Another point of view.

Beside my mage I have more or less decided that I will level my shaman as my second character, and due to the healing situation in my guild I have been thinking about getting it leveled rather fast.

As you might have guessed I want to play restoration and this is due to several reasons:
1^st Shamans is in my humble opinion the “best overall” healing class and perhaps the one who have been changed the least for the release of Cataclysm.
Chainheals initial healing has been nerfed, but I do actually thing that it is a good change since it will force you to use a larger part of your healing arsenal instead of just spamming Chainheal because it was such a strong heal both for AoE, which it still is, and for single target healing where it would crit for 14-18k and leave a massive hot on your target.

One of the major changes to most of the healing classes is that they now have the opportunity or they must do damage now in order to keep a buff up on themselves. There is those who think that as a healer the only thing you should be able to do is – Heal, and then there is those who adjust and see the opportunities in the changes as for an example I will take restoration shamans since it is the class which I am most familiar with. The talent “Focused Insight” – “After casting any Shock spell, your next heal’s mana cost is reduced by 75% of the cost of the Shock spell, and its healing effectiveness is increased by 30%”. This is a massive “on demand” burst healing one can launch while not feeling guilty of doing damage to the boss with a few GCDs add this 30% effectiveness with our mastery Deep Healing I think that Shamans will have the opportunity to specialize more in either raid healing or tank healing.

In addition restoration shamans gets a new heal “Healing Rain” which in its current state isn’t that healing impressive (from what I’ve read) it heals for close to 2k pr. Tick if there is 5 or less people in the area and then heals for less as more and more people is in the area, but since it is capable of proccing Earth Living on the target it is in my opinion a decent AoE heal. One has to remember that the amount of “burst” both on the tanks and the raid is being reduced and the tank dying within somewhat near of 1 second shouldn’t be that much of an issue anymore.  

Another new talent is “Telluric Currents” which will allow you to cast Lightning Bolts and essentially will allow you to do damage instead of just ideling / throwing a heal which you know will be 70/80% overhealing aswell as the druids hots would heal the target up without your help. And again it is the idea – Healers can do if they please do damage, and this is not a new thing you could take a look at almost every single video released by Paragon or Ensidia; If the healer got mana and a free GCD he or her usually throws a DoT on the target and when you search through some of the wipes you have had on 1-2% imagine if your healers would have had a DoT running almost constantly.
Another aspect is in my opinion that since most guilds most likely will run with 7 healers until they get the hang of the fight, enrage is first a problem when you actually manage to stay alive for that long, you will not be as penalized if the healers can do some damage. I am well aware that they won’t top damage meters or do billions of gazillions of damage, but every single bit of damage counts for a first kill! – Why else would we do theory crafting, respec for encounters and use pots and flasks.

Getting closer to Cataclysm.

Patch 4.0.3

Another patch fixing more bugs – yeah, right – I have NEVER experienced as many bugs /glitches and general problems with my mage.
Firstly I switched from my 0/33/3 spec to a theoretically higher singletarget output 2/31/3 spec, but what I accaulty managed to get was lower, and not just by a few 100 dps, but closer to 1000 dps which honestly should be impossible when gainng 2% dps. Though it might be added that my crit rate on fireballs was … well, playing with almost 62% crit, gaining 5% from critical mass and then 5% from the Fireball glyph I should in theory be at approximately at 72%ish crit on my fireballs, but I noticed that I several times was below 60% and my fellow mage who has less crit that I was around 80%. Crit is ofc. Unreliable, however this is just maddening along with the fact that my dps was significant lower than the previous raids.

Though when we started on Festergut I really started to become annoyed – I got Vile Gas as one of the first during heroism and as usual I used my Ice Block and used my Cancel Aura macro, but despite I’ve used Ice Block didn’t have the Vile Gas debuff my character still acted like I had the debuff.

On Rotface (Yey, for 3 DFOs in 5 months and no caster trinket from Halion in 3 months) I was surpassed by quite a lot of classes which I never have trouble beating despite having shit luck with my RNG, and I’ve encountered a new bug with Blink or atleast in my experience my first bug with Blink in ICC.  I blinked to avoid the big ooze and his slime spray, but instead of moving anywhere I just used a GCD and stood right where  was when I pressed blink.

From that point I was pissed and it didn’t help that my damage sucked mooseballs on the remaning fights and you might say: You just suck, isn’t that a reasonable reason ? Sure, if it wasn’t due to the fact that I changed my spec to gain more single target dps, I did exactly what I’ve always done and I committed very, very few mistakes during that raid, oh yeah and Living Bomb CAN STILL be fucking overwritten by another mages, or glyphs is still bugged (to our benefit though) and nothing has been fixed. Brilliant just brilliant.

But as the running joke in my guild current is “It will be balanced / fixed at 85”, and I do realize that the current raids is not really of great importance, but it is of a damn great annoyance

Issues with fire atm.:

Combustion: It has become more “regular”, but during the majority of my experience with it has it only been one mage who would “benefit” from it, an example is Deathbringer Saurfang where I haven’t encountered a single time where I and my fellow mage both have had Combustion work equally. I do know that there is a certain amount of factors e.g. crits / hs / ignite and the RNG luck with the far from 10% proc chance on Impact, but when one does 50-70% lower dmg with Combustion while doing almost the exact same thing I do suggest that there is a problem with it. It must be said though that during our last Halion kill it did seem as it was fixed, but since I only have been once I won’t say that it has been fixed.

Another problem is Impact sometimes overrules the other mages Living Bomb, it has become better, but there is still several of fights where I put up Livinb Bom and get an Impact proc just to notice 2 seconds thereafter that my Living Bomb seems to have vanished, and when I then ask my fellow mage “Did you use Impact?” his reply is always YES, and this also works the other way around.

In theory fire mages should also be capable of putting out a decent amount of damage during movement with the talents Firestarter and Hot Streak, but I find that about in 50% of my fights either Scorch “acting” strange meaning: You cannot cast it while on the move, but you can start cast and then move which either is a bug or the talent is unclear. When Hot Streak procs you should get an instant Pyroblast and this should just as Scorch be castable while moving (and has been so previously), but sometimes you are unable to cast it and have to make a “quick” stop in your movement in order to get it to cast.

Impact: The tooltip says a 10% chance to proc Impact, but I have done a little testing and it does seem as if the proc rather is lower than 10%, one might say that the proc rate is more or less the same as the one on Arcane Missiles before patch 4.0.

While taking about annoying bugs there is also quite a few bugs which gives us damage :

Pyromanic should only be up for 10seconds with an internal cooldown of 35 seconds, but it may bug and you run around with a constant 10% spell haste increase.

Oh yeah, while whining I doubt that mastery ever will come close to being a “primary” stats since the idea is decent, but since a high amount of our damage is coming from Crits (Hot Streak, Ignite) and we still want a decent haste level and this is for several reasons: 1. Faster casts is always win, 2^nd: the “haste caps” on Living Bomb 5-6 or 7 ticks.

And now to something quite closely related

Yes, Cataclysm is no longer far, far away in a developers head, but is getting closer and closer every day and is now less than a month and most of the information has already been released so it is only to wait and get ready to some powerleveling, after my examination on the 7^th that is, but the main question now is – How will the mage class work in Cataclysm and since I haven’t been playing on the beta and PTR I can’t really tell.  However, I do sneak around at most forums and a general problem seems to be the mana. However, several things may still be tweaked / fixed and if we come to face problems with our mana you are really going to see the difference between a good and a mediocre mage.

Beside that I have more or less decided that I am going to level as arcane and this is for several reasons:

1^st : Insane burst – No class or spec comes close to the burst damage an arcane mage can make.

2^nd : Arcane Blast (talented) will put a slow effect on the target and therefore become almost as good as frost regarding CC (ofc. Pet and Deep Freeze does still give frost the upper hand, but why spec frost if you can obliterate mobs before they even get close to you.

3^rd: Glyphed Evocation + a 2minute cooldown … it is just insane along with Mage armor imagine your downtime where you have to sit and drink to gain mana / hp.

This is for questing and solo leveling if I were to enter dungeons I would spec fire due to the superior AoE damage and fun factor.  

Patch 4..0.1a with minor fixes.

Sooo the patch was supposed to fix some of the bugs which had occurred since the release of patch 4.0.1 and I myself as a mage had encountered a few glitches and bugs.
1^st: Impact sometimes “overwriting” another mages dots which was quite annoying.

2^nd  The talent Firestarter seems to be slightly bugged from time to time which meant that you could encounter that you were unable to cast scorch while moving and thereby making Firstarter completely useless. I thought it had been fixed, but I encountered the problem several times as late yesterdays raid.
3^rd Prime/ Major glyph bug: There is a bug with the glyphs which currently is a DPS gain – One more dps glyph = sweet.

This is the bugs which I have stumbled across the last couple of weeks, however, I must admit that it is hard to see that you now are competing with warlocks, boomkins and shadow priests for #1-3 on damage and it seems that a single target boss fight in ICC we  have lost somewhere in between 1000-1500 DPS not that I am complaining since mages isn’t in as a position as rogues and feral druids, but it is always painful to experience a nerf.
Though there is also an upside – Fights with more than one target, this is where we shine these days with talents like Pyromaniac, Impact combined with Combustion and instant Blastwave + Flamestrike – well, the result  makes you almost jizz in your pants, however, you really have to min – maximize combustion to get the full effect so I highly recommend the addon Combustion helper if you feel that you aren’t getting the full benefit from Combustion.
I managed to almost get everything to perform perfectly on Deathbringer Saurfang in our raid the 27^th of October finishing with almost 25000 DPS and 400.000 damage done to adds, this was while running with 5 healers and getting zero Power Infusions – I was quite pleased with myself there, but when we encounter fight with only one target you might be better of with Arcane if your haste level supports it; I personally wouldn’t dump below 30% haste as arcane.

Another thing which of late has been bothering me quite a bit while raiding and also is one of my concerns for Cataclysm: Crit – Before patch 4.0.1 myself and my fellow mage in the guild was critting around 80ish oercent, and sometimes dipping in 90ish percents, with fireballs and that was when you only had to get two crits in a row to gain Hot Streak, however, now we seem to have problems with critting more than 65-70 percent and that is with pretty much luck and you now have to get three crits in a row to gain Hot Streak – Now it isn’t because I am obsessed with Pyroblast, however, atm. our 2-set tier10 bonus has around 5-10% less uptime which along with the nerfed crit is quite  significant in my opinion.

Talking about critical strikes and haste combined with the need to gain 17% hit from talents alone and from what I have read on forums and heard from people who currently tests dungeons and raids on the beta is:
fire is having some serious mana problems and several people talks about having to switch to mage armor during the fights or spam free scorch. Arcane seems to have the same problem aslong as the fight exceeds 3-4 min duration, however, you might argue “Then don’t use Arcane Power” that could be true, however, without using that arcane drops quite a lot on DPS, and this leads me to frost which I have read several people suggesting as the “most optimal” raid spec since the mana sufficiency along with frost being less penalized when your crit and haste raitings is low / medium. However, this is only testing from the beta which other people have made so I do not really have any personal reference to it.

Delayed post.

So Cataclysm is slowly getting closer and closer and the 13th of October patch 4.0.1 will hit the EU servers and we will have to adjust and ”relearn” to play our classes.  Am I looking forward to it ? Yes, most certainly after maximum 2 days of raiding each week with ICC, RS, TOTGC and UL I am quite sure that it will be great fun to raid these over farmed instances with an almost new class.
As I have stated in my first post my main is a mage and I have been playing him as my main character since the day I started to play the game quite a while back. So obviously my main focus will be the upcoming mage changes, but I might add that I haven’t won a Beta key and I haven’t bothered to download the Live game in order to play. This decision was solely made due to I find that from October to December is where I have the time to learn to play my class and how boring would it be if you already mastered it and then just had two months with standard farming and crying in private whispers because all the others were incompetent retards who didn’t manage to hit their buttons in the correct or just slightly correct way.

Anyway, I must admit that I first was a little against the remake and removal of almost half our talents and a complete remake of our class, but after a bit of thinking I do actually think that it is a quite brilliant idea.
So yes – The Mage, one of the current top DPS classes and the remake is looking quite tasty even though we aren’t given Flame Orb yet (dr00l for any Diablo 2 player).

I am fairly sure that this is more or less the build which I will be trying out first. It is a fire build (yay don’t we all love fire and huge ignites? Reminds me, here is a link to a Youtube Vid of the mage Greatshock from “For the Horde” who gathered a 100% crit set and was fooling around on the Saurfang encounter: http://manaflask.com/forum_topic.php?forum_id=19&topic_id=31091) and this is the build which I reckon will be the standard fire build until Cataclysm: http://wowtal.com/#k=RsnZtqt.a5o.mage. It is the build which I reckon would yield the highest single target DPS, but for a fight like Lich King on heroic I would change my build in order to get free Flamestrikes when the Valkyr Phase starts: http://wowtal.com/#k=RsnDX8_.a5o.mage. Though I might consider switching one talent from Netherwing Presence into Impact, but I do not have a feeling of “how often” Impact will proc, however, I will have an idea the 13^th of October.
However, even though I assume fire will be the “top raiding build” I must admit I do feel tempted to try frost since it does look like it got a major overhaul. However, I am afraid that frost will never become a spec which will be able to compete with fire and arcane.
Arcane, I do feel an urge to hit my head against my keyboard when I play it and I must admit that I am quite sure of that I ended up getting a physical disorder after playing arcane in what seems to be endless Lich King HC tries due to our only retard paladin decided to stop playing, just after he received Shadowmourne (Always fun when the first person who gets Shadowmourne decides to quit / give his account to his brother and the 2^nd person which received it got it and more or less stopped playing the day after while being one item away from BiS.

I am sorry for not getting this post up around the release date of patch 4.0.1, but I had quite a lot of irl things which had to be attended, however, I will post it anyway and make a brief update on my experience with the patch so far.

25^th of Oct. it has been about two weeks after the release of one of the most game changing patches so far and there is a lot to talk about.
Firstly as a mage I was quite thrilled when we started our raid on Wednesday the 13^th  and fooled around in Ulduar. There had been a quite noticeable damage boost for mages which I reckon would be approximate 1500-2000 dps close to BiS and it was quite fun for most of the casters (hello fatkins, lolocks and “I kill myself priests”), but for melee, except death knights, it was another story. Fury warriors had dropped something close to 50% in dmg and most of the other classes being within the range of 20 – 30% (rough estimates based on the meters in my guild) and there was quite a lot of frustration, which is very understandable – Going from #1-3 on dmg to just barely above the tank, man it must feel frustrating.
Though most of this was only to last a day since quite a lot of hotfixes were made during the night and some casters were nerfed while some melees were given a buff, which was needed, but rogues was and is still a broken class imo.

Our next raid was in ICC and we didn’t really feel much difference except people failing on stupid stuff while giving the excuse “My ui doesn’t work, I didn’t get a warning” as well as excuses related to class mechanic changes and yes, there were some changes, but some of it was just plain stupidity.
There was more or less not any real problems until we encountered Sindragosa and our melee dropped like flies, and thus blaming healers for being unable to keep them up – II do myself not play a melee or healer, but it is quite obvious that with Judgment of Light gone there is a lot of “passive” healing gone, this is also combined with the fact that the HP pool might be bigger, but the healing mechanics has changed as well. However, our melee wasn’t really understanding it and along with paladins going from being a “MUST HAVE” healer they ended up being the poorest healing class (until it was hotfixed a few days later, thank God) so I was asked to relog my resto shaman and spam some Chain Heal along with Healing Surge (mana expensive, but a damn good heal).
This is where our problem began, at the Lich King our pala tank was killed in what we later could see in logs, in 1,20 sec. due to the class mechanic and we had to switch him out since he more or less was unhealable.

However, we was unable to take down LK that week due to massive stun/slow failure and tanks taking immense amount of damage. This was fixed within the next reset where we one shottede LK.

Again I apologize for the late update and no pictures, but I thought it would be better to get a post up so I wouldn’t get even further behind and I will try to make my posts more date relevant.

My experience with vanilla WoW.

Uhrmf, I really don’t know how to start this blog so if the start makes you think – what the fuck, I do apologize. My idea with this blog was to cover the release of the long waited and quite interesting expansion to the MMO scene, and I do not talk about Diablo 3 (even though it will be quite interesting as well), but about World of Warcraft – Cataclysm and the still unknown release date.
However, since there isn’t an official release date yet I could sit around and wait awhile, so instead I decided to “warm up” and see how ghastly my Engrish had become and share my World of Warcraft experiences with you.

 

I guess the most logical place to start is with the beginning of my first and quite frankly pathetic first steps in game, but then again we all had to start somewhere and I started at the bottom. I bought my copy of World of Warcraft the 02/01/06 and what a journey it has been.  A friend of mine who had been playing the game a little longer than me suggested me to start on the Trollbane EU realm (For those of you who doesn’t know there is an EU and US version of the servers) and I started out with the most amazing character the realm had ever seen – A gnome mage with red hair, a big moustache and completely clueless of how anything worked, but he was on a quest to throw fireballs and frostbolts at any foe who dared to cross my path of retribution and goodness for I was to become a champion of the alliance, a hero of the light, or that was my intentions until I actually became aware of the gameplay.

 

I fooled around being slower to level than a turtle, but I finally got to level 60 in greens and blues and I was starting to understand just a little of the game, and yes this was the time of the incredible hard frostbolt spam.  One thing I do remember was my first Magister’s piece it felt amazing - those stats, the blue color and possible set bonuses in the future, but nothing happened for a while and I started to farm Timbermaw Hold reputation for the amazing +15 Agility on 1handed  enchant and there I met a druid with who I teamed up for farming the rep. This was my way into raiding due to he joined a guild a week or so later and they were trying to gather people for the flabbergasting, amazing and truly epic raid instance Molten Core. It was my first experience with more than 10 people I was thrilled and excited and even though we wiped a few times on the trash who either was immensely hard or we sucked donkey balls (we sucked), however it was great fun and we actually managed to take down Lucifron, Magmadar and Ghennas I didn’t receive any loot, but just the sheer thrill to take down a new and big bad mother fucker, oh yeah this is why I still raid.

This made me think – Hey, I can be a raider and I started to search for a raiding guild instead of the casual dungeon guild I was in. I honestly can’t recall if I made an application to my first guild Hazzard or if I just talked a little with an officer of the guild, but long story short I got in the guild and in Hazzard I experienced the rest of Molten Core (ghastly video quality movie of Ragnaros) and taking down Ragnaros was one of the best online experiences I have experienced.
Molten Core was done and we ventured into the next raid instance Blackwing Lair

After our Ragnaros kill we gradually started to change our destination a little and that was of course guided tours into the dragon infested halls of Blackwing Lair. All that I can remember of the first boss is the feeling “F##KING” adds, however, we managed to take it down and looked at a dragon, which in first glimpse looked to be a walkover, but oh boy were we up for a surprise. For those of you who did play with the encounter during Vanilla I reckon you know what I am talking about. Vaelastrasz the Corrupt was a bitch and along with the fact that I think is not to be underestimated: We sucked donkey balls

 I guess I need to make a little comment on the 40man raid environment – Unless and I repeat unless (or that is my experience) you played in what would today be called a hardcore top 50 guild you had tops and I repeat that TOPS 15-20 people who knew what they were doing and had actually studied the encounter – 10 people who almost knew what they were doing and then the remaining 10-15 people who either was afk. Auto attacking /melee huntards or wanding who which the raid could easily have done without in my humble and useless opinion.

Back to BWL and I must admit I can’t recall much of the instance tho after some thinking a part seems to crawl forward from the abyss which I refer to as my brain. If I remember correctly it was pull - run 20 yards, aoe - rinse and repeat for what I recall as 20-30minutes just to wipe on the boss and do it all over again. Now for those who always seems to say “Oh, everything was way better back in the days when things were hard and it is walkover and piece of cake these days – I say fuck ya, the reason for it being so abnormally hard was the majority of us sucked and the encounters had a serious amount of trash before each boss which today would be considered as several mini bosses – and because it is true we sucked or at least the majority of us did.

Ahh, it always feels good to ramble and taking the first steps towards being an angry and grumpy old man. I must admit I can hardly remember the next few bosses up until Nefarian (or Neffie) except there was something with decursing like a lunatic.

Though eventually we stood in Nefarian's room, and oh boy was he a challenge, and truly an epic encounter according to my blurry memories. I will sum up what I can remember and fill in addition info which I will copy pate from various websites because I am a lazy bum. However, here goes: Adds spawning from two sides of which there were two gates each place and they were to be tanked and aoeed down then an air phase in which we usually lost quite a few people in the beginning due to people “forgetting” to take their cloak on (insert link) and in the phase he did something, but I can’t recall what, but I do remember giraffes and other zoo animals being all over the place.

Since I played a mage I guess it is in its place to mention that during BWL the mages in my guild, and I would guess the majority changed spec to fire and began to cast fireballs (oh, the rolling ignite days) instead of the incomprehensive and mind-blowing frostbolt spam.

After we in some lucky + rng along with severe luck we managed to take him down and we now set our eyes on the next challenge, which was the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj or usually referred to as AQ40. The trash was harder than some of the bosses in the previous instances and the temple being incredible large, no that just not justify it  - It was bloody enormous. While we were progress in AQ40 another instance was released, and yes this is where you properly is sure – Hey, he isn’t even raiding hardcore what a waste of time to read and you Sir/Madame are properly correct, however I continue.

The instance that we in the current expansion “Wrath of the Lich King” only speak of as a joke, yes the instance Naxxramas today it is a walkover it was that when the expansion was released and people wearing Sunwell gear along with blues managed to clear it, however it must be said that those people is what you would call pretty damn good players for the most part.

Back to Vanilla and my first experience with Naxx: We started in the Military wing and after some sheer dumb luck we managed to take down Instructor Raz, and that was all I encountered except for some completely failures at Patchwerk.

I guess one of the reasons why we didn’t progress much more in Naxx was that it was not too long before the next expansion was released and there was not much point in farming gear which properly would be replaced shortly after by greens and blues because they were much better itemized.