Flinging myself into the monkey enclosure for yesterday's VP was... interesting.
First group: Blackwing Caverns. Blow up the first boss with only mild hunter-standing-in-instadeath. No worries.
On to Corla - first there's some discussion of doing the achievement, but eventually everyone decides not to as the tank has to go soon. Tank pulls, random DPS decides to let their acolyte evolve. Said acolyte dies, but my unprepared self has no mana left at this point: announced this to group. Second random DPS decides to evolve an acolyte and the third AFKs in the beam and turns into a gribbly. Wipe ensues.
Everyone runs back in, mage drops and is replaced by a 'lock. Try Corla again, after stating we definitely are not doing the achievement. Someone manages to pull a massive group of caster trash from waaaay at the back of the room, no interrupts or CC anywhere, wipe ensues.
Run back in again, hunter drops and we get a shadow priest. At this point, the rogue pipes up that we can skip Corla if we don't mind wiping on the bridge and using the teleporter to cheese past it (no Raz to clear for us). Not heard of this approach, but the tank is again making high-pitched whining noises so we go die hilariously.
Run back in, teleport to just before Karsh Steelbender. Tank starts sneaking around the edge to skip him too, and it all goes well until the warlock wanders into the middle and pulls the elementals and a bunch of slimes. Panic, dead me, wipe ensues. I ankh to save everyone the trouble walking. Warlock drops, I can't even remember what replaced him as at this point I've basically given up on life.
Proceed to epically mis-pull trash groups up to the final boss (every single pull involving zero CC and at least two groups pulled), but thankfully sufficiently frenzied spamming of Healing Surge and cooldowns meant no more wipes. Hooray, my VP are so close I can almost taste them over the overwhelming tang of failure and needless repair bills!
Arrive at last boss. Stare at all his trash, with no Raz on hand to clear them.
I get as far as asking "So, how do we handle this pull without Raz?" before the tank silently drops group, swiftly followed by everyone else.
Well, that was fun. Excuse me whilst I go and kick a few puppies in an attempt to expunge my hatred for the human species.
Second group: Grim Batol. Tank is decently geared, pulls the first group and asks if I'm comfortable running without CC. I agree to try it, and we proceed to clear everything in a fast, efficient, wipe-free manner with a little bit of pleasant banter.
Why can't more groups be like that?
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Monday, 24 January 2011
Cataclysmic Healing: Drood
Chuggin' along, healing heroics, flailing with limited success at raid bosses (Nomnomtron still refuse to fall over).
There's a lot of moaning about on the various fora concerning how hard this expansion is on healers. I think I've made my stance pretty clear on that (it isn't really, assuming your group can collectively outwit a catfish), but as I recently got my druid to 85 and started healing the odd normal dungeon to gear up for heroics I realised one other large factor that may be influencing my position.
My main, being a shaman, has many more tools to help out of the group is less than stellar; short cooldown interrupt, offensive purge, and a potentially long-duration CC (taking this opportunity to once again say how much I hate that I'm forced into enhancement subspec, making these utilities less reliable than I'd like). Add some totems that sometimes help (earthbind, grounding), and I'm actually pretty confident of my ability to cover for DPS or tanks that may lack in several departments. There are limits, of course, but just being able to take up a little bit of the slack helps immensely whilst pugging.
Of course, I don't have the priestly ability to move people out of fire, but such is life.
Now, I consider my resto druid. Being able to remove poisons is a lovely thing, and cyclone and roots are useful in a pinch. But that's basically the extent of the utility provided. Now if I end up with a group of marginal window-lickers, all I can do is heal through the uninterrupted spells/undispelled mob buffs/un-CC'd caster mobs setting fire to my face from afar...
Oh, and battle res. My experience with this from an outsider perspective is that it gets used to raise a DPS in the middle of a raid boss fight, therefore preventing me from reincarnating later when I take a fire bath.
Basically, I feel that I lack tools as a druid. All I can do is heal, and I'm not even convinced I enjoy that under the new healing regime. The joyous mobility of druid healing now comes with a hefty mana price-tag, whilst simultaneously punishing the use of any cast-time heals on a target without a HoT thanks to the mastery. Synergy: you are doing it wrong.
Underlying all this is the nagging suspicion that neither healing spec is actually that great when it comes to raw throughput. However, I'm absolutely positive that my (in)competence and gear are far larger factors in determining success right now. By the time such theoretical concerns as maximum sustainable throughput become significant, things will be patched to Hades and back.
Taking a positive stance, kitty is still lots of fun. Mmm, bleeds.
There's a lot of moaning about on the various fora concerning how hard this expansion is on healers. I think I've made my stance pretty clear on that (it isn't really, assuming your group can collectively outwit a catfish), but as I recently got my druid to 85 and started healing the odd normal dungeon to gear up for heroics I realised one other large factor that may be influencing my position.
My main, being a shaman, has many more tools to help out of the group is less than stellar; short cooldown interrupt, offensive purge, and a potentially long-duration CC (taking this opportunity to once again say how much I hate that I'm forced into enhancement subspec, making these utilities less reliable than I'd like). Add some totems that sometimes help (earthbind, grounding), and I'm actually pretty confident of my ability to cover for DPS or tanks that may lack in several departments. There are limits, of course, but just being able to take up a little bit of the slack helps immensely whilst pugging.
Of course, I don't have the priestly ability to move people out of fire, but such is life.
Now, I consider my resto druid. Being able to remove poisons is a lovely thing, and cyclone and roots are useful in a pinch. But that's basically the extent of the utility provided. Now if I end up with a group of marginal window-lickers, all I can do is heal through the uninterrupted spells/undispelled mob buffs/un-CC'd caster mobs setting fire to my face from afar...
Oh, and battle res. My experience with this from an outsider perspective is that it gets used to raise a DPS in the middle of a raid boss fight, therefore preventing me from reincarnating later when I take a fire bath.
Basically, I feel that I lack tools as a druid. All I can do is heal, and I'm not even convinced I enjoy that under the new healing regime. The joyous mobility of druid healing now comes with a hefty mana price-tag, whilst simultaneously punishing the use of any cast-time heals on a target without a HoT thanks to the mastery. Synergy: you are doing it wrong.
Underlying all this is the nagging suspicion that neither healing spec is actually that great when it comes to raw throughput. However, I'm absolutely positive that my (in)competence and gear are far larger factors in determining success right now. By the time such theoretical concerns as maximum sustainable throughput become significant, things will be patched to Hades and back.
Taking a positive stance, kitty is still lots of fun. Mmm, bleeds.
Tuesday, 4 January 2011
Back on the Wagon
Despite all attempts not to cave in, my shaman is back in Cataclysm. Slightly behind the crowd and only just into heroics, the healing game is an interesting beast right now.
For one thing, healing is still very easy iff your DPS and tank are competent. The days of saving bads standing in fire - over. Or at least put on hold, pending better gear and familiarity with the new palette of healing tools.
One thing I'm particularly interested in is the new relative ordering of stats for healing. Mastery in particular is quite tricky, as it depends on conditions outwith your gearing strategy to a large extent and this makes it hard to model.
As I'm messing around with Clojure at the moment, I decided to whip up a little 'healing simulator' that spam-heals a single target taking damage with some simple profiles, using a minimal priority setup for healing spell selection. Whilst this is in many, many ways incomplete and buggy, I thought the results were interesting enough to leave them here (and when I iron out a few bugs, I'll post the code somewhere too).
I used my shaman's base stats as of a day or two ago, in a mixture of pre-heroic blues and a smattering of heroic and rep items, and then simulated after adding a hefty chunk of one stat - 1000 ratings worth, although the ordering seems consistent for smaller increases and after changing the base stats somewhat.
First, bumpy damage. This attempts to model somewhat low, consistent damage, with periodic large spikes, which fits a number of fights if painted in sufficiently broad strokes.
Next, essentially random damage. This is some kind of nightmare scenario, where the tank's relative health is completely unpredictable from one GCD to the next. The simulator, unphased, simply makes its best guess as to an appropriate heal from one moment to the next.
So, immediately it can be seen that in this very crude scenario, intellect is king for e-HPS. It also lowers MPS, by allowing efficient heals to do more of the heavy lifting and having some tiny effect on Improved Water Shield procs. Considering it'll improve spirit-based regen and replenishment, intellect is looking really quite tasty.
Next up, haste is a good throughput stat, but that throughput comes at considerably increased MPS. So far, so unremarkable, although it's interesting that intellect appears to provide a stronger bonus to effective healing under the new healing model.
Mastery is surprisingly not-bad. It's not quite as good as haste, but it's not far off, and doesn't have a downside. Sure, it does nothing for you when you're healing people at full health, but in that situation so does every other stat - they just generate extra overhealing. Considering the variance I'm seeing in the results, it has negligible impact on MPS, although a smarter sim could probably save more mana here.
Crit is, to a surprising degree, not a great throughput stat. It does provide a decent chunk of mana saved, and the bonus of Ancestral Healing can't be underestimated, but it still feels underwhelming.
The result of all this: it's probably irrelevant. I'll wait for some actual raiding experience to inform my iteration of the simulator, but healing really isn't a problem suited to this kind of thing. Still, the braindead results do at least convince me that 'haste-stacking uber alles' is out of the window for the foreseeable future, Mastery is probably not that bad (I think I'll stop reforging it, although the JP stuff has a ton), and intellect is currently looking delicious.
AH uptime, pretty realtime graphs, and some priority-queue optimiser are things I'd like to add to the sim. I'll see how that goes; for now I need Earthen Ring rep!
For one thing, healing is still very easy iff your DPS and tank are competent. The days of saving bads standing in fire - over. Or at least put on hold, pending better gear and familiarity with the new palette of healing tools.
One thing I'm particularly interested in is the new relative ordering of stats for healing. Mastery in particular is quite tricky, as it depends on conditions outwith your gearing strategy to a large extent and this makes it hard to model.
As I'm messing around with Clojure at the moment, I decided to whip up a little 'healing simulator' that spam-heals a single target taking damage with some simple profiles, using a minimal priority setup for healing spell selection. Whilst this is in many, many ways incomplete and buggy, I thought the results were interesting enough to leave them here (and when I iron out a few bugs, I'll post the code somewhere too).
I used my shaman's base stats as of a day or two ago, in a mixture of pre-heroic blues and a smattering of heroic and rep items, and then simulated after adding a hefty chunk of one stat - 1000 ratings worth, although the ordering seems consistent for smaller increases and after changing the base stats somewhat.
First, bumpy damage. This attempts to model somewhat low, consistent damage, with periodic large spikes, which fits a number of fights if painted in sufficiently broad strokes.
| Bumpy | Intellect | Mastery | Crit | Haste |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| e-hps change (%) | 9.56 | 5.06 | 4.34 | 7.75 |
| mps change (%) | -1.61 | -0.56 | -2.34 | 6.62 |
Next, essentially random damage. This is some kind of nightmare scenario, where the tank's relative health is completely unpredictable from one GCD to the next. The simulator, unphased, simply makes its best guess as to an appropriate heal from one moment to the next.
| Random | Intellect | Mastery | Crit | Haste |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| e-hps change (%) | 8.09 | 5.67 | 4.24 | 6.92 |
| mps change (%) | -1.76 | -0.16 | -2.82 | 6.28 |
So, immediately it can be seen that in this very crude scenario, intellect is king for e-HPS. It also lowers MPS, by allowing efficient heals to do more of the heavy lifting and having some tiny effect on Improved Water Shield procs. Considering it'll improve spirit-based regen and replenishment, intellect is looking really quite tasty.
Next up, haste is a good throughput stat, but that throughput comes at considerably increased MPS. So far, so unremarkable, although it's interesting that intellect appears to provide a stronger bonus to effective healing under the new healing model.
Mastery is surprisingly not-bad. It's not quite as good as haste, but it's not far off, and doesn't have a downside. Sure, it does nothing for you when you're healing people at full health, but in that situation so does every other stat - they just generate extra overhealing. Considering the variance I'm seeing in the results, it has negligible impact on MPS, although a smarter sim could probably save more mana here.
Crit is, to a surprising degree, not a great throughput stat. It does provide a decent chunk of mana saved, and the bonus of Ancestral Healing can't be underestimated, but it still feels underwhelming.
The result of all this: it's probably irrelevant. I'll wait for some actual raiding experience to inform my iteration of the simulator, but healing really isn't a problem suited to this kind of thing. Still, the braindead results do at least convince me that 'haste-stacking uber alles' is out of the window for the foreseeable future, Mastery is probably not that bad (I think I'll stop reforging it, although the JP stuff has a ton), and intellect is currently looking delicious.
AH uptime, pretty realtime graphs, and some priority-queue optimiser are things I'd like to add to the sim. I'll see how that goes; for now I need Earthen Ring rep!
Thursday, 22 July 2010
Little Blue Forum Posts Ruin My Day
Quoth GC:
Ancestral Swiftness was not removed. Sorry for any confusion. It is still in the second tier of Enhancement, available to all.
Arse. Sure, it's available to all... and it's mandatory for all, as well. Here's hoping they finally get rid of this irritating talent. I want to be able to subspec into resto as ele, or ele as resto, rather than being absolutely forced to dump points into enhancement so that GW is useful.
Ancestral Swiftness was not removed. Sorry for any confusion. It is still in the second tier of Enhancement, available to all.
Arse. Sure, it's available to all... and it's mandatory for all, as well. Here's hoping they finally get rid of this irritating talent. I want to be able to subspec into resto as ele, or ele as resto, rather than being absolutely forced to dump points into enhancement so that GW is useful.
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
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.
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.
Friday, 18 June 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
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.
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.
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