak still exists, Frostbite still exists, fire still lacks tools for small-scale PvP, and so on. Combustion is really awkward, and I'm not sure how much I like the fact that Fire is now all about managing DoTs. Arcane as it exists on live is incredibly dull, and I don't like the proposed mastery for 'em. I hate pet management, so frost isn't that attractive, and I will outright hate it if I have to actually babysit my squirtle-Bob. All told, I'm just not convinced my mages will be as much fun after the expansion and that makes me a little sad. Still plenty of time for this to change, though.

Druids in their present state confuse me. Resto cannot even get past tier two without flinging some points into taking less spell damage or the literally useless Furor. Whilst I don't mind taking less damage, it'd be nice to have a choice between a couple of utility talents there. There's more choice later in the tree, and I was able to pick up the DPS talent at a fairly small cost elsewhere. Building a tanking spec was a bit more fun. Balance is a foreign land to me, a place of strange customs and glyphs that reduce spell pushback. Wut?

(Prot) Warriors have a talent called Blood and Thunder, for which they shall receive my eternal adoration. I quite like Rend, and I hope this will be worth the investment and live up to the name.

Priests and rogues - eh, I don't know enough to comment usefully. I hope they get the Smite stuff sorted for priests.


A Word on Paladins

I don't yet have a paladin, but they're undergoing a fairly massive overhaul and I wanted to whiffle about my misguided healer brethren (They wear plate! Pfft. Mail is where it's at). The addition of Holy Power came out of nowhere as far as I can tell. Loads of spells and abilities have been added or changed, and the talent trees went 'wibble' with such magnitude that nations trembled. All bets are off, essentially. The resident guild uber-paladin is somewhat depressed by the state of the class so far, which given Blizzard's track record is perhaps a reasonable stance. My concern for my future holy cow is largely in the new healing tools being added - Healing Hands is interesting, but rather encourages standing in the melee camp. All other things being equal, ranged tend to spread out - either due to fight mechanics or an inherent respect for personal space - and would be hard to cover with this spell. Light of Dawn is a conic AoE heal, the first of its kind. Having dealt with cone AoE as a DPS and tank, err, they're fiddly and really annoying at times. I wouldn't - don't - want to heal with one. Ever. If they insist on going ahead with this, I hope they at least address the issue of visual feedback. The VFX used for cone spells so far tends strongly towards being attached to the character, such that any movement gives a completely false impression of where the damage/healing actually went.

I hate to use the phrase, but so far paladin healing looks a tad... gimmicky. I'd be the last person to praise the current state of paladin healing, but it is at least solid and dependable. Gargantuan throughput on two targets (unt only two targets!), forever. The new AoE spells are strongly dependant on the position of the paladin, and running around constantly to get decent coverage for Healing Hands and Light of Dawn (mostly exclusive, as one wants to be in the middle of a pack whilst the other wants to be some distance away) does not sound very fun. At least there are more options for healing on the hoof, and Speed of Light provides a nice little mini-sprint tied to Healing Hands. Ideal for getting out of the fire whilst healing everyone who was stood in it like numpties. Bacon is back being a general-purpose appropriation of healing, but has had its throughput cut by half.

So far and with much hand-waving, it looks like paladins will be standing in melee range healing one tank and providing off-heals on a second via bacon. When the raid takes damage, Hands and Dawn will stabilise/top off the melee. If bacon also redirects all the healing done by AoE spells, these could also provide fairly massive spike heals or HoT effects. Holy Power provided by shocks and the odd heal on the bacon target will be used for free throughput with Word of Glory, exact proportion depending on how chunky the heal is and how tight mana gets. Shocks will see a bit more use, as they provide Holy Power and haste on the healbombs, but until numbers emerge who knows if this will be worth the GCD on cooldown or only as a last-ditch resort while moving.

A raid-healing paladin is doing almost exactly the same thing, but I guess making more use of shocks and flashes. If the ranged can be persuaded to cluster up a bit, some running around with Healing Hands and cone heals may also be standard.

I don't know, but neither of these seem compelling so far. Additional uses for Holy Power remain to be seen. But hey, no matter what - paladins will have more heals! It's a start.

Hunter Pets Are Unnecessary

Alright, alright. I admit it. I rolled a huntard. A cute wittle orc, in fact, struggling gamely 'neath the weight of her many heirlooms.

I hit level 20 the other night, levelling as Marksman because it looks to have the best toys. And really... why do I want a pet? I have approximately ninety-seven billion ways to control what I'm fighting, Disengage, infinite mana and obscene damage.

Sure, my li'l scorpid can sorta tank something if I want to eat a sandwich instead of playing the game. And he's cute enough. But really he's just an ambulatory DoT that wants feeding constantly (Why do pets get unhappy? Why do I care?).

I'm not going to drop the pet for now, just because... well, sometimes I want to eat sandwiches, you know? But it really seems excessive to have a pet in addition to all these other tools, and if I could trade him in for a personal DPS boost of some kind I'd do it without a second thought.

Maybe I'm a terrible person. Certainly I suspect I'm not a hunter at heart.

Stuff Happened

Welp, Arthas is dead. Sure, it took a 20% buff and a couple of weeks of flailing at him, but the important thing is that we smacked him about 'til he fell over. The wuss.

He dropped a very nice kitty staff, and a terribly itemised mace that I almost rolled on because it looked gorgeous despite the icky crit/mp5. Really, Blizzard? I know you're honour-bound to drop gear that makes me wince in ten man raids, but the final boss is allowed to have non-sucky stuff. Honest.

The fight is quite fun, although I've yet to heal it all the way through. I quite enjoy elemental, and we have an absurd excess of great healers, so I should probably be working on my offset gear with more zeal. Meh, back to the sanity tap for frost badgers I suppose. I will rise about DPS mediocrity eventually!

After that we went and roflstomped TotGC and just barely scraped a Tribute to Mad Skill. I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with doing these older raids with my main, though. I don't feel we particularly deserved the victory (three healers? What?), and the rewards are pointless - excepting those who still like to keep T9 set bonuses, they were genuinely happy to pick up some trophies. I value achievements and titles very little, so all that remains is the challenge (greatly diminished by lolgear) and the fun of doing stuff with a great raid group (unchanged, but equally available doing other content). I feel I should start bringing alts to these things, who may get upgrades (I like gear) and will be approaching the fights from a different class perspective. The problem then is simply ensuring I'm not the under-performing warm body making everyone else's life a little more miserable.

Next week: ICC hard modes! That will be fun.

Raiding in Cataclysm

Was feeling a little burned out and meh about WoW recently. A long weekend away from the game and some silly fun in ICC did a lot to cure that...

And then Blizzard insist on giving me the warm fuzzies. /blush You guys.

So what have we got so far?

1. Ten and twenty-five man raids share a lockout
2. Ten and twenty-five man raids share loot
3. Two tiers of points to replace the current badge system in PvE
4. Two tiers of points to replace the current honour/arena point system in PvP
5. Acquisition of top tier points in both cases are throttled on a weekly basis
6. Lower tier of both can be exchanged at a loss. Buying last season's PvP gear with emblems is old news, but now you can buy the previous raid tier with honour!
7. Twenty-five man raids will drop more loot per capita and may have other nebulous rewards
8. Arena ratings are dead!

So this looks like a barrel of robot pirate monkeys, at least to me. My esteemed colleague doesn't agree, and raises an important point or three. Mainly, what will there be to do after downing the raid boss d'tier each week? Currently, some people very much enjoy being able to raid as much as they like per week - being able to do both ten and twenty-five man runs on the same character doubles the number of raids available to such people.

On the other hand, running both raid sizes doubles your income. More emblems, more loot. The superior drops from the larger raid cheapen the smaller raid (devaluation of drops, and a slightly lower challenge due to better gear), and you halve the time before the emblem vendors have nothing to offer you.

In addition, removing the loot differences has many positive aspects. One of these is that it reduces the development cost of a new raid tier. Whilst I wouldn't bet on item creation being the bottleneck in this process, every man-hour saved can be put to use improving the quantity or quality of other content. This is assuming the loot tables remain roughly the same size as the current model, which seems reasonable if they wish to avoid the VoA lottery experience.

I don't think this is a zero sum situation, but neither do I think it's a clear-cut halving of content. It depends on the amount of stuff we get to play with, and rate of delivery. I do hope there's enough content to satisfy people who really enjoy investing time, but equally I think these are really positive steps overall. And there are always alts.

That said, I'm hugely biased. I don't like big raids, I don't like seeing anomalously nice drops unique to one size (primarily this has taken the form of me lusting after 25-man trinkets, but I'm sure there have been occasions when a larger guild has run smaller raids for the odd well-itemised piece). I don't like the reputation of ten mans being 'easy', and right now I don't care if that has ever been justified (it hasn't, so nyer). Blizzard are making a stand, saying that the only extra challenge in the larger raids will be logistical and we're to be rewarded accordingly.

They're removing the subtle, insistent pressure to do both raid sizes each week. For the drops; for extra emblems; for achievements; because it's the 'real' raid size... all these stupid little niggling voices are rendered null and void.

The PvP changes are nice too. Being able to fully equip a character with PvP gear will be delicious. Bye-bye ratings! Yes, yes, I suck and can't even get to 1800. I don't think I'll be threatening anyone's titles just because I can now get a resi weapon, but it will be a nice little carrot. Two-way exchange between the lower tier PvE and PvP points is a good escape valve, to prevent a repeat of BC (when people abandoned raiding in droves to get 'better' PvP gear in an 'easier' fashion). Being able to minimally gear up for either portion of the game in a manner you enjoy is good.

So, is there anything I don't like in this latest set of announcements?

Of course. I don't like the fact that they're sticking with the Hard Mode = Higher iLevel model. I would greatly prefer that hard modes have unique loot tables, shared between 10 and 25 of course. But this would eat into the time we just saved by having 10 and 25 share the normal loot tables, and could lead to raids doing a boss on normal because his normal loot is more useful, even if they'd rather be working on the hard mode. Maybe an Ulduar-like system where the hard modes drop additional unique loot would fix that, but doesn't help much with the item design task.

I don't like the fact that they only admitted the possibility that raiding enough during the week could free you from the odious duty of the daily random heroic. But then, keeping the player base running heroics has had a few positive effects (starting with there actually being people in the damn things, for a start...). So maybe I'm just bitter. I would be happy to have this go from a daily chore to a few-times-a-week thing, which the throttling may well accomplish for my actively raiding characters.

And... um... yeah, that's it. Overwhelmingly positive about the whole affair. The class previews had me excited, and this makes me think that raiding and PvP will be a whole lot more enjoyable in Cataclysm. More rewarding, less divisive, with extra ponies.

My pony will have tentacles.

Cataclysm Preview Thunks

Figured it would be reasonable to jot down a smattering of Things which strike me as interesting from the Cata previews, mostly pertaining to the classes and specs which I play with some regularity.


Shaman, Elemental

Earthquake - hell yes! I don't play Elemental well enough (or spec correctly ) to capitalise on the scary AoE Magma Totem + Fire Nova can potentially bring, and besides, I'm usually providing ToW for other, better casters. A cast or channelled ground-targeted AoE will make me extremely happy and it has delicious flavour and history. If it comes with some sort of snare or other useful debuff, double hooray!

Totem changes - adding a scaling version of the ToW/DP effect to all fire totems is lovely, especially combined with the proposed change to allow Searing (and potentially Magma!) Totem to operate or be dropped from a sensible range.

Mastery - Lightning Overload is great fun, and few things are as satisfying as firing off 'lusted Lightning Bolts like some kind of storm-powered magical Gatling, or hitting a clustered pack of mobs with a double-whammy of Chain Lightning. Adding the same kind of effect to Lava Burst and maybe shocks? Delicious!


Mage, Fire/Frost/Frostfire

Flame Orb/Wall of Fog - these make me really, really happy. And the reason is really, really absurdly geeky: they sound like D&D spells. They actually do something fun, in addition to their obvious making-things-hurt function. They let magi exert some control over the field of battle, especially in PvP, and I think that is incredibly good. Wall of Fog in particular strikes me as a fantastic way to cleanly bisect a group of melee, and I can imagine rolling Flame Orbs down tunnels in WSG. Frankly I don't care if these have a useful DPET on single target fights, they're flavourful and seem to reward inventive usage in a way few other Mage spells do.

Burnout - "AHAHAHA I'm burning myself alive but I'll take you with me! Everything must buuurn!" ::cough:: I may empathise with the crazy self-destructive fire mage a little too much sometimes.

Arcane Missiles, Deathfrost Mastery - Adding procs to low-level mage play? Hooray! Encouraging spells other than Frost Bolt? Hooray!

Time Warp - 'lust for another class is good, and it has a pleasantly mage-y 'time is my bitch' feel about it. Interesting to see how the personal movement speed boost turns out.


Druid, Restoration/Burr

Thrash - yay, a button that Is Not Swipe. With on-next-attacks buggering off, I'll be interested to see how these things go for burr tanking 'rotations'.

Stampeding Roar - odd, but fun. Chained with Dash and maybe Engineering boots (so tempted...) I'll be interested to see just how far a kitty can go whilst at Warp Factor Cat.

Restoration in general - HoTs scaling with more stats and health deficit, sounds great. Using Tranquility and Healing Touch, also great. Tree of Life as a cooldown, fantastic! I hate being in tree form - Roots, Cyclone and a bit of random DPS are fun things to do in many situations, and I want full usage of the druid spells to be the norm. Gimme an interrupt in caster form other than Cowstomp and healing Heroics could be (almost) as much fun as it is on my shaman.

Wild Mushroom - in relation to the above, I look forward to playing with this as resto-but-not-tree. It's a bit lot weird, but fun. Assuming it lasts for a good while after going invisible (absent instant detonation) this should make for some excellent PvP situations. In heroics, I guess plopping one of these down and then chain Hurricane on mob packs will be the norm when we get overgeared.


Misc Stuff I'm Even Less Qualified To Opine On, But Will Anyway

Warrior - from my point of view, possibly the most 'Meh' preview of all my active characters. Maybe, just maybe, Heroic Leap will be sufficiently fun to overrule this anyway.

Priest - Leap of Faith is lovely. Yes, griefing will happen. Yes, it will be funny sometimes and annoying at others. Yes, HoP/DI rotations on the tank, TotT/MD on a healer or a DPS taunting or a pet growling or people being daft already provide ample opportunity for griefing. I see this as no reason to ban interesting spells.

Hunters - focus looks really interesting, and fits the flavour of the class far more than mana in my opinion. Much joy on (a) having lots of pets and having them be viable and (b) being able to fill missing buff/debuff slots with a pet, albeit at reduced potency. This alone makes hunters an excellent addition to a ten man raiding guild. Yay.

Enhancement Shaman - I don't really care for all the crying over the third mastery bonus. I think it's a brave and interesting attempt to have the various spec bonuses different, which means they can't all be proc-y gimmicks that sound awesome. It's a boring bonus as written, but has the potential to allow for more valid ways of gearing, and for your Mastery rating stat to directly affect the way you play and spec your shaman. It may not work, but I'm glad it exists.

Rogue - me wants to bring Smoke Bomb to help bear tanks on tricky caster pulls. Also the self-HoT makes me want to level a subtlety rogue. Yes, I am easily influenced. I agree that the tanking cooldown is a bit daft for a class which already has plenty of exceptionally strong (if short) survival cooldowns, and significant problems with sustained metabolic viability outside those.

Deep Healing

Right. So! The meat of the shaman Cataclysm preview has been discussed extensively and with much insight elsewhere. I'm (cautiously) excited; Spiritwalker's Grace, Healing Rain and Unleash Weapon have me all tingly, and Spirit Link making a potential comeback is... nom. Tank assisting cooldown for shaman, maybe?

But on topic, here's our third mastery:

"Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target's health is lower. This will scale to damage (e.g. someone at 29% health would receive more healing than someone at 30%) rather than have arbitrary break points."

And after a bit of digging on WoWWiki, here's Eyonix on the mastery stuff in general:

"The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree -- meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear."

The important thing here is that shaman will always have some Mastery Rating from wearing mail (assuming you're wearing at least some and not pinching priest/tree gear exclusively, you naughty shaman), but that otherwise we should have some flexibility with regards to how much we acquire. Assembling a Mastery Rating-less gear set will probably be tricky or impossible (especially for ten-man raiders, assuming the current second-class citizen status obtains in Cataclysm), but with luck there will be adequate wiggle room that we can exchange most of our MR for additional haste, crit or spirit.

I really quite like the concept of Deep Healing. In a world where people don't have near-binary health, it plays into healing in ways I enjoy. 'Saving the day' with a massive heal on low-health targets is a nice feeling, and with Healing Rain and a bit of Chain Heal spam I can see our throughput being potentially monstrous after heavy raid damage. It'll help on tank healing, too, assuming tanks will not spend much time at 100% health.

One key thing is that it makes recovering from a bad health situation something shaman are intrinsically good at. I like this. I pick up Healing Focus today not because it helps when things go smoothly (it's generally useless then) but because it sometimes assists in turning around a raid when things go pear-shaped, and the mastery bonus seems to speak to the same philosophy.

It also discourages topping off of people who are not in danger. This is a good thing, to my mind. Let the HoTs and random smart heals do that, and not only will you save mana (I hear it matters in this crazy world, or something) but your heals will land for more when you do decide to heal someone. Bumping someone up from 95% will feel less satisfying than a beefier heal on someone who needs it more, and this kind of psychological feedback may be significant in mitigating the culture shock of returning to triage and mana management as constant parts of the healing play style.

All this said, who knows if Mastery Rating will be 'worth it'. Deep Healing is optimising for the worst case, which is not a place most theorycraft is done. Picking up additional crit or haste provides extra throughput all the time, and these ratings are supposedly going to be much harder to cap for all specs. Mana regen in general is going to be savaged; most or all spirit-boosting buffs are going away, including the current MP5 counterparts. Replenishment is being nerfed. The five second rule is going to be dead, replaced with in-combat and out-of-combat regen rates according to rumour... maybe stacking spirit and intellect will be vital. Can we even gem for Mastery Rating?

I'd like to hope it'll be an interesting choice. I love my current haste > all setup because it feels more responsive and fun to play. Bigger heals on nearly-dead folk doesn't appeal as much on a moment-to-moment level, compared to crazyfast casting. With other healers and the intrinsic randomness of raid damage, it's a factor beyond our control much like critical heals are, but it's also a reliable throughput increase when needed which crits are most certainly not, individually.

Like everyone else, I await details and numbers with bated breath. But so far, I'm voting 'maybe' to our Mastery.

Back To Ulduar!

For fun and gear, a loose bunch of people decided to start running through Ulduar again. There's a plan to progress to Onyxia and ToC and then start flailing around in ICC. I think we're all alts or people new to this raiding malarky, and this is a fun way to take those characters for a spin.

So, drood gets to play with trains! (She even managed to avoid falling off this time).

Ulduar went pretty well, considering. We're rather stupidly overgeared from triumph badge gear of course, but there were equally plenty of people who'd never seen the fights or in some cases, raided at all. This made it fun, and I'd forgotten just how interesting Ulduar is to raid. We got to Yogg within one lockout and after bouncing off P2 for a bit decided progress had been sufficiently good. I'm looking forward to trying out Ony. My druid even offtanked her in a pug a week or two ago, which is a testament to just how easily she falls over, and she gave me a supershiny tanking ring.

My main still hasn't killed Yogg. What can I say, scrub shaman.

I've started PvPing a bit more on the tree spec. It's kinda fun, and I made a bit of a commitment by respeccing into more PvP talents. I think this is reasonable, though, as it allowed me to pick up Living Seed and nab a few other handy-in-PvE bits (now an 11/0/60 build). I'll miss the 3% haste, but I think the added versatility makes for a viable trade in the context of 10-man raids.

What else...

Baby disc priest got to go to Gnomeregan. Ugh. There were some awful DPS that kept pulling for the tank, pulling off the tank (who was quietly competent, but there's only so many tools in the paladin toolbox at level 28), standing in what little fire they could find and generally making everyone's life needlessly painful.

Hmm.

My primary healing spells at this level (PW:S, renew, flash heal) cost very roughly 100 mana each. Resurrect only costs 300, and I can drink before casting that.

Some new, draconian policies were put in place: you pull for the tank, you don't get heals at all. You get one bubble for self-inflicted hurt such as pulling off the tank or standing in bad; the next heal you get will be Resurrect. Randomly targeted or accidental, unavoidable damage (categorised thus by mine discerning and increasingly hateful eye) I heal through to the best of my ability as long as the tank is safe.

This made for a happy, contented healer and tank, and some deeply unhappy DPS who were apparently unable to comprehend why pulling the next group with a Blizzard whilst the tank is drinking might be silly. Eventually they dropped group, we found replacements and proceeded to finish the dungeon with a far nicer lot of damage dealers.

So, yes. The old adage 'It costs less to resurrect you than heal through your stupid' applies when levelling, too. More so, in fact, because I have less mana to waste making up for the mistakes of others.