fredag den 24. juni 2011

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 29th 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 2nd 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

mandag den 20. juni 2011

A peak back before 4.2


Looking back on the the content which we have encountered from the release of Cataclysm, and what I think of the content and design of them so far.
First I will have to say that it has been a massive and possible a little too much content released in the beginning, and I am fairly glad that Firelands was postponed simply because it would only have been the the top 200 guilds which would have had any “farm time” of all the content.

Blackwing Descent (BWD) – Beside a few bosses which proved to be unkillable without bugging it (Hello Atramedes) or a boss which required class stacking to an extreme (Hello Kitty, I mean Nefarian). But all in all I am pleased with the 6 bosses in BWD and they do all require that one has to move away from the tunnelvision while pressing ones 1 1 1 3 4 rotation, which I personally think is a good welcome. And with the changes to healing I think it is quite fun that you now will see a far bigger difference between a good player and a bad player. An example - In WOLTK a bad shaman would use Chain Heal and Lesser Healing Wave and a bad shaman would use Chain Heal and Lesser Healing Wave and there would not really be any difference, and even if you played very well it was hardly noticeable if you were better than the guy who was clueless but was just spamming CH. Now you are able to see a difference between a shaman who knows what he is doing and one who just pushes his buttons randomly. I am a firm believer in that it is a good thing that the game has become more challenging and that it didn’t matter if you pressed 1 1 3 or 1 2 3 4 you would still do decent enough to get through. I do understand the need for Blizzard to show everyone their content, but there is just a far to big playerbase to make everyone happy, and you could argue that “Hey, top guilds are a minority so therefore the focus should be on the people who couldn’t move out of damage in spite of their lives depended on it” and it is a valid point. However, I do also believe that if the “top level” was removed and made far too easy it would remove a very, very large playerbase simply because people talk about Paragon, Ensidia & Method and look towards the players in the guilds for tips and ways to improve their own gameplay. Furthermore, if that aspect is removed and made to “common”, yes I am aware that this might sound like I am an elitist jackass, and a requirement to a) Understand more than 50% of your class, b) Being able to minimize the damage you as a player takes and finally c) Work as a team. If those were removed or made less important there would hardly be any challenge or fun in the game, the fun part is that a lot of people who sit and yell “The game is too casual friendly and easy now, I wish everything was like in Vanilla” usually have forgotten the dull and annoying grind for pots, elixirs, flasks as well as the problem with 40 people – Some of the will be AFK, Unfocused or just plain baddies and that was one of the reasons why people look at Vanilla WoW to be more challenging. Another and I must say that it is quite important is that some bosses were so bugged that they virtually were unkillable.
Finally, and what I think is one of the key things is – We have improved and the players which play today are for the majority more skilled and better players than people who played in Vanlilla, and they got more experience now. I am fairly convinced that the content that Blizzard has given us in this expansion is some of the hardest and most challenging that we have ever experienced, and I think that it is the way to do it. The content so far is also far more demanding on every single player an example is Council in BoT – If a person fucks up with Debuff he is likely to die, if he does so with Lightning rod he is likely to wipe the raid. If he fails to get the Frost Orb to the fire – He will wipe the raid, and all of these things has one simple thing in common – They are all about movement and how you place yourself when you know certain things will occur, and you are in control of 98% of it – People who say “Raped by RNG”, sorry but that is just b#llshit you made a mistake – Admit it and let us move along and hopefully you will learn from it.  

 Bastion of Twillight (BoT) – I like the ideas of the instance, but I really, really hate that many people tend to play WOLTK style meaning: I do not need to move from this thing, which will do 30-50K damage to me and is completely avoidable or I have an ability which will remove 50% of it, nah – I will get a heal” and it is so frustrating because a 30K heal is for a paladin a Divine Light which is 7k mana and if you have to spend that amount on more than a few people, well – you will drain your mana and in the end your tanks will suffer.
Halfus – Honestly I have given up with melee, if the Fireball  Barage will hit – they will all get hitted every single time. If the tank does a countdown you can be sure that a caster will have finished his cast the instant the tank says 1, and thereby already giving us a semi optimal start in the name “herp ti derp ti diipiiis”.

Valliona – I do like the idea of tank switching and two realms, and I do remember that our first kill was pretty tight, as a first kill should be! But when we land on “farm” people tend to ignore Twillight Blasts falling from the sky and is avoidable. People with engulfing goes “ ZOMG MOAR DAMAGE NAU” smashing between 2-5 people down at 50% before they realize “Ehm, perhaps I ought to move”. People “forget” to move when they are target with Metorite or doesn’t bother to move into our gathering point when we get a blackout, and thereby putting additional pressure on the healers and on the raid. However, I do think it is a fun fight – beside the RNG of CD stacking on Blackouts and the outcome.

Council: FUFUUFUFUFU, debuffs -. Movement, buff / debuff, Lightning and if we manage all this perfectly we are likely to have someone going “WUT IS DAT BLUE THING DAT IS FOLLOWING ME – I WILL CHARGE IT RIGHT ON” and bam – You just wasted 5 min. And the trash before Council what on earth were they thinking ? Something along the lines (I believe a French accent would fit nicely) “How can we make this unbearable and annoying like nothing ever before?”
And I will say that I believe that it is either the hardest HM or the 2nd Hardest because it requires everyone to be on their toes and not make any mistakes because it is quite hard to kill the boss with 24-23 or less people even if you got them all perfectly at 23-24ish%  HP.

Cho’gall – First we tried to morph a mage, but since we failed miserably at interrupting people which in the end gave Cho’gall an average of 2-4 stacks it was simply impossible to keep the mage alive for long enough to benefit from it. Instead we just used the CDs we would have used on him on the Shadow AoE which would be absorbed with 9 or 10 stacks instead, and it worked quite nicely. However, when my guild hits the “dis is farm” … seriously, interrupts on MCed people seems to have lower priority than taking a direct hit to the genital area or ignoring Blaze until you finished 3-5 casts. However, it is a fun and challenging fight and when we reached it for the first time we had quite a lot of optimizing to do, and I would highly recommend that people used WoL to compare other peoples logs with their own. We found out that our damage output was much higher, until we the add spawned and then it fell a lot because we used a suboptimal movement tactic and when we changed it we didn’t drop nearly as much damage.
Sinestra – A fun fight and as a paladin I just love to heal Calen with Avening Wrath + Divine Favor and when he hits 60% pop Guardian of the Ancient Kings and see a HPs which just sky rocks. Sadly, the last time when I was able to keep a 56k HPs until our wipe at 5.30 min a healer had to go and I was de/promoted to dispel duty – Horray, I am now the 6th dispeller we have used for this. The sad part is that people fail just as much to the Cutter than to Wreck going south. Furthermore,  I cannot stretch how important it is for people to use their defensive cooldowns and for priests and druids to use Divine Hymn and Tranquility. And on the same time how important it is for healers to throw a dot or two up on the boss whenever they just are throwing out overhealing anyway. Sadly, many are stuck in the old idea that I am a healer and therefore I only heal as well as DPS saying: I am a damage dealer hence I cannot use my healing spells or defensive CDs, and that is sadly just plain stupidity and is shows that you aren’t making the most out of your class.

Conclave of Wind – I hate it, I really really hate this boss, but I guess that is mainly because I get the honors of kiting the damn adds on my Death Knight because we only have one person in the guild who plays a DK, and he has been busy with IRL stuff à Hey, you got a DK alt right ? Kite ! They are a fucking pain to kite, and do require a bit of practice because if you make the circle to big you will most likely have very big difficulties with picking up the 2nd wave, or if you make the circle to little it is the same story. This can be helped with a Warlock to Stun the adds or a Mage to put down Ring of Frost, but you cannot always depend on it – Or if people can control their trigger happy fingers à BAM, an add is raping the raid because someone just had to whore 100 more DPs … Brilliant… idiot.
Al’akir – Phase one is all about movement – making the right decisions and minimizing the damage that you take. Phase 2 is about controlling the adds and is a DPs race, and it is very wize to let the classes who can cancel the Acid Rain aura do it at 11.12 debuffs – And that is Mages, Paladins, Rogues and Death knights (AMS <3) . Phase 3 is again movement, and can be  pain if people “forget” about the Lightning Rod debuff.

Overall I do think the content is quite fun and challenging, but it does also require that you play with people who know what they are doing and not just die every 25 second and then blaming it on RNG or bugs. There will be some bugs, but RNG – It should be named “Random Error 40” since it is usually YOU who makes a mistake.



lørdag den 18. juni 2011

Update - Ranting and words.


Since I have had a lot of irl stuff to do I haven’t been paying attention to this blog, however, with my exams finished I do have time again, and I guess it is time to throw some ranting around. Which is what I will be doing based on the amount of whine threads on the official forums and MMO-champion. 

One of the topics which is coming back again and again is – “Why don’t we have such a spell, I want one too, they are OP because of that, my class is broken I cannot AoE heal” or whatever people complain about. 

People seem to forget that the beauty of the game isn’t that every class is exactly like the other, but people tend to use their imaginary calculator and comes forth with something like this:  resto shaman = disc / holy priest = resto druid =  holy paladin because they are all healers they should be able to do almost every task just as good as the other class. This is utterly, utterly stupid and will in the end remove the “uniqueness” of the different classes. Sure, if you look at the statement “bring the player, not the class” you might want to bring 25 paladins, 2 tanks, 7 healers and 16 dps because all your friends just love the shiny bubble man.  Should it be viable? Should it be able to compete with guilds, which set more or less specific raids in order to provide every possible buff to the raid? 

Furthermore, if you are so damn annoyed about e.g. a paladin not being able to raid heal at the same ferocity as a priest or a shaman – Then why not roll one? “But I love my paladin and I got soooo many exciting achievements on this character” Then you got two options 1) Reroll or find a guild which wants a player who wants to play suboptimal. 2) Deal with it and go do what your class is good at.
What it appears that a lot of people want is 4 classes with the same amount of spells, which does the same but “only” has different names and spell icons.  However, sadly the most of this whining on forums is done by people who seems to struggle quite hard with the playing the game and their character at just a decent level.  Who has more fun just running around doing a dungeon from time to time, and that is cool – but please do at very least just a little research on your class so whenever you attempt to do your daily heroic you aren’t being carried. When I say carried I refer to e.g. warrior tanks who refuses to use cleave or rend + thunderclap at AoE packs and can hardly keep agro from the healer, who has to the hardest hitting spell in order to keep mr. tank up because he has gemmed, geared and is either using his CDs wrong or not bothering with such a tedious thing. The healer who insists on using one spell, and one spell only. The damage dealer who is struggling to pass the 4000DPs, which to many seems to be hard, and I still cannot understand how it is possible to do it, but there is some people who can pull of that “magic” trick. 

While I am ranting - I cannot stand people who in forums attempts to tell what is best for X class because a) They got 5/12 normal or b) Read it on a forum like Elitist Jerks, which as we all know is the holy grail for everything /sarcasm end. Sure, it is decent to start if you don’t know how to spec, but as far as healing goes the only “worth” is the spreadsheets on haste levels in order to get another tick on Rej, Riptide, HR and alike. You might get a x stat value which is better than y, but for the most part a thing called “sense” will take you just as far. 

Furthermore, when we talk healing many tend to look purely at HPs and it is understandable because it is the only data which seems to be available. However, HPs isn’t everything – far from it. A healers job is to keep people alive and that is done by using the healing spells and by using whatever cooldowns that you got at your disposal. This is the easy part and I will make the claim that everyone can keep Wild Growth on CD while spamming Rej on the raid. Spamming Prayer of Healing while keeping Circle of Healing on CD. Keeping Healing Rain on CD while pumping Chain Heals out like there was no end or keep Holy Radiance on CD while spamming HL/DL as a mad man. This will look brilliant on the healing meter, but a big part of it will be “wasted” healing, and it would mean that you are throwing a lot of overhealing out. This can be addressed in two ways 1) You are too many healers or 2) Instead of spamming “wasted” heals you could cast a few damaging spells or throwing a dot or two up. It might seem like a silly and pointless thing because it is so little damage, but whenever you are pressing on for a first kill it is vital. How many times have I wiped on 1% or worse 100k HP which sadly would have been a kill if the healers had thrown a few offensive spells, but they rather wanted to spam heals which would be wasted. 

A great example was my guilds first Cho’gall HC kill where we had our shamans and priest to throw out damage whenever there wasn’t any raid damage or heavy tank damage, which ended up with being around 5.5mio damage that the healers dished out. That might not seem like a lot, but was what made the boss go down that day and not a week or two after. One may argue that since our healers were able to throw out damage we could have been running with a healer less and that may be true, but we aren’t the best players in the world which also is reflected in the amount of healing required. If people make mistakes, and they will, it is your job to counter it with dishing out additional healing. You could just let the person die, and thereby hope he learned that “This fire stuff is bad”, but that would also mean that you threw that try away and you will attempt to counter the mistake, and I will admit that it is also one of the reasons I enjoy playing a healer that it is more “on the fly” than keeping an 1 1 3 4 rotation.

Furthermore, if you only want to win recount and feels that it is more important than taking down the boss you might want to switch to DPS because it is highly unlikely you will be getting a WoL ranking with the first few kills simply because you want a safe kill. When you have killed the boss a sufficient amount of times you will cut out a healer or two in order to make it more challenging, and because at that point you are pretty much just “stealing healing” and spamming unnecessary heals. A good example was a Valiona HC kill where we started with 5 healers and when one of the priests got a brainfart we continued 4 healers the reaming 75% of the fight, it was challenging but it was also making this dull boring farm encounter more fun. And it meant that the FAT DPSers had to minimize the damage they took because there were less rawr healing, and from my experience that is a problem that comes with farm content and this attitude sneaks up upon people “Nah, I can just stand here I will receive healing anyway” I tend to call it WOLTK playstyle.
This playstyle can manifest quite suddenly a sad example is we can one week one shot Al’Akir HC and the next week we can be wiping for hours due to people suddenly got major problems with avoiding tornadoes or use any defensive CDs whatsoever – despite the obvious “If you die you will generate 0 damage”. And while looking into that aspect I find it quite amusing that people doesn’t bother to use a damage pot, but they throw out all the unnecessary damage on adds and targets which doesn’t require damage – So that they can get a higher DPS output and it is quite idiotic.

I guess that was enough random rambling, and I will try to keep this more up to date with Firelands hitting us hard in our vacation time where everyone will be able to maintain a stable raid team.