Friday, March 14, 2008

Not sure if I'm wired to play a healer.

I'm in this sort of delimna:

I'm having a hard time adjusting to healer. I get people all healed up in the BGs, and noone's taking any damage for a bit.. and I start to get bored. So I'm thinking to myself...well this is gay, im just sitting here. Yeah I can cyclone a couple people or root folks off of a retard that's just going to keep smashing away at the cyclone or not run away from the rooted melee anyways... so I start scanning the battlefield looking for someone to help nuke down. Maybe I'm just too ADD. The RAPIST in me comes out, I guess which is from playing a warlock/hunter most of the time, you know? Anyways, before I know it, i'm too busy cc'ing or killing people, I forgot to scan health bars or keep track of where my team went. Oopse. I'm constantly scanning the field looking for my next target to sodomize, instead of patiently waiting to heal the important people around me at just the right time. I get impatient. If shit isn't dying fast enough, I feel obligated and compelled to contribute to the death of said newb as quickly as I can.

I don't know if I can cut it. Does that mean druid healers suck? No, far from it. I just have too much of an aggressive playstyle for me to be satisfied playing one I think. Damn it.

Rogue Shiv / Druid Build / LOL hunters / Pets

So while browsing the forums this morning, I came across this little gem.

And people wonder why I felt compelled to make informative posts on the forums and generate intelligent discussion. It seems that Blizzard's CMs or QAs aren't even aware of how many of the abilities in their own game were originally designed to function.

This goes without saying, but if that change goes in for rogues, it would be similar to changing, say, deathcoil to be a fear effect instead of horror. Shiv was originally designed so that it is unable to be blocked/dodged/parried, and it's been that way since TBC Alpha. Obviously this is going to have a huge ripple effect for rogues, and I really don't see the justification for this change, if it is indeed not a bug.


After playing around a bit with specs last night, I tried the 34/0/27 dreamstate build, and to be honest, I wasn't really impressed. The lack of swiftmend really seemed to hurt my burst healing capabilities. There's nothing quite like having a conflag heal. Having lunar guidance and moonglow was nice, so I decided to alter it a bit. This is what I ended up speccing and I have to say, I like it the best. I get pretty decent secondary damage to assist plate classes down that my rogue buddy is having trouble with, I still have lunar guidance and moonglow. Nature's grace has pretty awesome synergy with improved regrowth (High crit chance heal + reduced cast time after any spell crit = win). I still have swiftmend. I still have natural perfection, and I still have long range cyclone/root. I love this build so far. I have a feeling I'll be sticking with this one for quite a while.


Also,

Hunters are bullshit. I got bored yesterday and logged into jade on tich since I haven't been able to kill anything on my druid. I did a single solo pug wsg game. Averaging over 15,000 damage per minute in a 20 minute game is a little ridiculous. Hunters are quite possibly the most solid BG dps class in the game. Could they use a little arena love? I suppose, but not much. Maybe an ability that would shoot a trap to a remote location every now and then, such as at a teammates' feet. Regardless, I still say hunters are quite solid atm.


Finally,

WRU Pet scaling? :/

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Cyclowned

http://tinyurl.com/yp5987

Oh yeah, and cyclone nerfed, QQ.. etc.

Now it's going to have the same range as fear! Except unlike warlocks, I have leather armor, can heal, abolish poisons, have barkskin, and a talent that makes it impossible to interrupt via damage anyways.

This would hurt warrior druid more than hunter druid. (Which is good, as it's probably the better of the two combos)


Also,

Healing Touch: Wow this spell sucks. I tried to do this:

"Thinking about doing this spec, because the new 4pc bonus to resto set would go nicely with the healing touch talents.

That would make those 3.5s healing touch casts down to 2.75 (before any spell haste, that is). "

At least that's what I thought. Here's why...

In PVE, I use tree form way more than anything else for healing, for obvious reasons. Keeping my hots going, and having swiftmend is more than often enough to satisfy any healing requirements. On rare occasions, I will need to get a huge heal off. That is when I use HT, but only when in conjunction with Nature's Swiftness. Obviously, this pisses me off because it will shift me out of tree form, and that is really annoying. Is there ever a time when I think it's a good idea to not be in tree form and using primarily healing touch? No, no there isn't. To make HT even remotely good, you have to invest 12 points into naturalist, tranquil spirit, and empowered touch. 12 talents to make it still less-than-on-par with my other heals, that I still can't use in tree form. It's inefficient. It's slow. It can't be used in tree form (which means it goes with inefficient). In other words, it's crap.

The only time I ever use HT in pve, or pvp, is when I need to NS Heal someone. That's it. HT is meh otherwise.

This is the build I use lately, as it's a fantastic PVE/PvP healer hybrid build. Notice the complete lack of any HT related talents. They're pretty much a waste. Also, I'm obviously going to feel the cyclone range nerf pretty hard, as I'm used to 36 yard range cyclones atm. Yeah it's useful, cause I can stay near a pillar and CC someone I want to from a long ways away. The range nerf will definitely force druids out into the open more and make them more vulnerable to counter CC and focus fire.


Also, I know I already touched on this, but why the hell is Omen of Clarity in the resto tree? It's simply awesome for feral, but absolute crap for resto. I have to melee to get the clearcasting to proc? Let me tell you how often I melee shit in pve tree form, or pvp when i'm pillar dancing. Why is this a resto talent? I don't get it. The talent isn't bad, it's just in the wrong place.

Oh, and why the hell does casting Mark or Gift of the wild in tree form shift me into caster form? Gamebreaking? No, but insanely annoying. I don't see why druids can't be allowed to cast that in tree form. Would reducing the mana cost on these spells by 20% in tree form really be that op?

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Warlock Lifetap (and shaman flametongue) changes reverted.

Like I've said before, I'd rather wait and see what actually goes LIVE in 2.4 before throwing a fit. Sometimes its hard to get a good feel for potential changes on an internal test environment. Looks like warlocks will be keeping their current efficiency. Now, that incinerate change is looking quite nice. Not enough to replace Shadowbolt (thanks to ISB), but it is looking nice nonetheless.

Some Druid Feedback thus far:

Well i'm 64 now, and I must say that solo healing even as feral spec is pretty easy with decent quest blues in mana tombs. I don't have the oh-sh* buttons a resto spec would, but as long as I stay ahead of the healing game, noone dies. Druid healing is pretty damn fun.

Couple nuances I have so far (from what is otherwise an amazingly fun class to play):

1) DPSing (or leveling) as cat is boring. Manglemanglemanglemangle.

Mangle is good. Too good? All my other abilities that I used before it took a back seat. It's like shred, except for 40 energy, with no positional requirement. Claw is absolutely worthless now. The "increase bleed damage" effect is OK, but I really only see that helping in raids I guess. I really tried to level up on mobs putting all or some bleeds up, and keeping the mangle debuff on, you know, to get the full use out of that talent and its synergy.

The problem is, I get more dps just from mashing mangle than trying to take advantage of its synergy with increasing bleed damage. The other abilities that cause bleed aren't worth using, as I seem to get far more overall dps, and a faster kill time just by mashing mangle. My other abilities that cause bleed damages + the 30% bonus to bleeds aren't worth using over mangle spam, at least not when solo.

The end result? Single button mashing, which is boring and uninteresting.

Bear form is awesome. Primal Fury is a ridiculously good talent for tanking. Swiping 3 mobs and getting crits = gaining rage on a rage-using ability. Pretty nuts. I don't seem to have any problem holding agro with 3/3 feral instinct.


As far as feral/resto synergy goes, I really only have mixed feelings about a couple of things:

Naturalist:

I have many mixed feelings about this one. This talent seems to come in handy while im actually tossing out the semi-rare big heal when main-healing for an instance. It seems more like a PVE talent than anything.

It's great for more feral damage, but I never, ever use healing touch when I shift out to heal someone or myself. I stack up the more mana efficient hots and then go back to cat/bear. I may also throw up a regrowth, but never really a healing touch.

So essentially this is a PVE main-healer talent that's nearly useless to resto druid who wants to PVP as well, as these points are much better spent elsewhere. And while the feral damage bonus is awesome for feral druids, the resto spell it augments for feral druids is less than ideal.

I'm not saying healing touch is bad. I'm just saying that as feral, I use regrowth and other hots far more than HT. 3.5s is a long cast, and I do love the lower cast time. I could actually see this talent benefiting a balance/resto hybrid/mix more than a feral/resto.

If I were to make any changes, I'd give the +10% dmg bonus for feral druids on Nature's focus, as you often shift out to heal with things beating on you (and barkskin isn't always up), and put a spell damage bonus or other bonus to Naturalist, as resto tree doesn't really have any passive bonuses to balance other than the 30% regen talent.


The only other thing that I love and hate at the same time, is Omen of Clarity. It seems odd that for a talent that resides in resto, you have to melee to get it to proc. This talent is AWESOME for bears/cats (assuming it isn't dispelled), but tbh it never really procs while healing anything... which is odd, as it resides in the resto tree. I'm not sure if it's the talent tree placement that I don't like, or the fact that it never really gives me any bonus heals when I'm healing. In addition, it also doesn't proc off of balance spells. Just seems to me like this ability could be reworked a little bit.

Sunday, March 2, 2008