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.
Showing posts with label Cata. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cata. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
So..... Cata
Cata's been out for nearly a month now and I haven't posted much on my thoughts on it thus far.
I headed out at midnight to get the expansion. I wasn't planning on getting the collectors edition since I'd heard it was pre-order only. Turns out Best Buy had some extras, so I got one. I installed it and waited for the server to switch over.
Release night was crazy. The line to get to the flight master was insane. And when I say "line", I mean "cluster fuck".
After about 10 minutes, I finally got it, grabbed my quest to head to Vashj'ir, and headed out there. Release night was ridiculously laggy. I was having 2 second delays on all spells. Oddly, there didn't seem to be many people in the zone compared to later nights when lag was lower.
Regardless, I leveled through Vash, headed to Deepholm, realized I hadn't picked enough herbs to be able to pick the ones there, headed back to Hyjal, did the quests there, grabbing herbs along the way, returned to Deepholm, and Uldum.
Our resident rogue was our guild first 85, followed by one of our warriors, and then a hunter. I was fourth through the gate, having done quite a bit of healing through instances for that last level.
Since then I worked to get my real life friend to 85, and try to get us both enough gear to run heroics. And dear lord what a pain that has been. The number of places and methods required to be sufficiently geared to run heroics well has been painful. Some gear has come through quests. But the ilvl 333 stuff only seems to come from the end of long quest chains from an entire zone. Thus, I netted the quest achievements for every zone except Uldum and Vash. The former because I just quit for awhile, and the latter because it was bugged and not enough quests existed for the first few days. Seeing that, I left a few undone and apparently they've gone and fixed it, so I need to pick up those last few for the achieve.
Meanwhile, other slots can only be well filled from running non-heroic instances. And some.... well, there's just nothing there for some slots. Want a good set of druid healing boots right now? There's an ilvl 316 pair, but absolutely no 333 pair. Instead, you'll skip straight to ilvl 346 boots. Either you get those from the heroics you won't be able to heal, or you get these boots which only drop from a rare spawn with a 9-14 hour respawn timer in a cave that's heavily traveled by questers. My friend took the latter route. Other gear comes from Justice Points. If you saved some from Wrath, you're a step ahead. But since my friend blew all hers for boomkin gear, she's been hurting for JP gear since she can only get 70 JP a day, being unable to heal most heroics due to poor gear.
As a priest, I haven't been suffering nearly as bad. The healing is brutal, mostly due to severe mana issues. But as I've improved gear, that's slowly being mitigated. Still, I've been having some problems with my regen skills. Hymn of Hope takes far too long to channel. A tank will likely be dead by the time it's done. Shadowfiends have had their attack changed. Previously, they were permanently set to aggressive and would go after whatever your target was. Now, you have to be attacking the target to get it to attack, or actually press another button to tell it to. Obviously, as a healer, I'm not attacking anything, and having to actually tell it to attack both wastes a bit of its time attacking as well as takes my attention away from the people that need healing. I think this was an extremely poor choice.
Alchemy has been a help. The new mana potions are potent, but requiring Whiptail makes them expensive to produce since it can only be (reliably) farmed along the banks of the river in Uldum (also around a lake in Tol Barad, but have fun getting ganked). It's a very limited area and since it's so well defined, you can bet that you'll be competing to get it. Still, this isn't nearly as bad as the Azshara's Veil which only comes from Vashj'ir, and is extremely spread out. Super slow, yet required to make my flasks.
Aside from healer mana issues, heroics just haven't been going well. I've tried running several with PuGs, but generally drop within the first few minutes when it becomes clear the tank still thinks he's playing Wrath, and tries to AOE tank everything and not worry about cleaving the CC, if he even waits for it. Similarly, few people have been paying attention to boss mechanics and people standing in things has been a reoccurring problem, and a waste of healer mana. On the first boss in Halls of Origination, none of our three dps knew the lever mechanics (on normal) leaving the tank and I to be the ones to have to do their work for them.
Sometimes, I can't entirely blame people. The green healing circle druid healers drop frequently does a very good job of obscuring any ground effects from the bosses. The faint blue tornadoes on the first boss in heroic Throne of the Tides blends in with the blue room and are easy to miss when you're staring at health bars. Overall, it's requiring an ability to multitask that many people don't possess nor have the gear to compensate for.
In the meantime, I've also been working on archaeology a ton. I've maxed it out in Eastern Kingdoms, hoping to get the DPS caster staff, but no luck so far. After maxing my alchemy, I switched over to Kalimdor to put together Canopic Jars and attempt to get the Vial of the Sands recipe to turn myself into a Sandstone drake. So far, I've put together one jar and haven't gotten it. I've collected most of the materials, and almost have the 24k gold necessary to buy the Sands of Time.
Cooking has been a pain as well. I've finished leveling it, which wasn't too hard. But getting recipes requires the daily cooking quest. In this case, I wish Blizzard had gone with some more of the variety they had with gear: You get recipes from daily quests, instance drops, chefs in various cities, or reputation rewards. Nope. Instead, there's the painful bottleneck to collect the recipes.
I've been mostly concentrating on fishing recipes and haven't quite maxed that out, but am slowly working on it as I help the guild with the That's a Lot of Bait! achievement. Annoyingly, the main fish I want for the best dps caster buff, doesn't come from pools, making fishing them completely useless for the guild achieve.
Next week, the guild is hoping to have its first raid. I'm quite skeptical that we'll be geared enough. Additionally, we're lacking several spots. One of our tanks plays primarily on another server now and, even if he does sign on to play with us, is now playing a shaman as his main. Our third healer was an alt of another guild's member's, but now that she's concentrating on her main, we don't have her either, leaving me to probably be the 3rd healer for some time.
Another of my real life friends recently started playing and is leveling a Death Knight to be our new tank, but it's a long process. I'm not sure why Blizz didn't extend the cutoff for recruit-a-friend XP since the level cap was raised as well. He's currently 70, but it's probably going to be another 2-3 weeks before he's sufficiently geared to take up tanking, if he can even handle the responsibility with such a challenging difficulty as a new player.
So that's what been going on for the past 3 weeks with me. Overall, I like Cata. It's a good challenge, but there's some annoying oversights, and it's showing just how bad many players really were.
I headed out at midnight to get the expansion. I wasn't planning on getting the collectors edition since I'd heard it was pre-order only. Turns out Best Buy had some extras, so I got one. I installed it and waited for the server to switch over.
Release night was crazy. The line to get to the flight master was insane. And when I say "line", I mean "cluster fuck".
After about 10 minutes, I finally got it, grabbed my quest to head to Vashj'ir, and headed out there. Release night was ridiculously laggy. I was having 2 second delays on all spells. Oddly, there didn't seem to be many people in the zone compared to later nights when lag was lower.
Regardless, I leveled through Vash, headed to Deepholm, realized I hadn't picked enough herbs to be able to pick the ones there, headed back to Hyjal, did the quests there, grabbing herbs along the way, returned to Deepholm, and Uldum.
Our resident rogue was our guild first 85, followed by one of our warriors, and then a hunter. I was fourth through the gate, having done quite a bit of healing through instances for that last level.
Since then I worked to get my real life friend to 85, and try to get us both enough gear to run heroics. And dear lord what a pain that has been. The number of places and methods required to be sufficiently geared to run heroics well has been painful. Some gear has come through quests. But the ilvl 333 stuff only seems to come from the end of long quest chains from an entire zone. Thus, I netted the quest achievements for every zone except Uldum and Vash. The former because I just quit for awhile, and the latter because it was bugged and not enough quests existed for the first few days. Seeing that, I left a few undone and apparently they've gone and fixed it, so I need to pick up those last few for the achieve.
Meanwhile, other slots can only be well filled from running non-heroic instances. And some.... well, there's just nothing there for some slots. Want a good set of druid healing boots right now? There's an ilvl 316 pair, but absolutely no 333 pair. Instead, you'll skip straight to ilvl 346 boots. Either you get those from the heroics you won't be able to heal, or you get these boots which only drop from a rare spawn with a 9-14 hour respawn timer in a cave that's heavily traveled by questers. My friend took the latter route. Other gear comes from Justice Points. If you saved some from Wrath, you're a step ahead. But since my friend blew all hers for boomkin gear, she's been hurting for JP gear since she can only get 70 JP a day, being unable to heal most heroics due to poor gear.
As a priest, I haven't been suffering nearly as bad. The healing is brutal, mostly due to severe mana issues. But as I've improved gear, that's slowly being mitigated. Still, I've been having some problems with my regen skills. Hymn of Hope takes far too long to channel. A tank will likely be dead by the time it's done. Shadowfiends have had their attack changed. Previously, they were permanently set to aggressive and would go after whatever your target was. Now, you have to be attacking the target to get it to attack, or actually press another button to tell it to. Obviously, as a healer, I'm not attacking anything, and having to actually tell it to attack both wastes a bit of its time attacking as well as takes my attention away from the people that need healing. I think this was an extremely poor choice.
Alchemy has been a help. The new mana potions are potent, but requiring Whiptail makes them expensive to produce since it can only be (reliably) farmed along the banks of the river in Uldum (also around a lake in Tol Barad, but have fun getting ganked). It's a very limited area and since it's so well defined, you can bet that you'll be competing to get it. Still, this isn't nearly as bad as the Azshara's Veil which only comes from Vashj'ir, and is extremely spread out. Super slow, yet required to make my flasks.
Aside from healer mana issues, heroics just haven't been going well. I've tried running several with PuGs, but generally drop within the first few minutes when it becomes clear the tank still thinks he's playing Wrath, and tries to AOE tank everything and not worry about cleaving the CC, if he even waits for it. Similarly, few people have been paying attention to boss mechanics and people standing in things has been a reoccurring problem, and a waste of healer mana. On the first boss in Halls of Origination, none of our three dps knew the lever mechanics (on normal) leaving the tank and I to be the ones to have to do their work for them.
Sometimes, I can't entirely blame people. The green healing circle druid healers drop frequently does a very good job of obscuring any ground effects from the bosses. The faint blue tornadoes on the first boss in heroic Throne of the Tides blends in with the blue room and are easy to miss when you're staring at health bars. Overall, it's requiring an ability to multitask that many people don't possess nor have the gear to compensate for.
In the meantime, I've also been working on archaeology a ton. I've maxed it out in Eastern Kingdoms, hoping to get the DPS caster staff, but no luck so far. After maxing my alchemy, I switched over to Kalimdor to put together Canopic Jars and attempt to get the Vial of the Sands recipe to turn myself into a Sandstone drake. So far, I've put together one jar and haven't gotten it. I've collected most of the materials, and almost have the 24k gold necessary to buy the Sands of Time.
Cooking has been a pain as well. I've finished leveling it, which wasn't too hard. But getting recipes requires the daily cooking quest. In this case, I wish Blizzard had gone with some more of the variety they had with gear: You get recipes from daily quests, instance drops, chefs in various cities, or reputation rewards. Nope. Instead, there's the painful bottleneck to collect the recipes.
I've been mostly concentrating on fishing recipes and haven't quite maxed that out, but am slowly working on it as I help the guild with the That's a Lot of Bait! achievement. Annoyingly, the main fish I want for the best dps caster buff, doesn't come from pools, making fishing them completely useless for the guild achieve.
Next week, the guild is hoping to have its first raid. I'm quite skeptical that we'll be geared enough. Additionally, we're lacking several spots. One of our tanks plays primarily on another server now and, even if he does sign on to play with us, is now playing a shaman as his main. Our third healer was an alt of another guild's member's, but now that she's concentrating on her main, we don't have her either, leaving me to probably be the 3rd healer for some time.
Another of my real life friends recently started playing and is leveling a Death Knight to be our new tank, but it's a long process. I'm not sure why Blizz didn't extend the cutoff for recruit-a-friend XP since the level cap was raised as well. He's currently 70, but it's probably going to be another 2-3 weeks before he's sufficiently geared to take up tanking, if he can even handle the responsibility with such a challenging difficulty as a new player.
So that's what been going on for the past 3 weeks with me. Overall, I like Cata. It's a good challenge, but there's some annoying oversights, and it's showing just how bad many players really were.
Monday, November 29, 2010
1 Week + 1 Day
The upcoming release of Cata is getting me more and more antsy.
This past week in raid, we finally downed heroic Putricide and Sindragosa. We only took three attempts on Putricide before nailing it pretty flawlessly. I think it helped we had two friends from other guilds that were exceptionally geared and experienced helping out and the lack of one of our usual members who doesn't watch where he's standing quite often which threw our debuff all over.
Sindra took far longer. We spent nearly three hours wiping on her quite often due to trying out small variations on tactics and some people getting confused on what we'd changed due to negligence. But we finally got it, jumped onto Lich King, did our [Been Waiting a Long Time for This] and are now only left with just [Full House] and [All You Can Eat] to do this weekend before Cata is released, earning us our pretty Frostbrood Vanquisher.
Aside from that, I've been working on a few other minor projects to pass the time. I've been working on grinding out the Gilneas rep through some heroics with my pocket healer and real life friend Midoria. In the meantime, she's been using the Justice Points to work on a Boomkin set so she's not entirely stuck healing come Cata.
Also on the rep table, I finally finished off my Honor Hold rep earning my 30th exalted rep. I've been pushing my guildmates to run some more old world raids with me and joining pugs for them more regularly, so I'm fairly close on a few of those, and did get my Hero of the Zandalar Tribe before it was made into a Feat as well as winning a ZG Raptor before it was gone. I also found the cute Razzashi Hatchling on the AH very cheap and bought a few before ZG was removed, but it looks like they've just moved it to dropping off some other STV mobs. Oh well.
I've also picked up the new Shattering pets. The singing sunflower is awesome. I also ground out Mr. Grubbs (I recommend farming it at Zul'Mashar if you want to try for it; took me about 30 minutes there). Lastly, I did the quest chain for Withers although I don't get him out too often since he looks so much like the other tree pet.
This past week in raid, we finally downed heroic Putricide and Sindragosa. We only took three attempts on Putricide before nailing it pretty flawlessly. I think it helped we had two friends from other guilds that were exceptionally geared and experienced helping out and the lack of one of our usual members who doesn't watch where he's standing quite often which threw our debuff all over.
Sindra took far longer. We spent nearly three hours wiping on her quite often due to trying out small variations on tactics and some people getting confused on what we'd changed due to negligence. But we finally got it, jumped onto Lich King, did our [Been Waiting a Long Time for This] and are now only left with just [Full House] and [All You Can Eat] to do this weekend before Cata is released, earning us our pretty Frostbrood Vanquisher.
Aside from that, I've been working on a few other minor projects to pass the time. I've been working on grinding out the Gilneas rep through some heroics with my pocket healer and real life friend Midoria. In the meantime, she's been using the Justice Points to work on a Boomkin set so she's not entirely stuck healing come Cata.
Also on the rep table, I finally finished off my Honor Hold rep earning my 30th exalted rep. I've been pushing my guildmates to run some more old world raids with me and joining pugs for them more regularly, so I'm fairly close on a few of those, and did get my Hero of the Zandalar Tribe before it was made into a Feat as well as winning a ZG Raptor before it was gone. I also found the cute Razzashi Hatchling on the AH very cheap and bought a few before ZG was removed, but it looks like they've just moved it to dropping off some other STV mobs. Oh well.
I've also picked up the new Shattering pets. The singing sunflower is awesome. I also ground out Mr. Grubbs (I recommend farming it at Zul'Mashar if you want to try for it; took me about 30 minutes there). Lastly, I did the quest chain for Withers although I don't get him out too often since he looks so much like the other tree pet.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
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.
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.
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