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.