It's Tuesday!

The guild finally downed Cho'gal last week. I capped a vid of it. Oddly enough, our feral dps druid was in the wrong gear (healing) and as a consequence, only pulled 3.7k, and we had no problem.

Meanwhile, last night, we spent 3 hours on Al'akir, hoping to get him down before patch today, but it wasn't destined to be. Our best attempt got him to 11%, but we only made it to phase 3, a few times, so people weren't able to get the handle on moving with the clouds. But it looks like nerfs are coming, so we'll get it down soon, we hope.

Because it's patch day! 4.2 is out and I'm downloading it as I type this. I've looked ahead to what daily reward vendor I want to unlock first and.... they all suck for me. Each vendor has one item I can use, but every one of them is itemized with crit/mastery, the two worst stats for a shadow priest currently.

The only thing that does look pretty nice is that there are some blacksmithing plans to create an ilvl 365 dagger I can definitely use. Guess I need to start making truegold again. I guess this might be some incentive to work on my warrior again, who's a miner. Might also be a good idea since it's the Midsummer festival and I can get the XP buff.

Aside from the gear, however, it looks like there's 2 new pets. The Crimson Lasher and the Hyjal Bear Cub. As a pet collector (up to 127 now!) those are definitely on my list. I think those may determine which vendor I go for first more than the gear. >.>

Sadly, it's looking like most of my new gear is going to have to come from Valor Points. There's a ring and wand I'd definitely like since I'm currently using 353 items in both of those slots, as well as a neck, and wrist.

Is it Tuesday yet?

So 4.2 comes out on Tuesday.

I pulled my main out of the guild I joined a few months back and joined another new guild, . They're not quite as far along (they still have trouble with Council and haven't had many tries on Cho'gall), but they're a larger guild, so they have 2 raid groups and one of them fits my desired times perfectly.

Plus they needed a shadow priest.

I'm still somewhat disenchanted with WoW right now, but I figure I'm going to see how 4.2 goes before giving it up. In order to help bust into the new patch, I've been leveling my paladin alt as a tailor to make the craftable gear for my main.

Yeah, weird, I know to have a plate wearer as a tailor, but she was only Enchanting so I had a free profession slot open and don't care to make her a blacksmith to help herself out since she is just an alt.

Doing this was made somewhat easier since I'd just finished my Shatari Sky Guard rep grind on my main and had about 300 stacks of Netherweave cloth. I was able to do all my BC tailoring and still had a ton leftover. Guess I'm going to have to find something to do with all of it.

Meanwhile, Frostweave Cloth is sucking. My tailoring is at 395 right now and getting to 425 (where I can begin the Cata levels) is estimated to take another 150 bolts. At 5 cloth per bolt, that's 750 cloth I need to pick up. Joy.

So far I've farmed up 77 of the bolts... 73 more to go...

Word of Glory

My tanking spec on my paladin is somewhat different than what's popular right now. In particular, most specs include Word of Glory which allows a tank to use their holy power to heal themselves.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I still play with the mentality that it's a healer's job to do the healing, and the tank is supposed to have armor, parry, dodge, defense, and other mitigation to avoid taking as much as the damage in the first place as possible. As such, I obviously didn't take points in other associated skills like Eternal Glory or Guarded by the Light.

Arguably, the latter does put up a shield on any overhealing that would fall under the mitigation I just discussed, but to make using Word of Glory its best, you're using 4 talent points to support it. That's quite a few.

So the question becomes, is there anything better?

As usual, this is a tough question. To me, it depends on what you might be needing. As a tank that still hasn't gone beyond heroics, I consistently find myself running my daily heroics with raid geared players and as such, threat is a consistent issue. To help with this, I spent those 4 talent points in Seals of the Pure and Hallowed Ground. This has worked out pretty well for me. This past week I was in a group with a guildie on his hunter pulling 14k dps average, and he never pulled aggro. Apparently this was novel for him and he greatly enjoyed it. I can't chalk this up to these two talents alone. It could be my fabulous button mashing. Who knows.

So where do I see the extra healing coming in as more important? Easy: Entry level raiders. They'll need that extra healing until they're sufficiently geared to be mitigating the damage in other manners at which point, I think going back to more threat can be great since it lets your DPS go all out.

I bring this topic up because the most recent patch preview for 4.1 mentions that Word of Glory is going to be reworked some to give Paladins self-healing without having to blow holy power. I'm interested to see where that's going.

Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms - Thoughts

Looks like Blizzard has announced another new feature for the 4.1 patch. It's the Call To Arms for the dungeon finder which offers bonus rewards for people that queue as the least represented role (tank/healer/dps) to help reduce wait times.

Cool idea but I don't actually see this being a good move. I think it's simply going to increase problems I've already seen, namely, people queuing for rolls for which they're not properly geared, spec'd, or proficient.

A few weeks ago, I was healing an instance in which the tank was simply taking ridiculous amounts of damage. Crits were landing for half his total health left and right. Additionally, he couldn't hold any aggro. I inspected him to see that he dropped all his points in the prot tree, and was wearing about half pvp gear, some healing gear, and only one actual tanking piece. He'd never tanked before and only queued because he "wanted fast queues".

Unfortunately, the timer prevented us from kicking his ass out of the group so we agreed in whispers to let him pull, not heal him or get engaged in combat, and let him break all his gear and hopefully rageface enough he to drop group. It eventually worked.

While this was a pretty extreme example, I've seen it several times. People think that PVP gear = tanking gear because it has tons of stam and that tank threat = dps. It doesn't.

And it's not just tanks. When not healing, I'm very curious to see how priest healers break down their healing. Using Recount, I can see just how much of their healing is made up by what spells and I think most priests are doing it dead wrong. There's a ton out there that are still using Flash Heal as their primary heal and burning through their mana in 30 seconds. Bzzt. Wrong. Sure, you'll probably keep the tank up pretty well in that time, but you're wasting your party's time having to stop to drink after every pull. Additionally, those healers are lucky to have enough mana for longer, boss fights in which they're blowing every cooldown and requiring tanks to do the same. Big cooldowns (Lay on Hands, Last Stand, etc...) are generally considered "oh shit!" buttons. Not "my healer sucks" buttons.

Players that really don't know how to play a particular role can't be stopped from doing it, but this new system looks like it will encourage them.

In some ways, I don't mind this: Hopefully they'll learn quickly, or go read up on how to play, or someone in the group will give them some friendly tips. However, I also know from my experience both in game and out, that telling people they need to improve at something or what they're doing is wrong is something they don't take kindly too.

For example: Shadow priests have had the ability to cast Mind Sear on friendly party members since the last major patch. But I frequently see them casting it on enemies, which reduces the number of targets it will hit for an already underpowered spell. I generally remind them they should channel it off the tank if they're going to bother casting it at all (they can do more dps single targeting currently). The last time I tried this, I was met with a curt, "STFU! I kno how 2 play".

Obviously not.

Again, getting people to try out new things is awesome. It gives the game variety that will hopefully help to keep players entertained and keep playing.

So by all means, Blizzard should give the carrot of rewards gold, gear, and pet bonuses that the Call to Arms feature promises. But as with other things, there should also be a stick.

What I'd really like to see is Blizzard put in a ranking system where players were given a brief "thumbs up/thumbs down" for each member of their party after a random instance. Players that suck and get voted down repeatedly would be punished by getting pushed further down on the queue next time.

The problem with this would be that some players just have a hard time because they're not sufficiently geared. For example, a tank that is absolutely awesome, when first transitioning to heroics would likely suddenly find his rating dropping as people blame him for wipes that were simply caused by not having sufficient skill. Thus, there should be another factor: Some sort of algorithm that included the gear level appropriateness for the particular instance (and perhaps the gear type as well which could knock people for thinking that they're a PVP tank).

So while I think the idea is an OK one, I worry about the side effects. It may fix queue times, but I think it's also going to bring a lot of stupid players out of the wings and into the spotlight.

Catching up & Looking at 4.1

So I took a few weeks off from WoW to prepare for Naka-Kon. Before that, I'd joined the guild I'd mentioned previously, that I'd raided with before being bitched at by the GMs of Legions of Azeroth. Now, I'm a member of Guildbook on Stormreaver. I raided with them for one week before Naka and we beat down the first two bosses of Bastion of Twilight pretty quickly. That was more bosses in one night than in two months with LoA.

I then took two weeks off, and upon returning last week, we again downed the first two bosses and wiped a few times on the Twilight Ascendant Council. This week, we beat them in just a few attempts, before heading on to Cho'gall where one of our raid members decided to afk for 30 minutes without telling anyone. We pulled without him and wiped fairly quickly and no one felt like waiting for him, so we called it there.

Still, I managed to get myself a new healing neck. I also won the roll on some healing boots but passed them to one of our healers since I'm main spec shadow (why this guild doesn't do main over offspec, I don't know, but we're all cool enough that it's worked out fine).

So I'm currently quite pleased with how the social dynamics and progression in game are going for me right now. My real life friend quit last month to go back to playing Everquest (and subsequently quit that too), so I'm out one friend on there, but another friend just rolled up on my server and we've been playing together quite a bit the past few nights, keeping things fun outside of raiding.

But in upcoming news, Blizzard has announced some of the things coming for the 4.1 patch. Probably the biggest news is that Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub are being retooled into heroic 5 man dungeons. I'm not a huge fan of simply retooling things, but similarly, I wasn't thrilled about ZG being taken out, if for no other reason than I really wanted the damned mounts! The week before Cata hit, I got the raptor, but I'd still never gotten the tiger. Similarly, in ZA, my guild had gotten to the point where we could manage to get the Armani War Bear, but I always lost the roll and eventually, it was no longer available. Thus, I'm excited that similar mounts will be available again, even if they're not the same ones.

Of course, with patch comes class changes. Not much is changing for us priests. The biggest change I see, is that our mind sear damage will again be increased which will hopefully, again, make our AOE respectable.

My hunter is also now 85 so I glanced at their changes. Again, not much, but our multi-shot damage is getting a huge buff. That will be swell, but given that hunters already have good AOE, I don't know that it will stay that way.

I recently started leveling my paladin again to help tank instances as he levels. Currently, she's at 81 so possibly 85 by the time 4.1 hits. Again, not many changes here. We get a holy power when our Grand Crusader pops and we use our Avenger Shield. But given holy power isn't a huge issue for tanks, it's not something I'm jumping up and down over.

So that's where I'm sitting currently. Cool story.

4.0.6 Patch

The patch notes for 4.0.6 are out and, as expected, there's quite a few changes.

First off, class changes:

For priests, I'm not entirely surprised, but they're buffing shadow a tiny bit. Our Mind Blast is going to be "significantly increased". Given I'm already pulling 10k dps, I'd expected they'd feel shadow was sufficiently strong and leave it alone given we're, in a very real way, a utility class, restoring mana and health. Additionally, our Vampiric Embrace no longer has a duration to it. I remember when it had to be cast on every target! Our AOE is currently weak. Even with large pulls (think the whelps right before Sindragosa), I used to be able to pull 16-20k dps. After the nerf, I was doing 5-7 and other classes were consistently doing 12-15. Obviously we're lacking there as our Mind Sear was nerfed into the ground. I got better DPS single targeting. So finally we're getting an upgrade on that. A paltry 15%. Not enough to scale it back to on par with other classes. However, now we can channel it off friendly targets too, so that may help increase overall output some since we won't have to worry about our enemy target dying and breaking our channel.

Discipline priests are also being buffed, but not nearly as much as I'd expected. There's a slight buff to Pennance, making it cost 7% more, but heal 20% more as well. Grace can now apply to numerous targets, but when you're spam healing the tank with mana efficient spells so you don't run out, that doesn't much matter. Shields are getting buffed in a similar manner though. Mana cost up by 31%, but absorbs (and thus, instant heals when glyphed) for 208% more too. Not bad. Our only heal that we can truly cast on a party member quickly, Renew, is getting less expensive by 24% too. I'm wondering if this is being rolled into a talent or will be carrying over to Holy healers as well.

Speaking of Holy, we're not bad in this spec, but there's still room for improvement. On a good boss fight, I'm averaging about 6.4k HPS. This could easily be higher but given the need to conserve mana still, I limit myself in some ways. Our Circle of Healing will be going up 30%. Desparate Prayer will be getting buffed significantly whereas previously it was nearly worthless (although I was still spec'd into it).

My other class I've been playing is my hunter, mostly to level my Leatherworking and help all our leather and mail wearers in guild out a bit, so I glanced at their changes too. As predicted, they're getting some pretty hefty nerfs as well. Which makes sense since they're crazy strong right now. Our Cobra Shot now gets affected by haste, that's good. But our Black Arrow and Explosive Shot are both being reduced in damage and our passive agility (and thus AP bonus) on Into the Wilderness is being reduced by 33%.

So that's the changes for the classes I play. Priest will be getting a tiny bit easier. Hunter a tiny bit harder. Overall, pretty much what I expected.

Now for the instance changes:

When I first started doing heroics, I was not happy with them. Completely new mechanics and tricks made the learning curve far too steep for most players. The DPS gap was similarly prohibitive given that, aside from rep grinding and completing the Cata Loremaster to get all the ilvl 333 items from the end of them, there's not good ways to get gear to be ready to walk into heroics. The ilvl 316 stuff that drops on normal just didn't cut it. So heroics just weren't fun.

Slowly, as people have been getting gear, they've become more manageable. Tanks are finally walking in with 140k health unbuffed where earlier, they'd walked in with 110k. I have that much as a freaking clothie. You're not cutting it as a tank if that's all you got.

Heroics previously had been damn near impossible, now they're just challenging. Some more than others. I still haven't completed Deadmines. The sheer amount of burst DPS needed on Ripsnarl to manage the ghosts makes it impossible for most PUGs even now that many people are getting geared. So I expected some nerfs.

But I think Bliz went overboard. For example, in SFK, Baron Ashbury has 3 skills to worry about. The Stay of Execution, which needs to tick once or twice and then be interrupted, the Mend Rotten Flesh which also needs to be interrupted, and the Pain and Suffering, a DOT that can be interrupted or dispelled if it's not. So essentially what this requires is that your group have 2 interrupts and 1 dispell. It's pretty hard to find a group that doesn't. Getting people to do it properly is a bit harder, but that's fine. People should be required to be on top of their games on heroics and raiding. Blizzard has decided to completely remove his Mend Rotten Flesh. Now there's tons of room for people to fail again since you can double up on the interrupts.

Another over nerf, IMO, is completely removing a pup from Beauty in Blackrock Caverns. This was a pretty tough fight to keep 3 CCs up at all times. But now that nearly every class has some kind of CC, it's not impossible. And if you don't have 3, well, kill a pup. Every group should have DPS. Not super hard.

Ones that make sense? Giving an extra half second on Ozruk's Shatter to allow the tank to get away since there's issues with the dot ticking at the right time as I discussed previously. Tornadoes on Altarius don't knock you randomly around into other tornadoes or off the edge where the boss will kill you instantly. Reducing the flame breath on Valiona (although I had issues last night with it hitting me when I was clearly not in front of the boss; my archangel was at her back foot!).

There's several other small changes, but those are the big ones to me.

An Introduction to myself and Cata

I've been wanting to start a WoW blog for awhile now but never really felt I had much to write about with the end of Wrath, but with the new patch just released with the Shattering, I suppose it's time to start.

So I'll start off by introducing myself.

I'm Tiadara. I'm a raiding shadow priest (with discipline offspec) on Stormreaver, Alliance. I've been playing since a few months after Burning Crusade was released. In BC, I got through Karazhan and Serpentshrine. My guild (Legions of Azeroth) was working on Hyjal/Black Temple but back in the day of 25man only raids, we often had trouble getting full groups together. And being an astrophysics major irl didn't help me make it too often anyway.

Then Wrath came out. We blew down Naxx, Obsidian Sanctum, and Eye of Eternity. When Ulduar came out we struggled and never made it past Mirmiron. In Trial of the Crusader, we downed that including hardmodes on everything aside from the last boss. We've wiped the floor with Vault of Archavion. Lastly, with Icecrown, we've dethroned the Lich King and done all hardmodes except Sindragosa and the King himself.

We went into Ruby Sanctum the week it was released but due to some paste eating, we couldn't down her and haven't been back since most of us had better gear anyway.

Aside from raids, I collect pets and achievements and to a somewhat lesser extent, titles and mounts. I had just over 7k achievement points before the Cata patch and it got knocked down to 6885. Not sure what was removed, but I noticed they broke down old world into small numbers of quests for loremaster, so I'll probably go back through that and get a bunch there. I already have loremaster for oldworld, outlands, and half of northrend, so I'm safe on most of those, but to get the title, I'll have to actually quest my way to 85 come Cata. I generally go healer and instance grind as I hate leveling without a partner.

Regardless, with the patch out, I spent some time exploring the remodeled old world yesterday. I can't stand not having portals from Dalaran to all the major cities. At least they left the one to Tanaris alive as well as the ones to Blasted Lands. So I took that and did some running around. I like that they've added so many flight points and that they're now marked on your map. I picked some of them up and started playing around in the new zone in southern Blasted Lands, picking up some Gilneas rep.

I'm quite excited for the expansion, although I hate leveling and don't look forward to it. Hopefully it'll be as good as I've heard.