Big News, Everyone!

Not a lot of posts lately, mostly because IRL sucks and keeps intervening. But enough of the whining, let’s go back to what World of Warcraft is all about: “I love my mother but not nearly as much as WoW,” to paraphrase a local football supporter’s chant. And speaking of, I had a stunning revelation during TBC at one point, when I was leveling my brother’s mage through Hellfire (thus making it the 4th character I took through the Outlands): If your mum sends you to get some water and you’re thinking what is closer, Scryers or Aldor, you’re playing too much.

Now on to the big news released today: shared lock-outs for the same raid for both 10 and 25 man versions.

What this means: To put it in the words of Blizzard, you cannot down a boss twice in a week. No more running 10 man for starter gear so you can go join the 25 man version, where the real money’s at.. if it were a professional sport. There’s also another announcement, saying that you’ll be able to choose what bosses you want to kill normally and which ones you want to try your hand on the heroic version.

With this comes the clarification of loot: the same items will be dropped from both versions of the raid, just more of them on 25. To translate this in current terms, if right now a boss drops 2 epix on 10 man and 3 on 25, the latter will change to drop 5 epix. All of the same ilvl, that will, by the way, cease to be. I guess GS will be out and one can only praise the Lord for this bit.

This will make a huge impact on the game, as much as the first raids being accessible in quest blues. Like I have stated many a times before, I am in a small guild that revolves around 10 mans. This change alone will be our bread and butter. Sure, you can never see an item drop but that’s bad luck and won’t cause the same frustration like the one from knowing that you’re not able to field 25 players that you can count on. It’s a lot easier to live with fortune than with your inability, if I may call it that (be it work, low tolerance to stupidity or whatnot) to get a shot in at the good stuff.

Then again, if some things never change, each raid boss will have a ~10 item drops possible, 15 on 25 man. Not counting here Sartharion with the 1, 2 and 3D option. You will still have a better chance of seeing an item drop on 25 man but with numbers comes demand. Better chance to have it drop on 25 but better chance of winning it on 10, to summarize loot options.

I like it, and I like it a whole lot. The bomb Blizz dropped on us does indeed mean that, as Hinenuitepo put it, 10 man guilds will no longer feel like second class citizens. Which I do when I run around in circles in the mecca of narcissism, Dalaran, being able to eyeball those ilvl277 epix on other players, knowing that I will never have one.

In other news, the ICC buff will increase after today’s maintenance to 15%. I think I have a problem with this. 10% is a good enough buff, on par with tweaking a raid boss or 12 to be a tad more accessible. For what is twaking, I ask of thee, if not having a boss hit for x% less or not as often by making his melee swing .5 seconds longer. At least in my mind that’s how it’s done, after careful consideration and a ton of legitimate feedback from the gaming community.

I’m late to jump on the bandwagon but hey, I wasn’t blogging at the time. 30% buff in the end? My God that’s enormous. Imagine a nice and round 10k DPS fella that walking in and getting this buff. Chances are that on 10 K he’s already able to carry a bunch of alts, you only need some 6-7 K to down the bosses that are a DPS race. He’s picking up others’ slack of lack of gear. With the buff he’ll do some 13K DPS. Almost counts as two people, making 9 man ICC a possibility and not something that you laugh at the idea of. Then again, if he is in a guild that was able to gear him up to pull the damage bar so high, imagine that there are others like him in the same group. I know my logic is flawed in many ways with this but effectively with the 30% buff you could go by with only 3 DPS, 2 tanks and 2 healers. A 3rd healer would be obsolete and could only be brought along for the gear upgrades and for him to have a look-see at what raid healing is all about, without him being a liability in case he chokes.

Yes, healers choke. I did, when I was resto, and even though I only healed 5 man heroics and the odd VoA 10 or 25 and Onyxia, i was a very emo healer, in the sense that I always thought that it was my fault if somebody died and that there was something I could have done and oh, why, cruel world. I mean fuck it, with the offset pieces I gathered along the way I have a pretty decent healing set and I might respec from enhancement to resto again. I know I have a bit of a healer heart in me, I always jump to top somebody off if I don’t think that the healer can manage it (even though he can and I’ve seen him do it).

Shaman Changes for Cataclysm

I’m quite sure that everybody’s heard about the new tricks your favorite class will learn once Cataclysm hits so I won’t list them, I’ll stick to the Elemental side of things.

“Unleash Weapon (level 81): Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects (see below). A dual-wielding Enhancement shaman will activate the effects of both of their weapon enchants. Instant cast. 30-yard range. 15-second cooldown. Undispellable.

Here are a few examples of effects we’re considering for this ability:

Windfury Weapon – Hurls a spectral version of your weapon at a target, dealing 50% weapon damage and increasing the shaman’s Haste for the next five swings.
Flametongue Weapon – Deals instant Fire damage and buffs the shaman’s next Fire attack by 20%.
Earthliving Weapon – Heals the target slightly and buffs the shaman’s next healing spell by 20%.”

That is the exact blue post. While pretty straightforward in the way it will and should be used, this Unleash Weapon thing is something that will need to be worked into our rotation and for spice it up. It’s not just a damage boost, it can also be very, VERY tricky to get right if and only if the Flame Shock ticks aren’t considered an attack. I’m quite new to  the theorycrafting and I might have my facts wrong but to me damage done = attack. If I’m correct this will be very problematic because you’d always want to use it for your main nuke, Lava Burst. Now, with the FS ticks being affected by haste you will most certainly not be able to do so unless you use Elemental Mastery and stand on top of the boss so the spell don’t need to be flyin’. I’m guessing I’m either wrong in my assumption or there will be future clarification on how this will work or it will turn from an OMG GIEF! spell to something that won’t be really worth the GCD and nerves. Only time will tell.

“Spiritwalker’s Grace (level 85): When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.”

This is really sweet for us and our resto brethren as well. The main problem with the Elemental play-style is that in order to be competitive we need to be rooted in place and go back to being the TBC turrets. While moving we’re crap and unless while going from point A to point B we get a lucky Lightning Overload proc and we get to squeeze in a Frost Shock (if not on CD) that’s dead time right there. I’m guessing that they’ve thought of this for a specific reason and not just because of the countless QQ threads so… yeah… I’m looking forward to it and to putting it to good use. Here-here!

“Totem of Wrath now will replace Flametongue Totem for all shaman, and dropping this totem will buff the group’s spell power by 4%. Elemental shaman will have a talent that lets all Fire totems provide +10% spell power, allowing them to drop Searing, Magma, or Fire Elemental Totems without losing their spell-damage buff. The 4% and 10% buffs will be exclusive with each other and with the warlock’s Demonic Pact, so you can’t benefit from all of them at once. We’re also considering letting Elemental drop Searing Totem at range.”

1. Yay, we get to throw totems around!

2. Yay, we get ToW to scale!

3. Yay, we get to throw totems around!

4. Only Searing? QQ to come

*Edit : they’re toying with the idea of making any totem one that can be used at range. I hope they include Magma as well, it’s getting really old really fast to gave to run in, drop magma, run the fuck away from Cleave damage then to run back into it in about 15 seconds (2.5 for running in and out). At one point I said fuck it, I haz shield, i no di….! And then got cleaved in half by Marrowgar. The tank decided to WALK instead of RUN in to pull and somehow I got ahead of him in my race to find the perfect spot for mah totemz (Fire Ele in this particular case).

“Elemental Reach will be simplified so shaman have a more consistent spell range.
We plan to add Earthquake as a deep Elemental talent for targeted and persistent AoE.”

Moar range? Good! Moar options and moar running to drop in magma if they don’t make it ranged.

Earthquake? Yes, please! On trash we really can’t hold a candle to other classes so this is a very nice buff. It will be channeled tho but just imagine magma + persistent AoE. Key word Persistent, mind you!

“With the Mastery system, we’re also considering removing a number of talents that grant passive bonuses, such as Mental Quickness, Improved Windfury Totem, Mental Dexterity, Call of Thunder, Tidal Mastery, Purification, Nature’s Blessing, and others, to allow players more freedom to choose more interesting talents.”

This can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. In giving you more freedom to choose fun talents or those that will let you develop your own play-style they are opening up a horizon of opportunity to what can safely be called a pretty boring rotation and, some say, spec. As is the current state of things in the game there will always be a cookie-cutter spec and you’ll find it over at Elitist Jerks. PuGging, on the other hand, will make you see even crazier things that you see now. 71 points in the Elemental tree? That’s NOTHING! 75 is better, or even a 44/32/0 spec might seem viable to some, for some of the added benefits from the Enhancement tree. While I love the option to be able to come up with my own spec I dread the diopters I’ll get from staring at others’ specs in awe.

“Elemental will have a deep talent that allows Spirit (which will appear on the gear they share with Restoration shaman) to boost their Hit rating.”

No more +hit gems sounds nice, although they won’t be removed or completely useless. Chances are that the better your gear will get at 85 the less you’ll need to gem or enchant hit. Either way, this will be really sweet talent exactly because you might need it or you might not, thus freeing one point to put in Improved Stormstrike or whatever.

“Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Elemental
Spell damage
Spell Crit
Elemental Overload

Elemental Overload: Your direct-damage spells have a chance to proc a less powerful ‘bonus” version of the spell. This will work much like the current Lightning Overload talent, but would also apply to Lava Burst.“

Nice but I’m not sure if it’s nice enough, it seems a bit lackluster. The big bonus for our tree is something we’ve had all along +1? Oh, how… wonderful…

Of course,  Blizz said that this is a work in progress so I hope we get more juice out of the ultimate Mastery bonus. As a side note, I’d like to see a haste bonus instead of crit but meh…

Blood Death Knight Changes for Cataclysm

MMO-Champion brings to light the new ideas that Blizzard has for Death Knights come Cataclysm. And I’m not liking it at all, Blood the dedicated tanking talent tree? Why, oh, why? I luv my Blood DPS SPec! Here’s the full blue post by Ghostcrawler:

“We’re doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we’d go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.”