First, let me say how weird it is to be playing MoP again – it’s kinda the same, but not really?
Tl;Dr: So, disc has been nerfed a lot but I frankly don’t think it’s an issue unless you’re pushing cutting edge content.
Sidenote: we’re painful in arena and I do think we need a hot fix to address how rough it is for us ATM in pvp, specifically arenas.
Anyways…
I somehow stumbled into raid leading a group on classic. We’re not amazing, but we’re not terrible. We’re currently still on normals, but damn have I been proud at the group killing bosses well – 1-shot spirit kings, 2-shot final MSV boss. We were waiting for a tank and tried out the first boss of HoF and got it to 15% with 9 people. Grabbed another DPS and downed it quickly.
So let’s talk about disc nerfs. I personally think they’ve been overblown because what we excel at is mitigation. Who cares about throughput right now?
We eat the damage before it arrives – I’ve been arranging a lot of pug world boss fights, beyond my own weekly lockout, and it’s amazing practice for spirit shell due to stomp timing. We run as many healers as we can but I am basically doing 50% of the healing for Garelon due to spirit shell.
He’s great practice.
So back to MSV and HoF:
To maximize spirit shell absorbs, you want to be using inner focus and all of your archangel stacks. This will make your next prayer of healing incredibly strong and build absorbs.
Actually timing effects well will mitigate damage your team is taking, so your healing numbers will then shoot up. Avoid any team focused on these sort of numbers – you’re just doing absorbs. Someone like a resto shaman will pair well and shine because their mastery will pop off (they’ll heal more when people are low health).
Could disc be better? Definitely.
Is disc as bad as people are claiming? Imo, maybe they aren’t playing disc as it’s intended to be played…
This song encapsulates my feelings about disc: what, how, what, how, wtf, rage, what.
I haven’t really commented about the changes yet – I understand that they are only a stepping stone between here and the new expansion, but after playing (and raiding and PVPing) for a few weeks, I know enough to know that disc has been gutted.
My favorite moment from the past expansion was healing Shamans our first few times fighting them: there were two tanks to keep up. On weakened soul clear, both tanks got a bubble. I was rolling penance on CD to ensure I had a free bubble to use to kill that weakened soul on whoever had the HIGHEST weakened soul CD. The other one got FDCL flash heal procs – unless penance was on CD and that CD was 6+ seconds. In that case, greater heal, yo. If under, flash heals. Keep up grace on both tanks as well, using that penance smartly and those flash heal procs cleverly to reset the 3-stack CD. Weave in prayer of mending and holy fire/smite for boosted heals via archangel. Get that spirit shell in and time a halo or cascade to land when meteor lands. Fucking exhilarating.
Now: BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE BUBBLE HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA HOLY NOVA.
Obviously, our mana pools and regen will be changing, and we’ll be getting buffs from leveling and new talents, so I won’t comment on the balance – but the balance isn’t what upsets me. I trust that Blizzard will balance things. What I am concerned about is the deeper issue here: disc has been completely gutted and lost its complex interplay of skills. Disc was incredibly exciting to play – you had to know the fight, and you needed to use your skills well in conjunction with each other. You could do “OK” without maximizing that, and you could even do pretty good (which is a balance issue which should have been tackled) but to truly do great you needed to know every skill and know how to use them in conjunction with each other.
Now, I just play whack a mole and bubble spam.
…And the thing that frustrates me is that isn’t going to change. I’m going to passively get better at basic healing simply for levelling up and having gear, but that does not do anything to ameliorate the sting of losing all of my complex and engaging gameplay, nor do I want it to. I don’t want to be OP. I want to be CHALLENGED. I understand that simplifying things makes the game more accessible to more people….but does Blizzard even understand the ramifications of these changes?
I don’t want to get too heavily into the problems with PvP, but I’ll give this a short bit. First, self peels are super vital to healers. Who cares if we have silence? That’s very potent for arenas, yes – but most of us don’t play arenas. As someone who primarily just plays battlegrounds (because I’m a healer and love healing) god does stuff suck hard atm. I lost a self peel. I have a grand total of two instant casts (bubble and holy nova – both of which I already had). I lost my strategic and tactical stun interrupt. Hell, my freaking 4-set has even been nerfed. My hot has vanished. My strong prepared heal (glyphed Prayed of Mending) has been made a cast. On top of this, I lost my tiny hybrid potency (Shadow Word: Death), I’m physically weaker (lost Inner Fire glyph to increase armor), and now my shield glyphs are mutual exclusive – let me just reiterate this last part: I can either have a slightly less shitty bubble, I can have one that helps heal, or I can have one that deals damage. I am the class that basically just has bubble, but I can’t actually soup my bubble up to make it potent. That’s so damn depressing.
I think disc definitely had problems. Absorbs as a concept reward skilled healers way too well – if you know the fight, you can gimmick it to really just trivialize it and make things frustrating to your fellow healers. Absorbs really aren’t very fair as is, especially once you calculate in a good disc doing things like spirit shelling before big AoE pulses. My team didn’t like it initially, until we chatted out why I was nomming heals and making it clear that numbers meant NOTHING unless there were clear issues. I don’t expect every raid team to do that, and I’ve had to step in and go WHOA STOP to multiple pugs bitching people out for not competing with a 585 disc priest. Healers: you’re beautiful, keep on keeping on. You each have a special job to do. Raid leaders: Heal meters =/= dps meters so please stop citing them. Anyways, yes. Absorbs make other healers feel bad and unbalance fights, and disc was definitely due for a change.
Blizzard, however, cut the wrong things: aegis + crit gems + reforging + atonement were the big problems here (basically 50% of everything I did made an absorb), not the complex interplay around weakened soul and grace. Those things let anyone mindlessly stack absorbs without any skill, blanketing a raid without much thought, especially with this tier’s 2-set increasing crit. Seriously, most of us were doing fights with 30-50% of our healing coming from aegis. If you’re going to fix disc’s disparity, make it so absorbs require thought and pre-planning – and I’m baffled at why the more complex skillplay has been removed but mindless and RNG absorb procs have been left in. This isn’t smart gameplay. This isn’t rewarding clever players. Aegis is a fun concept, but its current iteration is the big reason why disc pisses people off. People do NO thought about aegis, it’s based on RNG, it can proc off anything, and derpy smart heals proc it….and as a nice toss of salt in the wound, it’s been kept in, while the actually engaging and intelligent aspect of the class has been gutted. Changing aegis to be a talent, making it be a buff you activate for x amount of time, or even just flat out removing it – these would have done a significantly lot more to fix disc than the changes we’ve seen.
I really don’t want to think that Blizzard is just slashing stuff to cater to the least common denominator – partially because I think that will backfire badly. Let me draw it out.
Mythic raids: people are min-maxxing. They’ll bring 1, maybe 2 disc healers. The disc are frustrated but play and do ok. Thing is, this is NOT where the problem is.
Every other (ESPECIALLY LFR) raid difficulty: You roll in via group finder or automated match-making and there are 3-5 other disc priests (according to the wow census priests are BY FAR the most popular healer class). One priest bubbles some people. The other priests can’t kill that weakened soul, so they are stuck unable to use their most potent (and in WoD, prime) skill. The top geared healer sees their numbers dropping to shit* because weaker absorbs are eaten first, and are ridiculed by clueless derps (this is already happening), and subsequently loses interest in trying to help out lower-geared people. Healers start sniping or recklessly healing to raise their numbers. Newer healers feel heavily discouraged. The new AoE skill invites mindless spam. It really just creates a shitty environment.
* Note, I do NOT promote heal chart number linking. You should only ever refer to heal charts as a tool for analysis. Heal chart numbers on their own mean nothing. See this article for more enlightenment.
In short, I am really unhappy with where disc is now. I used to enjoy healing. I don’t anymore. Numbers can be tweaked. Skill interaction and a dumbing-down of healing is a far huger task. I am worried about the expac.
Awesome, awesome dancing in this video. Picking it out of C2C’s selection (my favorite new group) because I am happy! Why am I happy? My guild did an impromptu run of Throne of Tunder – we reached critical mass of all our raiders online and decided to dive right in. After only a few pulls we downed Jin’kroh and this happened:
Anyways! 5.2 is here and with it comes some pretty fun new things. WoWInsider already does a great job of covering the fundamentals of this new, huge bunch of content. Byeond the core new additions, here are some fun little “extras” I’ve found so far.
Fish upon fish upon fish!
Ben of the Booming Voice makes a surprisingly quiet addition to this patch as a new NPC fishing from the river east of Halfhill.
There’s a one-time intro quest to meet him where you learn about the ability to fish without poles (although this was introduced in Cata, not everyone knew about it!), and you can get some easy golden carp. After that, however, is where it gets awesome.
Ben gives you a daily “secret” about where the fishing is hot. And by hot, I mean on fire.
Dozens of pools spawn in the daily fishing spot (make sure to use your Ancient Pandaren Fishing Charm!) and not only can you fish up the the special Nat Pagle rep fish, sealed crates, a minipet fish and the infamous turtle, fishing up enough pools eventually makes a super big pool spawn, called “Large Swarm of [insert daily fish here]”.
This pool can then be fished up, ala The Lurker Below, to summon a big ol’ monster named Krakkanon. This elite doesn’t do much damage, but he has a huge health pool, so you might want to bring some pals. From what I’ve observed so far, he can drop a stack of 20 fish, Nat Pagle rep fish, and Nat Pagle journals (increases your fishing 50 points, BoA, worth 1k gold!). He might drop even more fun things!
I advise systematically fishing each pool, as every pool you clear has a chance to make this pool spawn. It’s not a quick process (at least 30 minutes or more for one person; 50-100 pools), but I think this will become quicker over time as more people become aware of this new little bit of fun!
Faster Farming!
The master plough, introduced in 5.2, is now more effective than ever, finally stunning and (nearly) killing pesky vermin found in untilled soil. This is a great speed up to clearing your farm’s land (it’ll till up to 4 plots at a time).
There are also new seed bags, which let you plant up to 4 of each seed type at a time. Each bag holds 10 charges, so don’t be deterred by the price. Once you buy one, just point and click to plant all the plots in a targettable circle (plots must be tilled first!).
Pets, Pets, Everywhere!
If you are a fan of battle pets, 5.2 is a goldmine. Basically ever new part of the game drops battle pets. If you haven’t checked out the new Jurassic Park Island, head on over there. Bring a friend or 5 (we had a group of 10 at one point) and kill dinosaurs to collect bones which you can turn in for a mount or a battle pet. OR, go alone and just pinpoint the Zandalari trolls. These guys have a CRAZY high drop rate for minipets. They have 4 different ones they can drop, and we were seeing one pet drop for about every 3-4 trolls we killed.
Who’s a cute widdle dinosaur? You are, aren’t you?!
The rares on Isle of Thunder also hand out shinies. Our very first kill on Haywire Sunreaver Construct (down on the southern beach), Muttonhocks and I each got a Sunreaver Micro Sentry. Mutton’s the pet battling fiend in this relationship, so I asked him if the little dude was any good. His reply? An emphatic, holy shit of a yes. Apparently rare mechanicals are hard to find, and this guy can do a variety of attack types, making him great for hunting all sorts of pets in the wild. Plus, he’s so big he can’t even display properly in your window, which makes me giggle far more than it should:
DGAF PROTOCOL ENGAGED. ALL SYSTEMS NORMAL.
The Raid That Wipes Together…
Finally, if you are on a raid team, you are going to want to have your team camping out Ra’Sha. He drops an item that lets you kill yourself. Ra’Sha’s Sacrificial Dagger is insanely useful for a progressive raid team – not only does the death incur no durability costs, if your whole raid has it, you can quickly die to fully wipe and end an attempt, instead of wasting time waiting for people to stand in pools or whatnot.
He hangs out in a cave tucked away in a little beach cove past the troll area. If you see a Hakkar look alive (bone wind serpent) you are in the right spot. Hang a right past that ominous little clearing and there is a cave guarded by two elites. Inside is Ra’Sha.
This way to self-initiated doom!
My team’s been camping this guy on rotation. We have about half of our raid team equipped with the daggers so far. He only drops one, you see, regardless of however many people attack him, and that drop only goes to whoever tags him, so it can be a bit of a slog to get them. They are completely worth it, however, for any raid team trying to be efficient!
Darkmoon Arising
The Darkmoon Faire also got some minor upgrades! The daily quests now reward a sack instead of a single token. The sack can contain between 1-5 tickets, as well as a chance at a fluffy Darkmoon toy, like the sandbox rides. Minor upgrade, but definitely a change that makes doing the dailies a lot more appealing.
The elite pet you can battle there also now rewards a sack of fun things instead of the single ticket he used to give. This sack rewards the same thing as the daily quests AS WELL AS pet battle goodies. Not a bad change, at all!
I’m not sure when this change went in, but fishing at Darkmoon Island also now fishes up Pandaland fish, instead of the crappy level 1 stuff.
Plus, finally, you can get this:
AM I NOT FABULOUS?!
(Caveat: it actually gives 10% extra rep/xp when used and using it consumes it. It doesn’t stack with the carousel buff, and you can only use it during the Darkmoon Faire Season. Still, for only 10 tickets, it’s kinda worth it just for awesome screen shots…)
Those are some of the less advertised goodies I’ve noticed with 5.2. Hope you are enjoying the new patch!
My guildmate Zakkimatsu loves to make videos of us raiding (I’ve linked several on this blog). He released this short little outtake video yesterday, and it cracked me up:
It’s gotten some amused responses from the WoW forums and reddit as well. The editing is awesome (he’s really getting good at making these!), and it seems like the in-guild jokes we share touch on things most raiders have experienced.
Check all the things.
The pre-pull checklist cracked me up the most, since these topics (and reasons for wipes) have happened multiple times for us, to the point that they are now memes in our guild. For me, that’s the best part of hanging out with a group – you develop inside jokes and can laugh at silly things that have happened…and the fact that we can do that for an online game is a good sign that our guild has built up a community beyond just getting loot.
I found some of the comments surprising, reading people saying that they wished they were still having fun raiding like we seem to be. What has killed this fun for them? Why still continue if it’s not entertaining? For me, this shared community is why I raid! For those of you out there not raiding – what’s turned you off to the raiding scene? What would draw you back?
I was reading this thread on the WoW forums and it reminded me of an article I wrote for IRE a few months back. Rehashing it and adding a bit…
Anyone who’s played an MMO has a sense of the vast scale of the internet. Millions of players game online, with dozens of identical servers hosting similar iterations of the same world. Standing out in this vast community is nearly impossible – sure, there are a few famous players well known among the crowd of their particular game, but for the most part, the game world is a persistent place, rather untouched by those who live in it.
But that idea is shattered by MUDs. By their very design, MUDs are much smaller realms, and part of what makes them so appealing is the level of impact individual characters can have on the game world. In IRE games, for example, players lead houses, guilds and cities, with the process to learn class skills based entirely on interaction with other residents of the game. This makes for a very rich, player-driven system – people within the game, rather than game mechanics, lay out the foundations for progression and this creates an intricate system of politics and interpersonal interactions.
To advance in your city or guild, you earn favors from the organization’s leaders and high ranking residents. Essentially every organization has set tasks you can complete, with additional perks and rewards often given for members who demonstrate that they are valuable and hard working. This setup makes for a vibrant, interactive world that draws people in – you aren’t just grinding away to get to some abstract level or earn x amount of coin; instead, you are also working to prove yourself to your organization’s leadership.
The concept unfolds in engaging ways: if you are a promising novice, it is quickly noticed. If you demonstrate aptitude for combat, you often find that you are recruited to assist with city- or guild-based conflicts. And the recognition extends both ways – those in power are known throughout the land. Guild or city leaders become household names, and their characters often find themselves in the spotlights of the land’s activity.
Beyond this, events are sometimes held where the land itself is changed….due to the result of player actions. For example, in Aetolia, a giant sea monster threatened the entire world. Not only was his emergence a result of a magical ritual cast by the Magi guild, his eventual defeat came about through the efforts of many players. In game lore, posts, scrolls and stories documented the roles various characters played in his defeat and many players have found that their characters are now part of the game’s canon mythology and ongoing story as a result of their participation in this event.
In short, to become known in a MUD is not only possible, it’s a rite of passage. The communities are smaller and more tight-knit, and players thrive on interactions. Individuals can make an impact on the world in impressive ways you rarely see in today’s MMO, be that for their leadership style, their roleplay of a certain race, or their frightening ability for combat. Fame is not only possible, it is, arguably, one of the reasons why we play our characters!
One oddly particular quirk of WoW players is looking back at “vanilla” (ie, the original) WoW with rose-tinted glasses, claiming it was better. I’m not going to get into that (very LONG) debate here, but I will bring up the idea of a server community. Vanilla WoW didn’t have the immense resources that we have today. There weren’t sites you could just google to find out about an elusive quest or the best DPS rotation. Upcoming content wasn’t datamined months before it became live. The developers themselves didn’t communicate with the players like they do now – changes were magical new things handed down by the Blizzardy gods. Sidestepping the idea of dev-player relations (which I’ll probably explore in another post), the end result is that things were just a heck of a lot more mystical and hand-wavingly mysterious….and that meant you had to rely on your fellow players a lot more to learn things and get stuff done.
Nowadays in WoW, we have automated battlegrounds and dungeons, and cross-server zone functionality, where zones will merge across servers if their current population is low. But back in vanilla, it was just you and your server, and you had to get out there and talk to people to form up groups. I absolutely agree that this antiquated system made people stand out. Every person I remember from my early WoW days was someone random I met via questing or grouping up to tackle content or even through PvPing.
But is that equivalent to the type of fame you can achieve in a MUD? I can login to a handful of MUDs right now and people I’ve never met – people who didn’t even start playing until after I quit – will send me whispers along the lines of, “Ooh, it’s you!” Granted, that sort of notoriety goes both ways (sometimes I get “*groan* It’s YOU.”), but the very fact that you can leave a legacy like that is a heady one. There is something about fame that is alluring. We are drawn to leave our mark.
In a way, I think MMOs will always have a bit of a standoffish feel to their immersion for me, until they find a way to incorporate this feeling: instead of just playing a game, I want to help shape what happens. WoW skimmed the surface of this type of gameplay with the gates of AQ event, where each server worked together to complete gruelling requirements and eventually unlock a new raid. However, the end result was the same, no matter what happened. The gates opened and, sure, a few people got special titles out of it, but it wasn’t really something the players themselves shaped. Imagine, instead, if the event had been open ended – players could choose how they respond to the crazy bug stuff. Propose a treaty, declare a war, hold a ritual, etc, all could have spun off in different directions.
Obviously the logistics of that won’t work in a huge game like WoW. There are just too many players and servers to allow for open-ended and evolving events. The closest we get is roleplay storylines on roleplay servers. However, games like the new MUD Lithmeria make me think that maybe some awesome-crazy-awesome integration of player-based direction could find its way into MMOs. In Lithmeria, for example, hardcoded mechanics exist to let players do things like found their own religions or complete unique, one-time quests. Clear mechanics for player contributions combined with random response generation keeps the process feeling organic, while not requiring constant admin oversight. It’s a rather elegant idea, and I’d love to see something like this translated to MMOs. Let the players do the creative work, with mechanics in place to both facilitate this process and channel it along certain avenues (such as city elections).
In any case, I’ve been rambling, so I’ll stop now.
So, how do you view it? Does your server have any standouts? Is your character renowned/hated/revered/loved? If you could be famous for anything in your game of choice, what would it be?
Aesthetic plays a huge factor in what I play. My priest, who has become my main, was originally rolled as a Foresaken with a pal as a one-off silly try at a roleplay realm. He stopped playing and I ended up transferring to another realm to try out a guild and discovered I liked healing – and being undead. There were constant jokes since there aren’t many undead chicks, a lot of my friends recognized Kaliy (and her distinct purple pigtails) on sight and the lore is great. Even before the Cata revamp, the undead zones and story associated with the race are great – gothic, gloomy, and atmospheric. The race is identifiable and engaging, with their tragic roots and motivations of vengeance and loss, while still being twisted and magical enough to be something more than stock fantasy. If you spend any time questing in those zones, you quickly find yourself being sucked in to the story. I remember feeling a (quickly repressed) sense of gleeful, twisted pride at the Wrathgate event, despite the horror I was supposed to feel. Hell yeah, power to the Foresaken! >_> Shh, don’t judge me.
Then transmog came out and I fell in love with actually getting to LIKE what I was wearing. Unfortunately, being undead meant that I was doomed to dresses because of those ugly, exposed leg bones and how pants turn into ragged cutoffs when Foresaken wear them. Silly or not, that made me bummed out. I craved variety and splendor in my outfits. I wanted glamour and glitz. I wanted freaking chainmail bikinis, damnit (I mean, ffs, I explicitly specified that my barbarian in D&D wears one, even though that’s a freaking pen and paper game).
I resisted racechanging for a long time; I told myself I was hanging on for the PvP racials, but there was a bit of nostalgia at work, too – I am no longer in the guild that I levelled and first played Kaliy in, so there were a lot of fun memories linked to her. My belf paladin’s sexy tank outfits finally convinced me to race change to blood elf and I’m happy now. I swear. I’ve gone on transmog binges and my bank is crammed full of gear I want to play with…plus arcane torrent is actually quite nice for raiding. Still, every now and then, like when I stumble across a Foresaken NPC or do a quest like with Loremaster Cho where my character’s “roots” are discussed, I wonder if I made the right choice. Am I really a blood elf at heart? Do I even care about the Sunwell and all that jazz? This doubt lasts about as long as it takes me to open my character pane and remember – I’m here for the mageweave pants.
But, everyone has their own motivations. To some, pulling the highest numbers is their bread and butter, and they could happily play as an amorphous blob. To others, visuals are the most important – afterall, this is a graphical game, so why settle for something you don’t like the sight of? Others go for the story and could never pick a race like Orcs or Foresaken because of the backstory and crimes associated with that race. To some, it’s something that might appear relatively trivial, like the voice acting for that race, but which can prove to be a big factor after months or years of playing (after only a few weeks of playing GW2, I now know how tiring character sound-bites can become). What about you? What determines your character selection?
a little bit of everything all of the time 