B is for Badass

MMO-Champion released the pictures of the Tier-9 sets which will be featured in patch 3.2: Call of the Colliseum. I just wanted to share a moment of meditation with you before showing you what they are like. Breathe in deeply, and hold your breath. Feel at one with the cosmos. For just a moment, resist the urge to peel layers of thought from other people’s minds in vindictive and creative ways. Are you ready?

Can you say Badass? Can you feel the Badass?

This…is awesome. I feel a tear burning, itching to trail across my cheek as I contemplate what this will look like in Shadowform. And if they have a purple version of this, I’d better bring a change of shorts when we start raiding Colliseum.

^_^

Shadowpriest (unofficial) Q&A

Purplecadet, a Shadow Priest, has been posting some of his concerns and questions on the forums here. While initially ridiculed for “fishing for blue posts”, GhostCrawler did deign to respond to his questions. Below is a transcript of the questions and answers, after which I will be giving my thoughts on this.

Question 1: What does blizzard see as shadow priest roll in pvp or pve situations?
PVE: I dont pve much but from my understanding there are aoe monsters is this the niche you intended them to fill in pve? I once saw a blue saying that they didn’t want anyone filling that niche!
You’re a dps class that focuses on dots and “stealing energy” from opponents. I’ll write a prettier version for the official Q&A. Shadow priests can do single target damage and now in LK can do AE damage as well.

PVP: As you all may know Priest are the only class with TWO healing trees. Did you want our dps tree to also have a strong healing component through Vampric Embrace? I often hear shadow priest refered to as the Pre-BC caster tank, are there any intentions of turning shadows priest back into this role anytime soon?
Yes on the VE part. “Caster tank” as a role is a little risky. It basically means that melee have to close the gap to finally do damage to you, yet once they do… they still have trouble hurting you. I know that makes you want to say “But melee are crushing us right now!” That might be a problem, but doesn’t mean the right answer is to have non-fragile casters. You are probably tougher than mages, and still have decent escape mechanisms with Dispersion and fears.

Question 2: Was mind flay always intended to be our “filler,” damage spell instead of a nuke or was it ment to be a mainly pvp spell? If it wasn’t are you intending to give us a nuke? I ask because to my understanding shadow priest scale very poorly with haste which brings me to my next question.
We don’t really design every caster around nukes. That’s kind of a mage deal where they emphasize one main spell. We want the other casters to feel differently, to have rotations. Mind Flay is part of that.

Question 3: Does blizzard intend to make haste effect dots? As you all may know this would help with some scaling issues and I don’t see why they couldn’t do this, they already did it with crits!
It’s something we’re talking about. Haste is a problematic stat for a number of reasons. It isn’t always good for example if you don’t have enough room in your rotation to fit another spell. It isn’t good if you’re GCD capped. Now, it’s okay — in fact preferable — that stats aren’t equal for everyone. We like that not all casters would look at say a ring with haste, crit and spirit the same way.

Question 4: Does blizzard think that dispel protection is a problem for dot heavy casters? If you do what are you planning to do to fix this? If you don’t why not? I understand that vampiric touch has a penalty for being removed but I just don’t feel like it is strong enough or even compares to it’s much stronger version unstable affliction.
We think the whole dispel protection game needs to be overhauled. Buffs should be valued for their buffs, not for whether or not they can protect other buffs. We need to change this whole system to something more sane. Whether or not you have a dispel, and whether or not your target is vulnerable to it has just become way too important. You are right that the VT penalty is so low as to be silly, and that’s something we would like to boost for 3.2.

Question 5: Alot of players feel as though replenishment should belong solely to shadow priest, we understand that you would like to “bring the player not the class,” but honestly could you say that having a unique class/spec ability is such a bad thing?
Yes, it’s a bad thing. It’s good if you’re a shadow priest wanting a raid slot. It’s bad if you’re the druid or warrior who can’t come because the raid leader feels like they must bring the shadow priest in order to raid. We want the challenge to be the encounters, not the logistics of building the group.

Question 6: It takes shadow priest significantly longer to set up our damage than other classes. Would it be in your intentions to add an initial damage component to vampiric touch and make it instant cast to help alleviate some of the wait-time for damage?
I think there is something to the set-up-your-damage issue, but at the same time, dots also have a lot of benefits over direct damage spells. We would not want any spell that Shadow priests felt like they could just cast instead of doing their rotation, and if the instant-damage spell was weaker than the rotation, it would likely see only situational use (though maybe that’s a fine niche).

Questions 7:Are you planning on implementing a snare/root for shadow priest? Shadow Priest is currently the only caster that has no snare/root abilities. These types of abilities are essential when we are not able to tank damage and wear cloth.
We don’t want to give every mechanic to every class if we can help it. Just above you asked if it was a bad thing to have some unique mechanics. Saying no isn’t the same as saying everyone can have some mechanics. We intend for the Shadow CC to be things like Psychic Horror and Silence, and to a much lesser extent, Mind Control.

Question 8: Shadow priest are always triggering our global cooldown but have no way to make it shorter. Are you planning to implement maybe a talent to reduce our global cooldown?
We wouldn’t do it through a talent, but we might let haste do it. Remember, the global is there for a reason. Having too many abilities short-circuit it will ultimately have consequences.

Question 9: : As you may know shadow priest have a fair amount of mobility issues, are you planning on adding a short immunity to snares after fade is used? ( Improved Fade ofcourse.)
No. We would be more likely to nerf snares. We don’t want to have an arms race of snares, then snare immunity, then the snare that can’t be made immune, and so on.

Question 10: Are you planning to add Body and Soul to the shadow tree?
No.

Question 11: The fear/blind DR has severely destroyed a lot of synergy shadowpriest and rogues shared, are you planning to revert this change next season?
No. The game needs more DR on crowd control, not less. Using your crowd control at the right time is awesome. Chaining different forms of CC together to keep an enemy from ever being able to move is a lot less fun.

Question 12: Dispersion a lot of people feel the abilities strength does not merit it as a 51 point talent, are there any plans to move this to a lower tier in the shadow tree? Will there be any plans to remove the silence effect it applies in the future?
We don’t want to remove the silence for the reason we’ve never wanted to remove it — we want Dispersion as an escape mechanism, not an offensive cooldown. We might lower Dispersion’s cooldown though. We want it to do it’s job, not get marginalized in the tree.

Question 13: Was the disarm on Psychic horror intended to occur after the “horror,” or during? Is there any intention of removing the travel time on Psychic Horror, If not will you add an animation?
What do you mean by animation? To the projectile or the target? The disarm was intended to occur during the horror.

Question 14: Psychic Scream is a very powerful spell for getting attackers off of you, but there are various ways to counter it. Would it be reasonable to add a penalty for removing this spell early, maybe a 2 second stun or a snare.
We do the dot / hot penalties because its a weakness of dots. We’re not crazy about going down the road of making all CC have a kiss / curse element with its removal.

Question 15: Most damage over time spells just tick with no special effect with an exception to a few. In order to help us damage better could we get more “effects” on our damage over time spells such as ticking hard initially and damage slowly wearing off.
This might be something we’d consider. I understand the concern.

Question 16: From my understanding there is a cooldown on Devouring Plague to keep us from putting it on multiple targets. Couldn’t you just make Devouring Plague only usable on 1 target at a time and remove the cooldown?
Yes. I’m not sure many players would consider that a buff though.

Question 17: Mind Control although this is a fun spell it isn’t very useful in pvp situations because it leaves your character immobile for however long and randomly breaks. Could mind control make the controlled target your pet but movable by using the same mechanic used to place a death and decay?
We might do something like that for pets in general. Mind Control however is a really powerful ability. Not only does it prevent the target from doing anything, it also lets you use their abilities against their allies. It’s going to be hard for us to remove too many downsides from the effect.

Question 18: Are you planning on giving spriest a new 51 point talent?
No. We want the 51-pointers to be very attractive, but not necessarily the most powerful talent in the tree. A great number, if not a majority, of Shadow priests have Dispersion so it’s hard to argue it isn’t attractive. I understand some players want the 51 to be a big damage spell for damage-dealing specs, but that just isn’t always what we think the tree needs. I’m not saying we are going to take the talent trees to 61 or 71 points soon, but if we did, just think of the expectation. Does the 71 pointer need to blow all of the previous talents out of the water? Do deeper talents need to become more powerful at the same time the character gets more of them? That leads to a lot of power inflation. We think talents probably account for too much of a character’s power already.

Natarumah’s thoughts

There are some interesting points made, but nothing really shocking. My pet irk is that GC claims we have a rotation, while we obviously have a priority. We have too many cooldowns and DoTs ticking to rotate them properly.

As for the Haste part; our scaling of Haste is indeed bad on our DoTs, since they will not tick faster. If there would be some talent akin to the Druid’s Gift of the Earthmother (which reduces their global cooldown on certain HoTs) it would certainly make me happy, but also devaluate Haste even further. We’d be gearing more and more like restoration Druids.

The part where we have to take some time to properly set up our damage also has an up side; because of this, we may lack initial output which limits our use on trash, the longer a fight lasts the more damage we will effectively deal. We have some serious mana regeneration, replenishment and Shadowfiend to keep us going for quite some time, so we slow start but are pretty heavy hitters overall.

I have to laugh at calling Silence, Mind Control and Fear our CCs. While they may have their value in PvP, they are limited in PvE content. Silence is a necessity on Hardmodes to be able to interrupt properly, yes, but it also requires us to dump 2 points into Improved Psychic Scream, which is not helping us. I know I’d probably get a stern talking-to if I decided to use Fear as a CC. And Mind Control…well…unless it severely makes the encounter easier (or is required, such as Instructor Razuvious) I’d avoid it. It is easy to break, and the aggro we get from it is quite impressive.

Mind Control in PvP is such a double-edged sword. You trade your damage potential for the gimped potential of the one you MC. It is extremely strong if opponents are alone, but most PvPers I know will geek your stationary, helpless ass if you try this to their friends.

Dispersion actually is quite a bit more useful than I had given it credit for before Wrath. Even though the silence means our damage stops for a short while, it has saved my bacon quite often, and it is easy to pop it when you can’t do anything anyway (such as in Ignis’ flag pot) and get some precious mana back. If they lower the cooldown, I think my mana would never run out again…

There is a suggestion to make out DoTs tick harder in the beginning and more weakly as the spell progresses, similar to how Wild Growth’s HoT mechanic works. One word:

No

For the love of god, no. Not only will this mean that we will be having tons of theorycrafting calculating the exact moment to refresh the DoT early for maximum damage uptime, followed by the discussion of “5 stacks of Shadoweaving then refresh Shadow Word: Pain early then Mind Flay to keep it up 2 times but no longer except when you have gain a Crit buff because then you have to refresh again…” and such drivel which will make our role a chore and about as much fun as having your tongue pulled through your intestines and used as a midnight snack at our rear end.

Also, if this was done, we’d be slapped with cooldowns on our DoTs to prevent this from happening (like Wild Growth) which means our rotation gets even more complex. If this were to happen, I’d go bonkers.

Conclusion

I will reserve my judgments primarily for the official Q&A session for priests, but it seems than we are actually in line with GC’s expectations of our class. We provide Replenishment as one of the few, we have good survivability and deal adequate damage. Sure, we´re no mages or warlocks, but we have our place and are appreciated.

While Purplecadet puts forth some interesting notions and valid concerns, I believe that if these suggestions would be implemented, we´d be a class that could only be played by people with chronic OCD.

Features or Frills?

All is abuzz about the two most recently revealed changes for patch 3.2 to come: Raid lockout extension and Faction Change. Let’s look at a little depth what this means, so far…this information is parsed from the forums and MMO-Champion.com.

Raid Lockout Extension

It looks as if there will be the possibility to extend the lockout duration of a raid you are in by 1 week. By doing so, you will have the opportunity to spend more time on managing a certain hard-mode, or clear through a challenging dungeon longer. So far this is clear, but a few questions remain, which I will hope to answer here once it becomes more clear:

• Can only the Leader of a raid extend it?
• Does it apply to the whole raid at once? Must each member do it seperately?
• Can it be extended only once for 1 week, or repeated?

The problem is that I can see people griefing their pug members if the answer to points 2 and 3 is yes. They could theoretically extend it continually for weeks, blocking a group of people from actually finishing a raid or instance. It is clear that the screen to request the extension also allows you to remove it, but probably within the same restrictions as mentioned above.

Faction Change

Ever wanted to join the other side? Well now you can. With an upcoming paid feature Blizzard is planning (but not 100% sure if and when) you can change yourself from one faction to the other, choosing a new race. I can see how this is a benefit if you want to play with friends on the other side, or if there is a horrible faction imbalance on a  server.

Some people have stated that perhaps your faction allegiance changes, but not your race. This however is severly against the lore, plain silly, and more than a bit unbalancing to the game itself. On a PvP server you’d go nuts because even your friends could become your enemies. Besides addicted, I can see people becoming paranoid because of WoW now as well. ^_^

On the flip side, it’s also another way for known Ninja offenders to hide their trail. Even websites like wowprogress will no longer be able to connect the 80 Tauren Warrior from a ninja guild hopping servers and becoming an 80 Gnome Warrior. I think this is a small concern however, for it will allow you to switch sides if you had the idea you really wanted to play something else, but did not want to start all over again.

People have been wondering why it is not possible to change from Gnome to Human, for instance. Well, crudely you could do it by changing from Alliance to Horde and back to Alliance. I have to say I am curious how this will work out, especially with pets, achievements and reputations.

Fact is, the greatest cost is not even the money, but the realization you might be forced to grind all your faction rep again.

It does offer some interesting Roleplay options and PvP options. I will leave most of such philosophizing to the real PvP jockeys, but it allows them not only to reroll FotM classes, but also races now, and even factions. This might even slowly drain the life out of the “nerf it, reroll” discussions, and the like. In roleplay, it allows you to play an infiltrator (not that you couldn’t before, but now you actually are) or a Human who changed into a Forsaken.

Yogg-Saron parceled and packaged!

Elation and congratulations abound yesterday as we managed to finally close the curtains on Yogg-Saron. We had some good tries where we consistently reached phase 3, and then suddenly…click.

It is this special feeling when you get to the last few percents of a boss’ life, where the realization of just how close you are fades away into the chaos of violence. Like an orgy of destruction all I felt at that time was an extreme concentration as I was dotting Yogg-Saron, and burning down the adds along with everyone else. In fact, it almost did not register that he was down until the achievements started rolling in, like the end credits of some epic movie.

Patch 3.2 will still be a little way off, so I think there will be some weeks of Hardmode training that awaits us. With a bit of practice and luck, we may even get to burn down Algalon (or have him burn us down) before the patch goes live. That would be epic.

But for now, it’s a bit of time to bask in the glory of an awesome kill and a feeling of peace after a storm of raiding. Oh yes, added a screen shot. I am the floaty Draenei a little right of the middle. ^_^

A Shadow’s Crusade in Ulduar

Well, it’s about time to make a small recap for myself how I am doing in Ulduar, what progress we made together, and what still is on my “wishlist” from Ulduar. What with the new instance around the corner, I am imagining that Ulduar will soon become Hardmode territory, meaning a lot of learning and little loot, so this seems like the best time for it.

Progress

We’ve managed to reach phase-3 of Yogg-Saron so far, and while there’s a bit of refinement to be had on the General Vezax fight, it all seems to be going well. This week we hope to down Yogg-Saron, and that is when the Hardmode circus will begin, and we can start working on those fights.

Personal efficiency

I am not yet very pleased with how I am doing in terms of DPS. As a clarification, I use the following priorities to determine what I think is important in a raiding evening:

1. Don’t die from stupid stuff – healers can sometimes not be able to save you if they are very busy, but avoid the fires, use bandages and otherwise don’t be a burden on the raid.
2. DPS like mad – I am currently at 3.6-4k DPS sustained, but in my opinion this is still too low. I see our DKs and Mages run at upwards of 5-6k DPS, and even though they have better gear than me, I feel there is a lot of improvement on my side.
3. Secondary raid functions – Dispelling, abolishing disease, proper buffing and fight-specific tasks in some fights are more important than DPS. Even so, I sometimes will help out a little bit if the healers seem overwhelmed or there is not enough time to run dispels on everyone. In my opinion, it takes little effort to PW:Shield someone, so might as well do it if it can save someone’s life.

So, I manage to get #1 down well, in my opinion. It has happened sometimes (On Hodir or Mimiron) that I die avoidable deaths, but I try to minimize those. I generally allow myself one single “slip of concentration” death in an evening, and all my other deaths should have been wipe situations.

#2 is my issue at the moment. I think I should be able to push at least 4k DPS sustained, with my gear, so I am analyzing how I am running my priorities, and if I leave some slack open. For instance, I probably need to DoT up more adds. Especially in the beginning I did not do this, because I felt I may accidentally pull aggro from the tank in doing so, but after running with these folks, I am confident this will not happen. And for everything else, there’s Fade.

Dispelling and Abolishing Disease, #3,  I have covered so far with Mouse-over macros and Grid. It works reasonably well, but while it is easy to do while healing, I find myself a bit distracted while DPSing. For some reason running HoTs on my druid and cleansing is easier than doing the same while running HoTs. Anyway, a point I feel I can improve.

Every raiding night is my trial run again

This is probably my personal insecurity of running with a (relatively) new crew. They are great people and very nice to me, but being a junior member means I feel pushed to do my best every raid, even more so than normally. It causes me a bit of stress and frustration, to be honest, but I take every run as a trial run, and assume I am being watched.

Wishlist

But then I reward myself by checking out what things I would still like to haul out of Ulduar to pimp out my little Shadow. ^_^ Note that these are not in all cases Best-in-Slot items, it’s also about a bit of realism towards what I can gain in a few weeks.

• Conqueror’s Circlet of Sanctification (Head) – Thorim – I will buy these with Emblems of Conquest if needed
• Conqueror’s Mantle of Sanctification (Shoulders) – Yogg-Saron – Chances are limited, because this will spark bidding wars, or else I will have to go for the new badge shoulders or another equivalent piece.
• Shackles of the Odalisque (Wrist) – Razorscale – A bit of an upgrade, but I am willing to get it to get rid of the horrible Spirit on my wrist.
• Soulscribe (Yogg-Saron) or Guiding Star (Razorscale) – Not the best weapons that can be found, but considering I’d need to go Arena for them, or do Hard Modes, I think that these will be more than worthy upgrades.
• Ironmender (Offhand) – Kologarn
• Scepter of Lost Souls (Wand) – General Vezax – Light years ahead of my current wand
• Eye of the Broodmother (Trinket) – Razorscale – Because….<purr>
  
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To be honest, I think that with these (and maybe the Tier-8 legs to replace my Leggings of Lost Love) would be more than enough to make me ready for anything. And basically that’s what counts. I have been spending some DKP on items with Spirit on them, which few/no people wanted, mainly because it was an upgrade to my older gear. I would rather spend all my DKP on any form of upgrade than hoard them and have poor performance, only to be outbid the moment the really good things start to drop.

Also, the BoE tailoring patterns from Ulduar make for some really, really good belts and boots. But, each will cost 6 Runed Orbs or the like, so that means getting these will have to wait a bit. Once in 3.2 the Emblems of Conquest will be dropping from the sky, I will be able to get my hands on them all that much quicker, however.

Conclusion

I have the basics down, and we’re making good progress. Now comes the time to tweak tactics and make sure I am as efficient as possible. Also, I can be a bit more aggressive about DPS than I currently am. Also, I need to relax and enjoy the raids more, rather than seeing them as pay-per-performance.