patch 3.1

On Dual Specs and the Tournament

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bele_and_lokai_star_trek_phixr

Well, we’ve had a little bit less then a week to get settled into our new found patch. Many things have changed. New talents tree organization for many of the classes, talents and key abilities changed or tweeked and a beautiful new instance dropped at our doorstep. One of the most anticipated changes in the patch was Dual Spec. Dual spec allows for you to change your talents on the fly (as long as you aren’t in combat) at the cost of all your mana and a small GCD effect. So the question is, what should you do with your dual spec?

Here’s what I did with Lodur.

For those of you just tuning in, Lodur is restoration for good, I have no aspirations to take her in any other direction. Here’s my current restoration build

0/16/55

According to talent chic it’s the second most popular build ( I took Healing Way over pushback resistance) I’ll likely stay that way with maybe a minor shift in talents as tier 8 gear comes in. Now after dropping my 1k gold on the dual spec ability, I had to decide what it was I was going to do with Lodur. I could pick up a melting face elemental spec, or a second restoration spec geared towards PvP. Enhancement was not an attractive option for me since weapon itemization in the end game has been lacking somewhat (fast weapons ftl). Well, I went with elemental because currently Lodur is sans arena team. Here’s what I went with for talents.

57/14/0

Pretty cookie cutter spec, but it gets the dailies done. I found this useful on fights like loatheb where too many healers equal too much overheal, I was able to pop into elemental and just toss out some lightning bolts.

When I find myself a solid arena team (lfg arena pst) I’ll switch over to a pvp restoration spec, something like this

0/11/60

I’ll likely play with it after I get into a team and learn what holes need to be plugged, but that’s the plan.

This is an amazing tool blizzard has given us for raiding. It’s very nice to have a tank who can switch to dps when he does not have to tank anything, or have a hybrid class hop over into healing if things get too rough. It provides an amount of flexibility to the raid leader to fill in gaps or change strategies without having to wait for someone to go respec, summon back, re-glyph etc.

One of the other additions to the game was the Argent Tournament. Wowinsider has been doing a great job keeping up with the dailies Over on WI.com so feel free to check them out for more information.

The tournament feels to me very much like the Sunwell dailies. It’s placed at the far north of the map and has npc’s from all factions. It’s colorful and aesthetically pleasing and has a unique feel. It’s a tight cluster of dailies, that send you to a small selection of area in Northrend to accomplish the tasks set before you. You earn marks that you turn in to gain ranks in the knightly order, aspirant to valor all the way up to champion. It’s nice honestly. You joust, you gather items to build the tournament area, and you search for a lovely maiden’s favor. I’m very impressed with the quest line surrounding the Black Knight. It’s an interesting story so far and I can’t wait to see what else lies in store for it. I’ve just completed  The Black Knight’s Orders, but I’m still working on my next rank of knight. I enjoy this addition to the game quite a bit. Dailies that combine running things down with lances is always good in my book.

So how are you spending your dual spec? What do you think of the new tournament?

That’s it for today’s post,
Till Next time, happy healing

~Lodur

Feel free to follow me on Twitter

Image courtesy of Paramount

3.1 Initial Impressions or How I Learned to Love the Crash

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here_today-gone_tomorrow_phixr

3.1 dropped with about as much stability as we’ve come to expect from major content updates. Servers were down for extended amounts of time with updates every hour asking us to be patient and wait. Stories were filtering in through twitter and various blogs of people not even able to apply the patch. Slowly realms came back up one by one and people began to log in. The gates to Ulduar were opened and raiding commenced after guild logs were flooded with Dual Talent Specialization achievement spam. Life in Warcraft slowly began to creep back to its normal pace. Raids started, on some servers later then normal, and players shuffled in to test out their new shinnies. Some braved the lag at the portal to Ulduar to get a glimpse of the new content, while others were content to hit Naxxramas one last time in the hopes of getting a long sought after drop (looking at you here Zabos!)  On some servers, things went smoothly, on others… not so much.

Here’s my tale of excitement and woe.

The day started out fine, I was a little disappointed that it was patch day to be honest, but I schlepped my laptop to work and set my home computer’s vpn up so I could update both machines. The first bit of news I see on my RSS is that WoWMatrix is dead! Now while this isn’t earth shattering, for me it just meant my job pre raid was going to be that much more difficult as I have a lot of mods I use to monitor things. Looking at them while trying to patch I realize I ran between 80-90 mods (now since reduced!). My hopes were restored when people on twitter pointed out curse had released a new beta client for mac, one that hopefully worked. I work full time, getting time pre raid to mess around with mods doesn’t happen often.  I go to log into my system at home and start the patch process when I get an odd error saying it can’t validate my account. I try again, receive the same error. At this point I start digging around and sure enough, battle.net accounts are having a difficult time downloading the patch. I decide to say meh and wait for BigDownload to get it and entertain myself by conversing with people on twitter (thank you guys again for that as always =D)

I get home, get patched up and installed, get everything that has an update updated and find that my server is still down. After about 30 or so minutes, it comes back up. I log in, get myself over to Naxx and get ready to go. Everything was going fine and dandy until Loatheb. We didn’t wipe, but at about 1.2m hp left to go, the instance server freezes. We can still type in guild / raid / say / tell and we can log out and log back in on alts, but we were treated by a lovely scene of Loatheb’s backside. Those of you on twitter got to read my lamentations that quickly rose to comedy. The jokes and statements of my fellow guildies more then enough to lift anyone’s spirits by pointing out the sheer comedic value of the situation. While not the most exciting patch day (think 2.0) it was better then I assumed it would be, and to be honest it had been a lot of fun taking bets on which healer would spontaneously go from tree to crit – chicken or go careening off to smack a boss with their hammer. Stuck in the instance we logged out and back on alts and then out for the night. All things considered it was a pretty fun night for me, got a lot of laughs out of it.

How about you guys? How was your first experience of patch 3.1? Any good patch day stories to share?
Till next time

~Lodur

Feel free to follow on twitter http://twitter.com/LodurZJ And don’t be afraid to ask questions using direct message there or the contact form here on the site!

Suggested Restoration Spec and Glyphs for 3.1

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3.1 is upon us and it’s free respec time. Here’s my suggestion feel free to edit it as you see fit. I’m going to quote matt here from his post previous to mine

WoW Insider has a great roundup toeverything 3.1 related.

No Stock UI has a great list of updated and compatible 3.1 addons for you to peruse.

Restoration Shamans were largely untouched in this patch (yay) but some things have shifted around allowing use to move some talent points and gather up our talents.

0/16/55

Restorative Totems: Increases the effect of your Mana Spring Totem by 20%, and increases the amount healed by your Healing Stream Totem by 45%

This is still a must have, if for nothing else with mana spring totem no longer staking with Blessing of Wisdom, you’ll be using healing stream totem a lot more.

Healing Way: Your Healing Wave spells have a 100% chance to increase the effect of subsequent Healing Wave spells on that target by 18% for 15 sec.

With the talent points being freed up, there is no good reason not to take this

Thundering Strikes: Improves your chance to get a critical strike with all spells and attacks by 5%.

More crit is always good

Elemental Weapons: Increases the damage caused by your Windfury Weapon effect by 40%  increases the spell damage on your Flametongue Weapon by 30% and increases the bonus healing on your Earthliving Weapon by 30%

People may scoff at this one, but with the points floating around, taking this with it’s full 3 points is a great way to give your spell power a bit of a boost.

The spec lets you get everything and the kitchen sink, foregoing the more pvp centric ones. The movement of the talents to different tiers and just a couple point changes really give us everything we need.

As far as glyphs go it might be time to change it up a bit, I’ll list the ones I feel are the great contenders

Water Mastery
Healing Stream Totem – With the change to restorative totems this is worth a second look.
Mana Tide Totem
Earth Shield – NEW 20% increase in the healing done by your Earth Shield is always a good thing.
Riptide – NEW while it might not seem like much, increasing the duration of riptide makes it more into a true HoT instead of just a Chain Heal buffer.
Chain Heal

Now as far as totem mods go, I will make an endorsement here. Totem Timers worked for me on the PTR’s latest build when Yata and Flototem failed me. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking out. Tracks Earth Shield charges, water shield, lightning shield, all totem schools, has a totemic recall option and is pretty light weight.

Good luck in Ulduar!

As always feel free to follow on twitter http://twitter.com/LodurZJ And don’t be afraid to ask questions using direct message there or the contact form here on the site!

Suggested Healing Priest Specs, Glyphs, and Addons for 3.1

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Not sure how to spec or glyph for 3.1? Here are my suggestions. Feel free to modify accordingly. WoW Insider has a great roundup to everything 3.1 related.

No Stock UI has a great list of updated and compatible 3.1 addons for you to peruse.

Discipline Priest Specs

57/14/0

Soul Warding: Reduces the cooldown of Power Word: Shield by 4 seconds and reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield by 30%.

Absolution: Reduces mana cost of Dispels and Disease curing spells by up to 15%.

Focused Will: Increases your spell critical effect by 3% fully talented. If you get crit, incoming damage is reduced by 4% and healing effects on you increase by 5/10/15%.

3 points can go either into Absolution or Focused Will. With the amount of cleansers and dispelers in my arsenal, I opted for the increase crit for the time being. But that might change later.

Improved Flash Heal: Must talent, I think. Reduces mana cost of Flash Heal by 15% and increases the crit chance if your targets are below half health.

Rapture: It’s different now. When your Shield is absorbed or dispelled, you instantly get back 2.5% of your total mana and your target gains 2% mana, 8 rage, 16 energy, or 32 runic power. Works every 12 seconds.

Discipline Priest Glyphs

Glyph of Flash Heal
Glyph of Power Word: Shield
Glyph of Penance – NEW: Your Scribes will have to be lucky here.
Glyph of Prayer of Healing – At least it’s some form of AoE healing if the fight calls for it

Holy Priests Specs

14/57/0

Blessed Resilience: For 3 points, it increases your healing effectiveness by 3%. The stronger your healing effectiveness, the better this talent will be. For the time being I opted not to get it.

Serendipity: A haste inducing talent. Requires you to Flash Heal or Binding Heal before it adds a 12% haste buff per stack up to 3 (total of 36%). Makes your next Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing faster. Note: Binding Heal used to grant 2 haste buffs per one cast. It doesn’t do that anymore.

Test of Faith: No change here.

You’re going to end up with 6 talent points. You can only invest in two of the above abilities. I recommended Serendipity and Test of Faith.

Empowered Renew: Another instant healing spell added to Priests. The closest thing I can think of is that it’s an inverse Lifebloom. Instead of tick, tick, tick, BOOM! It becomes BOOM! Tick, tick, tick.

Holy Priest Glyphs

Glyph of Circle of Healing
Glyph of Hymn of Hope
Glyph of Renew
Glyph of Flash Heal
Glyph of Guardian Spirit

Things will be very busy in the World. New places to explore, new dungeons to conquer. All of us will do our best to provide the advice and guidance in the challenges ahead.

Lodur’s Final Thoughts Before 3.1

by

ulduar_phixr1

I’d like to condense my final thoughts on the Restoration Shaman Changes so far, since the patch is imminent at this point and shouldn’t be too far off.

The hottest topic for Shamans as of late has been the Blessing of Wisdom and Mana Spring Totem stacking change.  Understandably we were all a bit shocked by this change. This is pretty much taking the stars out of alignment for us. I know I reacted harshly to it first in my post Shaman and Paladins Mana Buff Get Hit! . This was before I got a chance to actually test it out as well as sit down and think about it.

Lets talk about mana regeneration from an encounter design standpoint. In a raid how often do you run out of mana now? For me I know it’s never unless a lot of other healers bite the dust and I have to pick up the slack. How often do you have to use mana potions? I think I’ve used 5 total in about 8 weeks, and those were on heroics. That’s with moderate gearing, not even a heavy MP5 set. That’s honestly not good for designers. In order to compensate for ungodly amounts of healer mana developers tend to make encounters with more widespread raid damage instead of other much more fun mechanics. Personally I’d rather have fun mechanics, I like variety! (read as less Whack-a-Mole plx!)

Raid wide we lose 109.2 MP5 from this change and I can tell you from testing it, it’s not that bad. I’ve spent a lot of time on various iterations of Lodur on the PTR testing the changes out, doing raids, seeing how regen was affected… and to be honest it really wasn’t affected as majorly as many people think. Right now on live I can end a fight like Kel’thuzad or even Sartharion with drakes with around 50% mana, and that’s with chain casting. On the PTR I was ending with about 35%. Honestly it’s the difference of a mana potion.  We’re not really going to see a shift too dramatically. Rejoice! We are the mana base line!

There is also another great part of this for Shaman in general that I’d like to take a moment to point out. There was a discussion about totems and macros and such on PlusHeal and a very interesting point came up. A lot of shaman over there refer to our water totem as our swing totem, and I agree with this. The water totem slot is our most versatile of the lot and tends to get the most use. By changing the way mana regen stacks it allows us to take a Blessing of Wisdom, and then use our water slot for something other then just Mana Spring. Healing Stream totem is getting a buff through talents that makes it a very attractive choice (AoE hot? yes plz!) and lets not forget our brand new Cleansing Totem that will take care of both poisons and diseases. With the new change we wont have to sit and worry about taking away mana regen by dropping a poison cleansing totem or what have you. I found the ability to not have to worry about having Mana Spring down all the time was like a weight lifting from my shoulders. I have a feeling once you guys see it in action you’ll feel the same =D

Here’s a recap of the Patch Notes relevant to restoration Shamans.

Restoration

  • Ancestral Awakening: This talent now accounts for your ineffective healing, rather than effective.
  • Ancestral Healing and Healing Grace have swapped places in the Restoration talent tree.
  • Cleanse Spirit now has a new icon.
  • Mana Tide Totem: This spell no longer costs mana.
  • Restorative Totems: Reduced to 3 points, down from 5. Increases the effect of your Mana Spring Totem by 7/12/20%, and increases the amount healed by your Healing Stream Totem by 15/30/45%.
  • Riptide: This spell has a new icon.
  • Tidal Force: Now has a new spell effect.

General Shaman Changes

  • Bloodlust/Heroism: Cooldown reduced to 5 minutes, but Sated and Exhausted now last 10 minutes.
  • New! Earth Elemental Totem: The summoned Earth Elemental should now have significantly more health and slightly more armor.
  • New! Fire Elemental Totem: The summoned Fire Elemental should now have moderately more health and mana, and its damage scaling has been increased. In addition, the Fire Elemental’s spells now cost less mana.
  • Flametongue Weapon: Bonus damage from spell power now based on weapon speed. Slower weapons will benefit more from spell power.
  • Frostbrand Weapon: Damage increased by approximately 20%.
  • Mana Spring Totem: This totem has been redesigned. It now provides the same mana benefit as Blessing of Wisdom to the entire party or raid, but is exclusive with that effect.
  • Poison Cleansing Totem and Disease Cleansing Totem have been merged into “Cleansing Totem.” Cleansing Totem pulses every 3 sec, down from 5.

Another item was the change to Heroism / Bloodlust. The change is that the debuff and the cooldown are being flipped around. Cooldown has been changed to 5 minutes and debuff has been changed to 10 minutes. At first this seems like a big hit from the nerf bat, and at first I thought so too, until Matt and I had a great conversation about it. Heroism / Bloodlust is an optional raid buff, unlike replenishment which Blizz feels is a mandatory buff. Encounters are not tuned with you having one every try in mind. It’s a raid leaders shot gun buff, on Sarth 3D we use it to burst down the second drake for an example. It’s something you use when you really need to have something dead and fast. The change allows for you to use it more inline with progression fights. Lets say you pop it, and you die. Dying clears the debuff but if the ability is down and you don’t have another Shaman, fat lot of good it’s going to do you. This will allow groups that only have 1 Shaman to always have this buff available when learning fights. I think this is actually a good thing.

Elementals are getting buffed, which is long overdue. This will bring them back up to something a little more useful then were they currently are. I know my Fire Elemental when I break him out on Sarth adds doesn’t really do a whole lot and tends to run out of mana fast. Which his damage scaling more and cheaper spells he’ll just be that much more useful. Earth Elemental getting a health increase is also really good. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dropped him to make a get away only to have him die so fast it doesn’t matter that I dropped him at all.

Bottom line here is we really made out this patch. We didn’t get godly buffs, but we avoided the nerf bat and remained largely unchanged. The changes we did get will actually help our utility to a raid, and can be looked at as buffs in a way. The Mana Spring totem change really benefits us more then it hurts us. It gives us a bit more freedom to roll around totems. I am looking forward to this patch for many reasons, not least among them Ulduar.

What about you? How do you feel about the imminent patch?

Till next time, Happy Healing.
~Lodur

As always feel free to follow on twitter http://twitter.com/LodurZJ And don’t be afraid to ask questions using direct message there or the contact form here on the site!