Patch Notes

Discipline’s Tier 10 4-piece Joke

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Haha!  Hey!  Hey!  I got a great one for ya! 

“What do you call a 5% buff to Power Word: Shield?”

“Insignificant.”

Wait!  I got another one!

“Name something fun, interesting, and awesome that gets replaced by something as mundane as a bowl of rocks?”

“The Priest Tier 10 4-piece Set Bonus.”

Let’s bring everyone up to speed.  Not all priests are at a place where they can experience, or even look forward to the set bonuses of the current tier.  The current Tier 10 4-piece is as follows:

Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

Avalonna at talesofapriest.com has a great write-up of how beneficial this was to Holy Priests.  Now, I have very little knowledge of Holy, since I’m primarily (and almost solely) Discipline.

From a Discipline standpoint, this was amazing as a tank healer, or even a Discipline raid healer.  Follow me on this one, as it’s my first attempt at something resembling theory-crafting.  I apologize in advance if my numbers are off a little bit.

The “Math”

Penance is 16% of your base mana.  You get 3 pulses of healing.  I can crit all 3 for ~14k.  Flash Heal is 18% of your base mana.  With Glyph of Flash Heal and Improved Flash Heal, it’s less.  I can crit and get about ~9k (with a 3-stack of Grace).  Penance is relatively cheap, and heals more than Flash Heal.

With full raid buffs and the Borrowed Time proc, my Flash Heal cast is ~1 second.  With Glyph of Penance, the cooldown is down to 8 seconds (thanks to the lovely Penance nerf we had a while back).  So, you’re telling me I have a chance to reset an 8 second cooldown with a 1 second cast?  Yes, please! 

Not to mention that Avalonna also points out in her post that this Flash Heal! proc doesn’t have an internal cooldown.  It’s possible that you can have a string of Flash Heal -> Penance -> Flash Heal -> Penance -> etc. etc.  Even without worrying about Grace, this becomes pretty powerful. 

The Fun

When I was first looking at the likelihood of getting my Tier 10 set, I was salivating at the mouth for a cool and interesting 4-piece bonus.  Look at what we’ve had in the past:

Tier 7 – Reduces Greater Heal cost by 5%. (Discipline doesn’t really utilize this in most circumstances.)

Tier 8 – Casting PW:Shield grants 250 spellpower for 5 seconds. (Obviously useful for Discipline.  Kinda “meh” for Holy.)

Tier 9 – Increases Divine Aegis and the initial hit of Empowered Renew by 10%. (Blizzard gets the idea to involve both specs.  Still, marginal increase.)

So finally, we get a Tier bonus that’s interesting, challenging to work with, and it gets tossed under the bus.  If it was deemed overpowered, a simple fix would be to either shorten the window needed to cast the Flash Heal, or reduce the chance for it to proc to less than 20%.  I feel that completely redesigning it was a bad move on Blizzard’s case.  People need to understand that this game is organic.  I personally enjoy having to tweak my playstyle a bit to get more “oomph” out of my healing.  The Tier 7 set had me speccing into Divine Fury and utilizing a Borrowed Time-hasted Greater Heal for a while.

The Replacement

Our incoming Tier 10 4-piece set:

This bonus now increases the effectiveness of the caster’s Power Word: Shield and Renew spells by 5%.

Sorry, I just gagged a little while reading it again.  Blizzard has gone the “easy route” and just given us a static stat increase.  As far as Discipline goes, it’s a sad one at that.  Thanks to math from Zusterke, I’m able to whip out some numbers for you.

Let’s say you have 3000 spellpower, raid-buffed or not.  Your glyphed Power Word: Shield will total 8,813 (as of right now).  At 3200 spellpower, it’s 9,177. 

With this new “buff”, those numbers change to 9,254 and 9,636, respectively.  You’re looking at a 441 and 459 jump.  Even at 4000 spellpower, you’re only increasing your shield by 532 points of absorption.  With how bosses and mobs hit, this is hardly worth even considering. 

Even if you’re able to keep up PW:S on the raid the WHOLE time, you’re preventing only ~11,500 extra damage every 15 seconds. 

Hence, this bonus is far from worth it to me.  Dawn Moore wrote up on WoW.com her initial thoughts on the changes.  She writes:

“Still, the buff is exceptionally good. The only problem with it is that so many priests who turned their back on the tier gear for other badge items (such as shadow’s tier gear) with better itemization are now going to be screaming bloody murder.”

I disagree with the phrases “buff is exceptionally good”, “only problem”, and….well, hell, I disagree with her.  I really don’t know any Priests that I game with or interact with in the blog/twitter communities that were against the original set bonus.  If anything, those that were on the fence about the bonus were quick fans once they actually acquired the bonus.  This news of “4-piece hatred” came out of nowhere, as far as I’m concerned. 

Then again, I’m just one person.  It looks like I’ll be going the route of dropped loot, crafted pieces, and off-set badge gear.  This particular Priest isn’t too thrilled about the change.

Other Thoughts:

Lilitharien from Divine Aegis

Bati from Holy Nova NOW!

Miss Medicina’s “To Bonus or Not to Bonus”

How do you feel about it? How does this affect your gearing strategy as you make your way through the content?

Email: elder.thespius@gmail.com | Twitter: @Thespius

 

Give Me Patch Notes and I’ll Give You Totems!

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thehammer

As I’m sure many of you know by now, the PTR is live bringing with it a wonderous amount of changes to pretty much everyone. I’m going to focus today on a few things, Shaman changes and tier 10 set bonus for Restoration Shaman. First let’s take a look at the set bonuses for tier 10 Restoration shall we?

Shaman T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – Your Riptide spell grants 20% spell haste for your next spellcast.

Shaman T10 Restoration 4P Bonus – Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over until cancelled.

Hmmm, interesting set bonus. Two piece gives you more haste very much like how Tidal Waves reduces the cast time of your Healing Wave by 30%. Personally I love haste, and rolling Riptide should be a part of any Shaman’s normal healing arsenal so this set bonus really appeals to me. The four piece bonus is also very intriguing. The wording is a little weird and so it will have room for interpretation. Is it placing a HoT on a target for 25% of the amount healed similar to how Earthliving Weapon places a HoT on the target? Will it give an instant heal for 25% of the total? My moneys on a HoT. Personally I like these set bonuses. I think they are solid additions to our repertoire. Looking at them though we can take a guess at what type of damage we’re going to be seeing… I’m guessing lots of raid damage. Giving us haste, adding an additional heal component to our chain heal this just screams to me tons of raid wide damage (thoughts of Sun Well suddenly jump to mind). Now I’m looking forward to the aesthetics of the set. Hopefully we wont look like a mix between bugs and sand people.

So our set bonuses are shaping up nicely (which is pretty par for the course for us at this point). Lets swing our attention over to the patch notes shall we?

Not much is changing as of yet, of course as you know that may or may not change. For now though here are the bits though.

Orc and troll shamans now have their own unique totem art.

Shamans

* Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.

I’ll leave the totem art aside for a second, first lets talk about Fire Nova.

This one is… interesting. Basically getting rid of a totem that some of us were using to help with AE damage in fights like Thorim’s arena. It lets us not have to cast a different totem, but instead we can center an AE spell off our current fire totem. This still requires you to run into melee and drop said totem, but it’s a nice touch. I can run in set my totems and then when needed blast out some AE damage to help thing the gaggle of bad guys we’re killing. I’ll have to play with it more, but so far so good.

Now, onto totem art. Orcs and Trolls it has been long overdue that you guys get your own. Lets take a look at them real fast

3.3-orc-totems

The Orc one is pretty gnarly. Not only is it a totem but it can double as an axe! It seems to fit to me.

3.3-troll-earth-totem

Trolls are pretty cool too. Troll fetish hung from the totems looks like the shadow hunter’s totems in WC3.

All in all pretty good job. Now if I may I’d like to take a second to rage about another set of totems. The Dwarf Shaman Totems. Now I know that Cataclysm (or at least 4.0) is a while away, they… bother me.

3.3-dwarf-totem

I understand the concept behind it. It’s a hammer with Gryphon feathers. I’ll be honest though, as someone who is going to race change into a Dwarf Shaman I’m a little disappointed. I mean I can see the correlation between axes and Orcs, fetish masks and Trolls and I can understand the correlation of hammers and Dwarves… kinda. When I was at blizzcon and they were talking about bringing Dwarves into the fold of Shamanism, they mentioned making sure they had unique totems. They said they wouldn’t be kegs (which made us all sad) but that they were looking at maybe rune stones. I look at the above totems and that doesn’t scream Dwarf to me. Had they been chunks of stone with glowing colored runes in them I’d have been content. I mean look at the Draenei’s totems

1701

They pretty well scream Draenei. They have holographic rings around oddly shaped stone with the element present above it. Even the *Now* Tauren Totems fit their race

totems

So… why can’t Dwarves get something stone related? I mean think about it. They live in the mountains, they have a racial ability called Stoneform, they are known for their Gryphons, but only one clan (Wildhammer) and they aren’t playable, but we hear about is how they are awesome miners. Sure we hear about their forges and smithy’s but I think the totems could be a bit better suited to the race (read more metal/stone and less wood please).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy I can finally be a Dwarf Shaman. I’ve wanted to be a Dwarf Shaman for a long long time. I thank Blizzard for that, but that doesn’t mean I won’t weep a little bit every time I drop a set of hammers on the ground. Trolls and Orcs won out with some pretty good totem design and Tauren get to be unique snowflakes again with theirs. Overall I’m happy with it. Giving each race’s Shaman’s a unique totem is a good step. But if Goblin Shaman get cool looking gear totems, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe throw my hammer at them. Maybe cast Wrath of Carpentry.

Although maybe I can rename myself Captain Hammer and invite people back to my Hammer Cave to show them my Hammer….

So what do you guys think so far? Like the new totems, dislike the new totems? Like the set bonuses?

Until next time, Happy Healing

Sig

Images courtesy of Dr. Horrible sing along blog, WoW.com, and WoW guru

Patch 3.2 in Brief

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So I’m a little long-winded. My typical posts run somewhere in the 2000 word range, with the longest of them hitting a staggering 4000 words. As a personal challenge, I am going to provide a little commentary on multiple aspects of Patch 3.2 . . . in two sentences or less. Patch changes are listed in descending order according to the very scientific standard of my personal interest in them.

Coliseum Raid Instance

Five bosses is far too few for a new raid dungeon, regardless of how many times we can play through it in a week. Also, if Blizzard thinks I’m going to be satisfied fighting a Jormungar that looks like every other big worm just because it drops Tier 9, they are fooling themselves.

Normal and Heroic Versions for both 10 and 25 players

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I really don’t enjoy killing the same boss repeatedly–regardless of the “extras” in hardmode–in the same week. I used to really, really hate the 3-day reset on Zul Aman for that reason.

New Druid Art

I applaud any and all new artwork in game, including the pink kitty. Now, if I can have one of these forms, I might just go feral myself.

Resto Tier 9 Bonuses

Lackluster compared to Tier 8. HoT ticks that can crit will have less impact than a small front-end instant heal on Rejuvenation.

Three Flavors of Tier 9

They had better not be Rum Raisin, Licorice, and Bubble Gum. In all seriousness, the designers need to take care that the color mix doesn’t make us all look like clowns.

Lifebloom Nerf

Wait, didn’t they realize that the Bloom is nearly 100% overheal anyway? This spell’s now awkward mechanics and situational use have already minimized its place in my rotation, and I’m quite sure that we don’t need it at all as things stand.

New Resto Idol

This will be the new must-have Resto druid accessory, more stylish even than a pair of Manolo Blahniks.

Changes to Mp5 allocation

It’s about time! Even in BC this stat was too “expensive” for its value.

Upgrades to Profession Bonuses

These are all fantastic and I applaud them, but I had really wanted a new alchemist stone. I just really like the idea of manufacturing my own Pet Rock of Uber.

Epic Gems Available

There goes all my hard earned flask money! Seriously, did we even need these?

Reuseable Flask of the North

Why haven’t they thought of this before?

New Moonkin Idol

Probably not as good as the Resto idol since Moonfire is a low-priority spell.

New Heirloom Item

With this stacking bonus, my baby priest will be leveled up to . . . 40 in no time, before I forget her again.

Streamlined Emblem System

Golf claps. The system as it was could be pretty awkward, and at this point in progression it’s appropriate to use emblem gear to facilitate a reroll.

New Pets

I want a baby raptor, especially if he makes a cute squeaky noise.

More Argent Tournament Dailies

I wish I didn’t have to have exalted reputations to unlock them. Dailies are a nice thing to do on alts, and I’ll be stuck doing them on Syd–I just can’t really see myself getting the Argent Dawn/Crusade rep a second time.

More Argent Tournament Mounts

The dailies didn’t hold enough of my interest for me to buy even one of the mounts yet, so I’m indifferent. I still have two pets to go as well.

More Tasks For My Argent Tournament Squire

I love how Averna calls him her pet boy. I humiliate mine by making him carry the Gnomeregan flag, and I can’t wait to make him fetch my dry cleaning.

Changes to Mounts and Mount Prices

I am extremely puzzled by anyone who opposes these much needed quality-of-life changes. To them, I will only say that every generation, as it ages, always claims that when they were young, things were “much better” because they had to work “much harder”–It’s annoying when Gramps says it, and it’s annoying when you post it on the forums.

Venomhide Ravasaur for the Horde

That’s just ducky, but why doesn’t Blizz let everyone get both this mount and the Winterspring Frostsaber? I have never understood the resistance to cross-faction mounts.

Changes to Shield Block on Items

This is not a genuine fix to warriors and paladins, and is barely a bandaid. I still foresee a day of reckoning ahead for tank balance.

New Battleground

Funny, I still haven’t managed to visit Strand of the Ancients yet . . .

Official 3.2 Patchnotes for Shamans

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Ok so yesterday I posted what the Devs were saying, but now they are officially up on the forums. Lets see what shamans have cooking for the patch and PTR

Shaman

  • A customizable totem bar will now be available for shaman allowing the storing of 4 different totems. These totems can be placed on the ground at once in one global cooldown for the combined mana cost of all 4 totems.
  • All Shocks now have a default range of 25 yards, up from 20 yards.
  • Base health increased by approximately 7% to correct for shamans having lower health than other classes.
  • Chain Heal: Jump distance increased to 10 yards. In addition, the amount of healing now decreases by 40% as it jumps to each new target, instead of 50%.
  • Ghost Wolf: Can now be learned at level 16. While in this form, snaring effects may not bring the shaman below base normal run speed.
  • Talents
    • Enhancement
      • Shamanistic Rage: Cooldown is now 1 minute, down from 2 minutes. Successful melee attacks now have a chance to generate mana equal to 15% of the shaman’s attack power, down from 30%.
    • Restoration
      • Ancestral Healing: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.
      • Cure Poison and Cure Disease: Combined into a single spell, Cure Toxins.
      • Earth Shield: Dispel effects will now remove charges of Earth Shield rather than the entire aura.
      • Healing Way: Redesigned. Rather than providing a chance of increasing Healing Wave spells on a friendly target, this talent now innately increases the effectiveness of the shaman’s Healing Wave by 8/16/25%.
      • Mana Tide Totem: Totem health now equal to 10% of the shaman’s health.
      • Nature’s Guardian: Redesigned. Now has a fixed 100% proc rate, has a 30-second internal cooldown and increases the shaman’s maximum health by 3/6/9/12/15% for 10 seconds.
      • Nature’s Swiftness: Cooldown is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
      • Tidal Waves: No longer reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave by 30%. It instead now provides +25% critical strike chance to Lesser Healing Wave, along with the previous 30% cast time benefit to Healing Wave.

Lodur’s thoughts:

Oh my! We knew about the totem bars, and we knew an increase in health was comming. 7% increase will be very nice for our survivability in PvE as well as PvP

Nature’s swiftness – We already knew about but it’s nice to see it in print

Ancestral Healing – Great googly moogly thats awesome. I have to say reducing incomming damage by 10% that’s just amazing! And it scales ridiculously well with content. I mean Disc priests used to only get 3% from grace.  This change has made me excited (I hope this one stays! think of this with chain heal!)

Cure Toxins: With us having Cleanse spirit this change is kindda meh for restoration Shamans, but really awesome for odd PvP specs.

Earth Shield: More of a PvP buff but still pretty slick.

Healing Way: This is very handy. The change to this talent will let you roll your Healing Wave around a bit and I’m certain more people will use it now as a result. Maybe not much more, but a bit.

Nature’s Guardian: Also more of a PvP fix, but I’ve seen some Shaman pick it up for progression fights, which isn’t a half bad idea. The change to it could see more use esepecially in hard mode fights with lots of raid wide damage.

Tidal Waves: A lot of Shaman I’ve been talking to haven’t taken a shinning to this one yet. Personally I think it’s a great thing. The extra crit will let you get Ancestral Healing out there and its a fast heal to begin with. I like this change.

Improved Water Shield: 30% change to be triggered by Chain Heal is nice. Not losing an orb is even better. There have been too many hectic fights where you forget or just can’t spare the GCD to toss Water Shield back up. This takes care of that and lets you keep it up a bit longer, which will help your overall mana regen.

Chain Heal: We new the increase in range as well as the lower number on the healing reduction, but seeing it there is a comfort for sure

I can’t wait to test these out!

*edit*

I forgot to mention the replenishment nerf.

Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

Also at the same time MP5 gear will be getting… more MP5

I do <3 me some MP5

Who wants to do some hard modes? What do you guys think so far?

I’ll update this post as needed, but until then, Happy Healing,

Sig

  • Improved Water Shield: This talent now has a 10/20/30% chance to be triggered by Chain Heal, and the charges of Water Shield are no longer consumed by this talent.

    • More Shaman 3.1 Changes (With Edit!!!)

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    800px-ketchican_totem_pole_2_phixr

    Lodur back again with more Shaman changes on the PTR. There was a recent patch and it looks like this is what we got changed

    Restoration

    • Healing Stream Totem range increased from 20 to 30 yards.
    • Mana Spring Totem now restores 91 mana every 5 seconds at max rank. (Old – 34 mana every 2 seconds)
    • Nature’s Swiftness changed to – When activated, your next Nature spell with a base casting time less than 10 sec. becomes an instant cast spell. Nature’s Swiftness shares a cooldown with Elemental Mastery.
    • Restorative Totems now Increases the effect of your Mana Spring and Healing Stream Totems by 4/8/12/16/20%. (Down from 5/10/15/20/25%)
    • Healing Grace has been moved from Tier 3 to Tier 2.
    • Ancestral Healing has been moved from Tier 2 to Tier 3.

    Totems

    Nature Resistance Totem, Stoneskin Totem, Fire Resistance Totem, Frost Resistance Totem, Strength of Earth Totem, Flametongue Totem, Wrath of Air Totem, Windfury Totem descriptions have been changed to reflect the latest changes, they now affects all raid members. ( But will not Stack with some class buffs)

    Healing Stream and Mana Spring totems will not be combined at this time.

    So, what do we think about all this?

    The Healing Stream Totem range increase is nice, I’ll give them that. Not going to really elaborate on that one.

    Mana Spring Totem change brings it to 109 MP5 with talents, making it the exact same mana regeneration as Blessing of Wisdom. To be honest, we knew this was coming since BoW and MS no longer stack. This goes hand in hand with the Restorative Totems Talent

    The Natures Swiftness change is more PvP centric. It seems to take down the Hybrid spec people were running around with letting them get Elemental Mastery and Natures Swiftness and then have an “I kill you now!” button.

    Healing grace and Ancestral Healing Swapping places does not really affect us, that’s more just housekeeping. You still spend the same amount of points in the tree to get what you want without having to take anything you really don’t.

    Totems tooltips were updated, that’s about it for the top part there. The big news here is the decision to not combine Mana Spring and Healing Stream totems. With them tweaking MS, I’m not surprised. As much as I would love to see that combination, I personally think it wont happen, at least not till they figure out how to handle mana regeneration for everyone.

    Playing around on the PTR (when the world server is active) Nothing really feels different in the play style. I’m hoping to get into an ulduar group (hopefully the raid invite goes through this time =P ) so I can test it out on some heavier content.

    What do you guys think ?

    *EDIT*

    Restoration

    • 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%.

    There it is. Was waiting for the shift in restorative totems. Could be quite nice.

    Image from wikimedia