Patch 4.2: a Week’s Worth of Impressions

Patch 4.2: a Week’s Worth of Impressions

Released a week ago, Fire-themed patch 4.2 brought a lot of changes to the mix. There are new dailies, a new raid, new gear (including a legendary caster staff), class changes galore, and a variety of nerfs to tier 11 content.

Unleashing the Lightning

My favorite new addition so far has to be the new glyph of Unleashed Lightning. By allowing us to continue casting Lightning Bolt while moving, it keeps us from having to use lower-damage abilities while repositioning due to all those nasty surprises the ground has in store for us.

Fire Nova changes

Fire Nova now deals 15% more damage, which is welcome news, but the real selling point is that now it increases the duration of Flame Shock on targets affected by Nova by 6 seconds, which is great for packs of high health mobs. Switch to a new target when the Flame Shock is coming up, and cast away.

Firelands

As one might expect, there is plenty of fire in the newest raid dungeon. Aesthetically, this means you’d better get used to lots of yellow, orange and red (I think I stared at a light blue wall for 10 minutes after our first Firelands raid, just to cleanse my retinas).

The amount of trash mobs is positively obnoxious, which should at least allow you to quickly reach Friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal. You will fight charging Surgers, spinning turtles, flame vent spewing Molten Lords, angry scorpions and salamander packs, and that’s probably just in the first 10 minutes.

We tried Beth’tillac and Shannox on our 25 man raids on Tuesday and Wednesday, but as was the norm since ICC, not much progress was made until we went with a 10 man on Thursday and finally downed Shannox. Not that I can complain, since now I have my first Eternal Ember, with 24 to go on this early stage in the legendary staff quest.

Cataclysm Heroic Dungeons From a Dummy

Hello again, my reader*. It has been a while. I had a whole host of excuses for not posting more, but frankly, it would sound like whining because that’s what it would be. But now I intend to be back, at least somewhat regularly, and we’ll start with some suggestions and tips for Cataclysm Heroic dungeons, with a focus on our role as Shaman, especially Elemental.

Crowd Control
After almost a whole year of running daily WotLK heroics with 251+ gear and just treating every pull like a giant AoE pile, it has been refreshing having to pause and treat pulls as puzzles. “Okay, so we have two humanoids, 2 dragonkin and an air elemental. Let’s sheep Moon, trap Square…” Sure, a month and a half into Cataclysm, our collective gear and dungeon knowledge levels have improved, but CC still plays a key role in the groups I run with my guild. Less damage to go around means fewer deaths, less healer stress, and a better overall experience.

Now that Hex doesn’t have a longer cooldown than its duration, and having Bind Elemental, all Shaman bring some useful CC for some important mob types, so don’t be afraid to use it. If you happen to be in a random group with a tank you don’t know, politely offer to CC. I personally say “Which mark would you like me to use for Hex/Bind Elemental?”. It reminds the tank of what I can do, and hopefully also reminds him to use the abilities available to the group.

Even if you’re not assigned a CC target, you can still use that to save a wipe. Let’s imagine a dangerous humanoid mob concludes that your priest is a good source of protein and wants to eat her face as part of a balanced, nutritious, delicious breakfast. You can continue to dps your target, or switch to that mob, turn it into a harmless frog, and then go back to your target. Sure, that may have you two precious Lightning Bolt casts and that oh-so-important damage meter race, but it also probably spared your party a wipe, and at the very least it gives the tank time to corral the loose mob.

Interrupting
Several dungeon encounters, and even trash mobs, feature spells that need to be interrupted. Even when they don’t spell doom for your party, interrupting a caster may cause them to actually move towards your tank. Our interrupt does not trigger a global cooldown, and is on a 6 second cooldown, or less than that with talent points. Besides, it’s a good skill to become used to, as interrupting dangerous abilities is a key mechanic in quite a few raid encounters (let’s take this moment to say hello to Maloriak and Halfus Wyrmbreaker).

Thunderstruck!
Ah, Thunderstorm, what a joyous little spell. AoE damage, a cool graphic (really, what says “Force of Nature” better than lightning just exploding from you?), and a hilarious knockback, which also happens to interrupt spell casting. Naturally, that knockback bit tends to make tanks and melee dps a bit grouchy. All this means you must be careful with TS usage. If you think you will use it often, be sure to be out of range of CC’ed mobs, or those being tanked/aoe’d.

You could use the minor glyph to remove knockback, but you’re giving up an important tactical use of a neat spell. Let’s go back to our priestphage mob example**. If you are already CCing a different mob, you can run to your priest, and position yourself so the Thunderstorm cast throws it toward the tank, who then has a better chance of grabbing it. They may not, and the mob may come back, but at least you bought your healer time.

Threat Management What? Omen Isn’t a Contest?
As fun as it may sound, that 9-stack Fulmination is a really poor opener move on a mob your tank just grabbed. Not that I would know from experience or anything. I know that as a DPSer, your role is to kill the mobs, but giving your tank that second or two to get an attack in doesn’t make you a low DPS scrub.

Have Fun

Yes,  for all the Justice Points, Valor Points and 346 ilvl drops, you’re still supposed to have fun. Be nice to people, have a good time, and don’t lose your cool if there’s a wipe.

* Yes, I assume I have one reader. Maybe.
** That’s a word. At least it was in my head.

The 31 Point Talent Trees

Last week, we were finally introduced to the new, streamlined, 31-point talent trees. Iconic talents will become available along with their specializations at level 10, when young characters get to answer the question “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?”, which should give budding Elemental Shaman 75 levels worth of practice in the art of annoying their tanks and melee by Thunderstorming mobs out of their range. Not that I condone that or anything.

But what does that mean for those of us who will have an almost full allotment of talent points to play with when the new trees go live?

My first thought is this: I love mobility. It lets me survive better by moving away from areas of the floor that have a greater desire to broil, gril, poison, freeze, or otherwise harm me. I don’t trust the floor. That means both my Elemental and Restoration specs will have 7 points in Enhancement to pick up Ancestral Swiftness.
Elemental

Not much is new. Most of the talents are currently live talents, or knew about from recent previews. On that note…

I’m glad we’re retaining Totemic Wrath, as it really addresses the problems with Totem of Wrath right now, by scaling well with better gear, and allowing us to drop DPS Fire totems and buff the raid at the same time.

There are still many passive talents in the tree, but that may not be bad, in and of itself. One glance at your spell book will show just how much is going on there. I’m fine with there not being 15 more active abilities to keep track of.

Searing Flames is now out of reach for Elemental specs, so the debate between that and Lava Surge is over.

Restoration
Restoration offers some intriguing trade-off, with stronger tank healing from Nature’s Blessing, to improved survivability via either Nature’s Guardian or Ancestral Resolve.

Sadly, Restorative Totems is still a prerequisit for Mana Tide Totem. I will still spend those points, joylessly.

Focused Insight and Telluric Currents are probably the most interesting talents. Extra healing, and mana conservation, by dealing damage. I don’t know well they play out in a real raid environment, but they have the potential to add more variety to the play style, and I have to appreciate the apparent intent here.

Well, that’s all for now. Hopefully, my next posts will be more frequent.

Ramblings on the Cataclysm Shaman Talent Preview

Earlier this week, Blizzard sent out a preview of the Rogue, Druid, Priest and Shaman talent tress for Cataclysm. Some of those had already been announced in their previous class previews, but it was nice seeing the trees themselves, and what they look like. Because I have not played Enhancement since setting foot on Outlands, I’ll just focus on the Elemental and Restoration changes, only noting the changes to those Enhancement talents I usually take with either spec. For the full talent list, you can go to the ever helpful MMO Champion.

Elemental Talents

Talents in Tiers 1 through 4 are unchanged, the first real change to the tree is in Tier 5 where we bid farewell to Call of Thunder, which is replaced by Elemental Mastery. My first guess is that, by dropping our innate critical strike chance, this will raise the relative value of Critical Strike Rating as stat by a small percentage.

On Tier 6, Elemental Precision sees a significant change. Currently, with 3 points you get

Increases your chance to hit with Fire, Frost and Nature spells by 3% and reduces the threat caused by Fire, Frost and Nature spells by 30%.

 The Cataclysm version reads

Increases your chance to hit with Fire, Frost and Nature spells by 1/2/3% and increases your spell hit rating by an additional amount equal to 33/66/100% of your spirit.

We lose threat reduction and gain a conversion from Spirit to Hit Rating. Both sides of this change had been mentioned before. Whether that threat reduction is baked into Defensive Stance, Righteous Fury and their ilk remains to be seen. The Spirit to Hit conversion allows a more seemless transition between Elemental and Restoration sets, which should be a good change.

We see Elemental Oath dropping to Tier 7, following Elemental Mastery’s move, along with one of the better DPS improvements for Elemental Shaman, Totemic Wrath (according to the talent calculator) or Wrathful Totems (its placeholder name)

Causes your Fire totems to increase the spell power of your party and raid members within 100 yards by 10%.

First, we get good gear scaling for the signature Elemental totem, and perhaps more importantly, that effect applies to all Fire totems, allowing us to buff our raids AND improve personal DPS at the same time. This is a change that can’t come soon enough if you ask me.

Lightning Overload is replaced by the Elemental Overload mastery, which is improved by the Tier 8 talent Acute Overload

Increases the damage dealt by your Elemental Overload spells by 7/14/20%

It’s free damage, from more sources, what’s not to like?

Tier 9 gives us Earthquake

35 yd range – 1.5 sec cast – 15 sec cooldown – You cause the earth at the target location to tremble and break, dealing 267 Physical damage every 1 second to enemies within a 10-yard radius, with a 40% chance of knocking down affected targets. Lasts 10 seconds.

A welcome ranged AoE to complement the somewhat clunky, placement dependent Fire Nova.

On to Tier 10, where we see a cool new talent, Lava Surge

Gives your Flame Shock periodic damage ticks a 10/20/30% chance to reset the cooldown of your Lava Burst spell.

That’s an interesting talent, to say the least. One of the key aspects of our casting priority list (“rotation” sounds soooo Burning Crusade) is that we want to cast Lava Burst as close to on-cooldown as possible, seeing as it has the highest spellpower coefficient, and it should always crit, thus guaranteeing Clearcasting. Being able to cast it more often should result in a net DPS increase. Another aspect of that change, is that it should raise the value of Haste slightly, since faster Flame Shock ticks would mean more chances for the Lava Surge effect to occur.

Thunderstorm remains unchanged. Nothing to see, move along.

Enhancement Talents

No more Thundering Strikes, and its tasty 5% crit chance.

Restoration Talents

On Tier 1, Improved Healing Wave is changing to reduce the casting time of both Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave.

Continuing the theme of dropping innate crit talents, Tier 4 sees Tidal Mastery going away, being replaced by Focused Insight

After casting any shock spell, your next heal’s mana cost is reduced by 15/30/45/60/75% of the cost of the shock spell, and its healing effectiveness is increased by 5/10/15/20/25%.

I could be wrong, that sounds like an exciting, fun talent. Let’s say it’s encounter with a timer-based giant boss hit, or large AoE damage spike. You can weave in a Flame Shock, and following it up with a stronger heal. It definitely looks like something I want to play with.

On Tier 5, Healing Way’s wording is changing to specify that it affects both Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave.

Let’s welcome Tier 6’s Ancestral Resolve, everyone

Reduces damage taken while casting spells by 5/10%.

Wow. 10% damage reduction while casting should help with those tense survivability fights. I’m going ahead and calling it a mandatory talent.

On Tier 7, Cleanse Spirit becomes Improved Cleanse, and now removes magic effects, to go to with the dispelling and debuff removal changes announced by Blizzard. Nothing too shocking.

Conclusion

There was no mention of the new Restoration spells (such as Healing Rains) in the talent tree, which may mean that particular tree is not as finalized as Elemental.

Elemental, however, received a lot of attention, and I must say I am pleased with the overall results, and will stay tuned for any additional information that comes out.

Cataclysm Raid Progression: A Casual Raiding Quandary

By now, you probably have already read Blizzard’s annoucement on the changes regarding the raiding progression paths once Cataclysm goes live. Based on my own guild’s forums and chat, it seems to have elicited strong reactions, which I imagine is part of the goal.

I won’t pretend to know how someone who is staring at a Heroic Lich King 25 attempt feels about these changes, but I can tell you about one segment, which we will call the Casual Raiding Guild. I am currently an officer in a guild that defines itself thus. One of our central policies is that we recruit “friendly, mature, polite players”. The other key policy is that “everyone gets to raid”, by which we mean that if someone signs up, we will do the best we can to ensure that they see at least one raid a week they are prepared for.

We have a large player base, with varying levels of knowledge, skill and available playing time. Some enjoy the challenge of hard modes, and are always working towards improving. Others don’t raid, and another group signs up assiduously and reliably, but just can’t seem to perform at the same level. This means we invariably hit a wall somewhere progression-wise, which typically leaves heroic modes to smaller, more focused 10-man groups, rather than the 25-man raids we try to schedule.

What these proposed changes seem to do is ask us “What kind of raid do you want to run?“. Those guilds that can answer “We have a consistent enough group of people that we can always field 25 to handle tough content” will probably opt to remain that way. Those who prefer the small atmosphere of 10-mans will be able to do that without feeling that gear will pass them by because of their choice. The good news is that, even if you don’t who you want to be, you have until Cataclysm hits to figure that out.

I do hope for one thing out of these changes: that we never again have to see the likes of the Talisman of Volatile Power 🙂