Closing in on patch 4.2

With the upcomming patch 4.2 and the new and interesting content known as Firelands will be flung in our heads ,ready or not, on the 29^th of June (Yes, Europe !!). Most people tend to focus on what new flashy loot will be available for them and their class along with the changes in their classes, which can be for the better or the worse.
I did the same in regards to holy paladins, and lets take a brief  look at the changes to holy paladins.

·         Our mastery gets “reworked” and can now stack, but in spite of this it is still a situational stat at best, and since it only affects our direct heals it isn’t that great since, and I can only speak for myself and the paladins in my guild, but we tend to balance our healing around beacon and beacon swapping. It can now stack, but unless you play like a retard, OR there is some insane attack that we would be able to mitigate by stacking a shield like idiots – Unless that is the case I hardly see any change to our mastery.

·         Holy Radience gets it CD lowered which always is nice – This, makes us more viable for raidhealing, which apparently is quite important to some holy paladins, and I must admit I do welcome it because I usually want to spam it more than I can currently.

·         WoG becomes more potent, however, It is still sub par compared to LoD when we talk 25man content, but I guess it will be a nice boost to 10man paladins.

·         Divine Protection will now grant the same speed buff as HR, and I guess a lot will argue “this is only for PVP”, and sure it Is possible done to make paladins more viable in PVP, but it is sure a very, very and I stretch this – VERY nice feature, which if used wisely will grant you the ability to avoid some damage. And as a bonus you will look like you do care about surviving and using your defensive cooldown , which is a thing I still think people tend to ignore the importance of.

And in regards to gear I had gathered close to BiS (Stupid Fing trinkets – this is the 2^nd expansion where my trinkets just seems to have vanished from the game), however, at the brink of new content and while being prepared for it am I going to reroll, again. Or I guess it is more of a “back roll” to the character I changed to in order to help out the guild in the beginning of Cataclysm – my shaman.

It wasn’t an easy call, however, there is several reasons:

·         When playing in a Danish guild (And I am fairly sure it is the same thing in every guild where you only got one nationality) the amount of people isn’t that big, and this affects the numbers of “useful” classes which will apply to your guild. Our case was that an old paladin, who have played with us for a few years and then took a break due to IRL stuff, decided to reapply to the guild. So what do you do? Four paladins will undoubtedly be one too many, and you aren’t really in a position to throw away good applications and especially when you know a person is a quite good player, I mean , that is just stupid. So one way to resolve this was to say: nay – you quitted on us before, however, since the manner of his leaving was presented in advance giving us time to replace him, and since he wishes to play with us again (yeah, it must because of the awesome jokes I crack on VT and all that other stuff) it does also show a great deal of loyalty. Loyalty is a thing which is too rarely seen, and I do think that when you got loyal players who come back that they should be given a chance. So I suggested that I “rererolled” to my shaman, however, this being a week before Firelands and my shaman at the same gear level that I left him when I rolled pwaladin, and the paladin in somewhat half heroic gear it isn’t the start of the content I had hoped for. However, as it is said numerous times and therefore must be correct: Skills > gear.
Furthermore, this movement of persons will also ensure that we are “full” on healers, and should thereby be standing better due to not being forced to run suboptimal setups as we did before with 4 holy paladins. It worked, but it did require some coordination and I must admit we did have some quite good paladins.

·         I just realized that I forgot to hit the damn “Enter” and thereby pretty much throwing everything in to one single paragraph.

·         BUT, we will now look at Firelands with two restoration druids, three paladins, two priests and three shamans which I think is a quite decent  setup.

·         Furthermore, I did talk about the difference in gear level, but then again I doubt that people want to change their ilvl 372 just to get a few +points over a person who runs around with ilvl 359. And I guess it will be healthy for me to try to be in the lower end of the healing meter (Yes, aren’t we all some small horny bitches who wants to be able to point at the meters and say “Look, Look at my healing done I must be the best healer in the WOOOOORLD, or a massive cock who snipe heals, but I choose option number #1)

However, the more I think about it the more I am looking forward to playing my shaman again at a higher level than our occasional alt run whenever I am bored.
And one thing that I do think is quite unique for a shaman is the ability to throw a HR and then spam Lightning Bolts in order to maximize the damage whenever being close to a first kill, and as I have stated in a few posts – A few of our first kills would simply not have been possible if our healers hadn’t thrown out between 3-5 million damage. Furthermore, I get around a thing which I have been thinking on and that is the inadequate Judgement, and the none excisting scaling with the mana return, and it is a thing which will rape paladins in the butt at one point if the issue does not get addressed. It is a great tool and depending on the fight I did regn. between 100.000 – 150.000 pr. Fight due to Judgement, but it is a decent amount now, but when we get further into the expansion it will be harder to justify the usage of a GCD to regain that amount of mana if you are running around with 200k mana (It will take a while, but I hope you understand what I am trying to say), and furthermore you are not capable of using your Judgement as you wish during progression and when being slightly undergeared – whereas a druid uses one GCD with innervate and priests one with Shadow Fiend, but yes shamans is in the same business as us and has to spec into Telluic Currents and with a cast of everything between 1,2 and 2 sec casttime, depending on your haste level, they do seem to be worse off than paladins, but since that their mana “gain” scales with the damage it will therefore scale with gear which makes it more and more precious as you get better and better gear.

Oh well, I guess that was enough whine – but I do think it is an issue that needs to be addressed and I believe it was a paladin from Method (Yes, those something who were worse than the Finnish) who addressed it on the official forums under Healing, but I seem to be unable to find the thread, but if I will I will edit it in because he did say some quite interesting things.

Here is the link, and the post is written by Shakaroz from Method Link to post

That will be all for now, and I guess with a new class and new content I will making a few posts which will deal with me whining about the content is too hard or my class is underpowered or any other excuse I can find to explain my miserable playing.

While add it I will take the liberty to give a little advertisement, in case you play a shaman please read on and if not do it anyway you might want to do so, for a guy who plays a restoration shaman and I must admit that when I played my own shaman back when normals were hard I did agree with the majority of what he had to say, and I think he has some very nice observations, however, here is the link: www.lifeingroup5.com