News and Opinion

General news and opinion about WoW.

Enchanting 3.3: Don’t Get Worked Up

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Some enchanters are disappointed at the upcoming addition of disenchant as a loot option. I’m personally quite happy with it. I have an enchanter of my own and I sympathize with the hassles that enchanters go through in instances and the like.

The enchanting process now

Here’s the steps involved in taking an item and sharding it for the group:

  1. Need roll the item
  2. Look for it in your bags
  3. Select disenchant
  4. Find the item again because you forgot where it was
  5. Actually disenchant it
  6. Tell everyone to roll
  7. Wait an extra 15 seconds for the AFK guy to roll
  8. Open trade after closing within range
  9. Actually trade it to him

The enchanting process in 3.3

If there’s an enchanter, all the group needs to do is hit the disenchant button. The process of item sharding and trading is done for you. The sharded item goes straight to the winner of the role without the enchanter having to do anything.

Thank goodness for this feature.

Enchanters benefit because they don’t have to spend the time or effort fishing for the item, looking over the rolls and figuring out who gets the item. Is this actually a pain in the ass? No. The first few times, it’s manageable. But if you’re in a raid and you’re handing out shards at the end or if you have a lot of items to hand out, it can get annoying. Just for a streamlined process alone makes it worth it.

Everyone else benefits because there is little risk of having shards stolen or conveniently “forgotten” about. Heck, I’ve forgotten to distribute shards once or twice (or more). Right now, I just greed stuff in instances hoping to win it and keep the shard for myself. But with this in place, the group will immediately know if there’s a disenchanter present and can get a crack at the shard legitimately via the updated looting system.

The argument against

Actually, this is a stance that has gone back for a long time. The traditional argument goes something like this:

Herbers, miners and skinners get to keep their own loot that they acquire. Why can’t enchanters keep the shards?

It’s only fair right? No one rolls for herbs or for ore nodes unless they’re an herbalist or a miner. It’s assumed to be theirs with little discussion. Why then are we enchanters not allowed to be entitled to these shards? We did invest a ton of gold and time to our professions. It’s only fair that we reap more of the benefits. I know I personally experience runs where there are 4 drops and I don’t get one at all.

Why I disagree

With that in mind, an enchanter then would have every right to roll on every drop in the instance regardless of whether or not they can use it on their character. Every item is viewed as something usable that contributes to the enchanter and pays off for the time and gold they’ve invested into enchanting.

Hey, I totally understand where they’re coming from. I must’ve sunk 5000 gold into it myself just from getting from level 70 enchanting to level 80 enchanting.

But just imagine how chaotic it would be if enchanters had the right to roll on anything just so they could disenchant it.

I can’t buy into that.

All tradesmen have paid their dues in leveling up their skills and each has their own unique set of perks and benefits.

In the item’s base form, without an enchanter present, it would be greeded and vendored.

In shard form, the shards can be greeded and then sold for greater value. I just don’t quite see how the presence of an enchanter automatically means they get all the shards simply because they’re the only ones able to disenchant it and convert it into a form that can sell more.

What you can do

Remember that setting loot rules ahead of time can always be done no matter what you’re doing.

As an enchanter, I’ve politely requested asking specifically for one shard if it is determined that we’re on a shard run. Group members will usually understand. Try asking for a change.

Of course, you could always do the completely dick move and wait for everyone to hit “shard” on the loot option before hitting “greed”.

Chill of the Throne and It’s Future

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As Matticus has just reported, Daelo and the Dev Team have unveiled a new mechanic that tanks and healers are going to experience in Icecrown Citadel.

The new mechanic is a skill called “Chill of the Throne”, and it’s applied to all enemies in the zone:

The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee target.

Healers have grown accustomed to the heart-attacks caused by massive spike damage and carefully timed cooldowns.  There is a thrill accompanied with the notion of needing to stay on top of things to an extreme degree like that.  However, the reality is “Can the dps kill the boss before the healer runs out of mana spamming their biggest heals?”  We’re pigeon-holed into praying and hoping our heals land at the right time so our main tank doesn’t eat two 25k hits in a row.

Chill of the Throne allows the size of the hits to become smaller, rather than huge hits that hit every so often (via a tank’s mitigation).  If RNG fails, a tank is dead.  We, as healers, now get to heal a steady stream of damage, instead of breaking down with panic attacks.

Where does this go from here?

Devs have been talking about introducing a way to incorporate expertise in new bosses.  Although it seems that system isn’t viable for Icecrown, we may be able to see it in Cataclysm.  The  idea is for bosses to scale in skill, not just in health and damage done.  This could definitely open up more possibilities for damage management in the future.

ThespiusSig

Handling Icewell Radiance

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Props to this guy for coining the term.

Daelo announced earlier in the day the implementation of raid wide buff called Chill of the Throne. What does it do?

The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid’s main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

Similar in concept to Sunwell Radiance, the reason it was implemented was to lessen the overall spikiness of incoming tank damage. Spikiness refers to something like a tank taking constant streams of 15k damage here, 14k damage there, and then suddenly plummet after a 44k hit of some sort. Sometimes it was predictable and in other cases it was not. It’s a large and often unpredictable hit that is capable of flooring a player.

I call it the Chuck Norris effect.

For present healers, the current way to deal with this is to use defensive cooldowns in tandem with tanking cooldowns. If tank avoidance isn’t high enough or if cooldowns aren’t used, they can easily get 2 shot in a manner of seconds.

With luck, this will be the last time we’ll ever see a buff like this in the game. Going forward into Cataclysm, the idea is to raise the health pool of tanks. Right now our overall approach to healing is to spam really fast heals, really large heals, or AoE heals depending on the situation.

While tank health pools go up, healing spells will scale up but not as sharply. The ratio of healing done on a tank vs tank health won’t appear to be the same as it is now. Let’s say a Greater Heal can cover 60% of a tank’s health right now. When Cataclysm hits, Greater Heal might only heal for 35% or something. The approach is to make overhealing a real risk to the point where healing spells can’t be spammed just to get through the boss fight.

That’s going to present an interesting change. It feels as if it’s going to be a hybrid between Vanilla-esque healing and TBC-era healing. I daresay those were the two extremes. In Vanilla, you had to rotate out with other healers and regen for a minute before tagging back in. In Burning Crusade, you could get away with Circle of Healing spam. It looks like in Cataclysm, they just might make overhealing mean something again since we can’t spam heals nor can we switch out with other healers to come in for us.

Patch 3.3 Makes PUGing Easier

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Back at Blizzcon we received an announcement from the devs that they were implementing new ways to reduce the wrath of the “additional instance” boss, which was already in place on many realms at the time of the convention. As many of you may have noticed this seems to have gone off pretty well and I think at least for now the instance door boss has been put down. Lets hope his respawn timer doesn’t come back up anytime soon, but so far so good. People have been able to farm Headless Horseman to their hearts content and daily heroics don’t see us spending 45 minutes waiting to just zone in.

At the con they also announced that they were going to refine the LFG system as well as add in cross server LFG capabilities to the game. Well in patch 3.3 PTR we are seeing the beginnings of the system. I for one am incredibly excited and can’t wait to see how this feature shapes up. As it stands you can use the system to go into a completely random group, or you can party up with a couple people and random the rest. You can choose your spec or role that you can fill just like in the current LFG system, but now you have the option of assembling a completely random group from different servers, and you get an option to sign up to lead the rag-tag band of misfits you aquire. As a reward you’ll receive a number of Frost Emblems and a helping of gold for your time and trouble. That alone is a good incentive to use the system as money and badges are always a good thing.

For me the biggest draw of this is the cross server interaction. They put that together for us back in an attempt to balance out Battle Grounds (which more or less worked but that’s a topic of debate for another day). Now the idea of being able to go directly to the instance with people pulled from the other servers of my battle group excites me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a group ready to go but missing a tank, and there were none to be found. I just imagine a tank on another server unable to find a group kicking his can around wondering why no one wants to play with him. With this new system, the problem is lessened in theory. With the amount of badges we’ll likely need when Icecrown drops this will help ensure you’re able to find a group.

In a nutshell this will help eliminate those times where you’re sitting around for hours waiting for a group to do something. Just hit a button and shortly thereafter you’re off on a new adventure.

This is also important because there are also plans to use this for raids as well, at least the random group part, but not the cross realm part. Right now the interface for it is buried in the PTR (you can dig and find if you like). This is good for people like me with an army of alts. There are a ton of raids I would love to run on my hunter, like I would love to run her through naxx, but I can never find a group. This would also help struggling guilds that are having trouble filling in the last couple slots of their roster for a raid, just pop open the tool and find a few more folks to join in the fun.

I’m really excited about this feature and I think it will open up a lot more of the game for many people. It will allow greater accessibility to the content of the game for people that otherwise might not have been able to see it.

What do you think? Like it? Hate it? What do you expect from it? Will you use it?

That’s all for today, until next time Happy Healing!

Sig

Image borrowed from wow.com

Counterpoint: Wrath Saved WoW Raiding

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young-frankenstein

This is a guest post by Thespius, a raiding Priest and blogger of Healer By Nature.

With all of the talk going around that Wrath of the Lich King made things significantly easier and therefore "killed the game", I wanted to bring another perspective into the mix.  I believe that Wrath SAVED WoW.  Yes, that’s right, I said it.  I’m happier playing WoW now that the game has changed.

I will whole-heartedly agree that the difficulty level has dropped in the end-game content.  I was never around for Vanilla WoW, but my share of SSC/TK content and the little I saw of Black Temple was daunting.  My favorite fight to date?  Leotheras the Blind.  Getting 25 people to move away from his whirlwinds and not DPS until the tank reacquired aggro was one of the toughest things to do.  Having to force healers to DPS their own doppelgangers down was priceless.  A tank that wasn’t a druid, warrior, or paladin?  SO much fun.

By comparison: Toughest boss in Naxxramas? Heigan the Unclean.

(Pause for laughter)

I know, right?  Personally, I still don’t see the hard part about avoiding the lava waves, or helping to cleanse diseases. 

When I look back to the BC days, if I wanted to try to get a newly-minted 70 friend into raids with me, we had to run him through Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, and Magtheridon’s Lair.  CONSTANTLY.  If I needed to take a break from WoW for a bit for work, school or family, I might as well /gquit.  I saw tons of people take holidays back in Karazhan.  When they saw the work needed to get up to SSC/TK levels, they ended up quitting altogether.  The condensing of difficulty into smaller bite-sized pieces makes the process of "catching up" a lot less daunting, thereby reassuring players that it’s OKAY if life gets in the way at times.

With "gearing up" a breeze, guilds can actually afford the "selectiveness" with which to form their raid team.  Elite raiding guilds in BC ideally had one requirement: gear.  If you had the right gear to enter SSC, you were good to go.  We were all compartmentalized by our gear.  It was as if we all came with little tags on us that said "put me here."  On my server, those with the correct gear were in short supply.  In those situations, you have to disqualify other pre-requisites such as team-oriented, ability to adapt, or the skill to actually play your class.  Few guilds back then (in my experience) rarely looked at your actual personality.  They looked at your contribution to the overall DPS, instead of your contribution to the actual raiding core.  "No amount of gear can upgrade a poor personality," I always like to say.

Now, if a friend, family member or co-worker just hit 80 and you want to bring them along in your 10man ToC team, it doesn’t take too long to get them up to speed.  Vault of Archavon, Onyxia, Heroic Dailies, Triumph Emblems are all viable (and quick) ways to get your selected raider up to speed.  Instead of dealing with geared raiders that don’t listen or cooperate, now you can get people you trust geared quickly to join you.  Thus, you make your team THAT much better than you would’ve been able to back in BC. 

The 10man vs. 25man debate comes into question as well.  I’ve heard the argument that making content accessible to 10mans has made the content too easy, since it’s supposed to be accomplished by less people.  This is true.  10 people would have a hard time clearing content only designed for 25.  Follow my logic:

  • In BC, getting a bonafide 25man raid together was tough. Coordinating 10mans in WotLK is much easier.
  • More guilds get the chance to see, experience and progress the 10man content.
  • 10man content is not drastically different than 25man.\
  • If you need to look for someone to fill in for an absent raider in your 25man, you’ve now got a bigger pool of available people who know the fights.
  • From this bigger pool, you can be more selective (like how I brought it all together?) of who you bring along. 

This transition into WotLK made it that much easier for you to form your raid team, even from your own realm.

And last, but not least, WotLK has made it more interesting for off-raid nights.  The guild I raid with runs 3 nights each week.  We primarily do 25mans but will do 10man content on occasion for hard mode experience.  On the off-nights, we can do other 10man content, "The Daily", even slightly lower content for Conquest Emblems.  Maybe a raider needs that vendor ring to replace his/her ilevel 200 one.  Instead of waiting for the next full raid night, you can be proactive in getting your other raiders up to par.

Overall, I believe WotLK has helped WoW’s raiding base.  Utilizing hard modes and bosses like Algalon, it provides a tough challenge for the hardcore raiders.  For the casuals or the "hardcore casuals" (as I like to call myself), it affords us the experience and ability to sub in or even start our own group of like-minded individuals who pay their $15/month just like everyone else.  Getting ready to raid is no longer an arduous process.  Less time focused on gearing, and more time focused on actual raiding.