You’ve probably noticed that the blog has been totally inactive for a couple of weeks now, and there is a good reason for this! 

I’ve stopped playing my Priest. Therefore this domain name became quite inaccurate… I’ve moved to a new home, and have imported all the posts from this blog over there. If you want to continue reading as I start on some new adventures, then please feel free to update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

The new URL is mine4fish.com - There’s also a full explanation there of what’s gone on for the past few weeks.

Look forward to seeing you there This blog will be online for a few more days and then automatically set to forward to my new home.

No related posts :(

The majority of my mana regen comes from rapture, with a good deal coming from replenishment when it’s in the raid too.

We consider Replenishment mandatory. What I mean by that is we assume that you have Replenishment available to your raid. It is technically possible to go without it, but you will need to overgear the instance or otherwise compensate for it in other ways.

That doesn’t mean we will or will not nerf Replenishment. But we don’t want it to feel optional (assuming you are in reasonably challenging content) and nerfing it too much might have that effect

Firstly, I like replenishment, a lot. Having a 25k mana pool raid buffed makes me get an absolute ton of mana back from it. However, let’s examine what classes currently can trigger Replenishment. Shadow Priests, Retribution Paladins, and Survival Hunters.

The first two are fine, providing they’re in your raid, Survival Hunters though? Speaking as a TBC raiding Survival Hunter, I can say that the current state of the tree is infact a joke. Hunters over-all are pretty much a joke right now, and apparently the survival tree is the most viable of the three.

In my opinion, you can’t go giving an effect like replenishment to two hybrid classes, and then go putting it in only one tree of a pure-DPS class - that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In 25 mans its absolutely fine, but in a 10 man when you only have 6 DPS slots, you begin to force people into a specific tree.

Personally I would like to see at least one more class getting replenishment, if Blizzard see it as mandatory, it seems only right. Also, giving it to pure DPS classes in a single tree only needs to be changed.

Healing difficulty has also been brought into question recently, currently there are two healing challenges in the game for me. First is KT, healing and saving Penance for people who get turned into an ice cube of death, and then switching to keeping the off tank alive while tossing some heals onto the main tank as well is interesting. The second is Malygos, phase one is a nice healing challenge, especially without replenishment.

I am sympathetic if you find healing too difficult. Many players do not and are clamoring for more of a challenge. There are many ways we challenge players in PvE, including complex encounters, short enrage timers and high damage. When mana management, or healing in general, are too easy then certain encounters become too easy. Furthermore, the game mechanics as designed don’t work — Spirit and mp5 become stats players aren’t interested in. Choosing efficiency vs. throughput is not a meaningful decision. Healers in general are marginalized because raids can get by with fewer of them.

When you claim we are dumb for thinking healing is too easy, you are disagreeing with a lot of other players who post on these boards. Your conclusion must be that they are dumb too and we should design the game just to support your playstyle. Above all I am constantly encouraging the community to read what other players are saying. They are not always going to agree with what may be blindingly obvious to you. Does that mean they are wrong? Does that mean you are wrong? Of course not. All it means is the WoW community is large and diverse.

We have structured the game in such a way that you can find a difficulty level you are comfortable with. Naxxramas is one of the easiest raids we have ever done. Malygos gets a little more difficult, and Sartharion with multiple drakes is fairly difficult. Going into the future we will keep adding even more challenging and hardcore encounters while still making sure players who just aren’t into that can still enter raids. The game has difficulty levels. If you are finding things so difficult that they aren’t fun then by definition you probably aren’t a cutting-edge raider. That’s cool. We want to make sure you still have plenty of interesting things you can do, even within a raiding environment.

I do like the way the CM calls the player dumb here. That was well deserved. I do think healing is a challenge, when there is replenishment. Yet, they’ve already said replenishment is mandatory. Hmm.

Not quite sure what the answer is there, I’ll be interested in seeing how mana regen comes into play in 3.1. I currently gem for intellect and mp5 where possible, I think it works out quite well for me, apart from being the cheapest gems around

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Tonight, at least, we completed the Champion of the Frozen Wastes achievement. Malygos should have been on the cards for the past 3-4 weeks, however people have been very slack on the uptake. Eventually it took one guy to take the initiative and put together a 10 man run in order to get the tactics organised and finally clear out the start of the WotLK content.

The fight itself was relatively straight forward, we wiped a few times on the first stage getting that sorted, and then breezed through to the third. Once we had the control of the drakes in stage three down it was the home straight.

Very glad to have gotten this done, it did trigger a lot of drama in the guild. Most guilds? They would congratulate you on your achievement and be happy that 10 people put in two and a half hours of wiping and talking tactics to work out how to get the fight clear. Our guild? Well, we got told we were hated, a clique, and told to go die.

Typical.

To be honest I’m beyond caring with the majority of the guild, if they can’t get around the fact we put in our own time off our own backs, under our own steam - then I sure as  hell am not teaching them the encounter.

WTB: New Guild.

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Let’s see, what pretty screenshots I have…

Many Death Knights, left side…

I came across a multi-boxer playing with his Death Knights, I just liked how the glows of his swords were in a pattern! Was great. Entertained me for a little while anyway, I was considering stalking him around a little while to watch him fight, but he flew off on the flight path, so I didn’t get the chance! Cry!

Shadowcraft, ahhh how I missed thee… 

Esti got her full Shadowcraft, and oh boy does it look pretty! Unfortunately I didn’t get to wear it all for very long as I started on the upgrade quests for T0.5, I’ll go into more detail on this at some point - all I will say now is it is incredibly long, and pretty expensive to boot! It’s really good to experience the full chain of quests though. Obviously there is the major benefit of getting to stand around looking like a ninja when I finally get it all completed. The quest continues.

Baron 45, in 15…

Alex took me through the 45 minute Baron run… It was close, only had like 30 minutes left!!! Ahhh, long gone are the days when there were proper challenges like that in the game. Not even sure if there could be considered an equivalent today… Strat timed run for the mounts? I don’t think so, we have cleared that on a group of alts (Alex doesn’t count, his gear is the same level as our alts at the moment…) - there really aren’t enough personal challenges in the game anymore I feel. Maybe I’m alone in missing that?

Onyxia, Tier 2…

Onyxia got killed on Friday night, and my Rogue got her T2 helm, before she was even 56, really quite amusing. She also got the neck piece from the quest when I got to 60. Looking back at it I got quite a lot of levels over the weekend, I started at 55 on Friday night so I could go to Onyxia, and by Sunday night I was 61. Not bad going really considering I didn’t rush to outlands at 58, only arriving there at 61.

 
Naxx 25 Cleared

A final piece of news for the week - Naxxramas 25 man is finally clear! KT dropped tonight like a stone on our first attempt. This was mainly due to the new found awesome healer team we have built up, we’re running a (currently under-geared) Paladin who until recently was a Death Knight, a Druid, a Holy Priest, a Shaman, and myself. It’s a pretty good setup, and thankfully all of us are fairly skilled playerrs - and it really showed, one shotting everything through the evening was very nice!

There’s some marginal guild related drama going on, but we’ll see what happens there shortly I suppose…

No related posts :(

One can not, however, overlook the sheer number of things that have cropped up. Mainly due to these PvP and Arena type things. To be honest, I don’t care. I think PvP, Arena, and Resilience are the things that are screwing the game, so I’m quite glad that it’s a bit fucked up right now. How heartless of me.

I will, however, care when they screw up at 3.1… I will leave that rant until then.

There’s been a lot of Priest action on the forums recently, and some of it has been pretty interesting. It’s good to see some attention directed our way.

We have some exciting changes planned for priests. Many of them will make it in 3.1 (Ulduar). We hope to have them finalized enough to be able to announce some in the next couple of weeks, but that date might not work out for a number of reasons. The community has a way of overlooking all those caveats such as ?at this time? or ?assuming nothing changes? and suddenly we are ?breaking promises.?

Interesting, I am very curious as to what these changes may be. Personally, I would like to see some changes to Discipline coefficients to take into account spellpower more. Currently I feel that we are not going to scale very well in future, though time will tell.

Disc is a really strong spec in PvP and PvE. We talked about it a lot today, and we are convinced that if healing meters showed absorbs and damage negated that Disc would be up there with everyone else. It’s just hard to really get a handle on how much damage you are preventing.

I asked everyone around the table if they would feel comfortable having a Disc priest on main tank duty even with no paladin. Every one of them said yes.

(I know the tree still has some bugs and a couple of awkward areas in the tree. I was reacting more to the thought that having Holy and Disc as separate healing trees was doomed to failure.)

It’s not that hard to work out how much damage you are preventing, you can’t do it exactly, but if you’re using Glyph of PW Shield then you can get a pretty good idea. Anyone who knows me is well aware of my position on Paladins as healers, hopefully once the scaling issues (that may or may not actually be issues at the current point in time) are rectified I see us being far superior to Paladins.

My favourite fix from the patch? Penance directional fixes! You can now be facing away from someone and heal them with Penance and it’ll swing you right around to face them. Bloody awesome.

Despite people crying over a couple of minor things (minor, because I don’t care about them) being broken, this has been quite a nice patch I feel. Bring on 3.1.

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Anyway, today Esti got fully Shadowcraft, she was level 48 at the time, so couldn’t actually equip it for quite a few more levels! I wanted to be able to do the T0.5 quest chain as soon as it became available at 58, so last night and this morning we set to grinding away at the instances.

I got quite lucky with a couple of the drops, I got my Chest piece on the 2nd kill, and the others for fairly forgiving, I think Canon Master for my shoulders was the guy who held out the most.

So now the only challenge is levelling onwards so I can equip it all and start the T0.5 quests! She’s currently level 50, so not far to go really…

In other news, Schozie managed to out-roll me for the [Swift Zulian Tiger], he also out-rolled Stu and Felpe, but that is besides the point - I was next closest! In all honestly I never expected to even see it drop, ever, so congratulations to him! Hopefully he will post some screenshots this weekend!

We’ll be heading back tomorrow after it resets to try again, but I won’t hold my breath on it dropping again.

No related posts :(

Now, it seems some people are complaining that Priest are very unfocused in some ways, I can but assume they are talking about the Holy tree, as Discipline is about as single target focused as you can get.

Holy Priests are multi-talented

OBVIOUSLY! Why are people complaining about this? They may not be the masters of any trade, but they can fit all the roles perfectly well.

We designed the priest to have lots of different tools. That in and of itself can be very powerful. You can fill lots of different roles in a group and switch from role to role very easily. While some tools (Renew and Flash Heal for example) are very reminiscent of spells from other classes, other tools (Prayer of Mending and Guardian Spirit) really have no direct equivalent.

I think the “not as powerful” clause gets invoked sometimes because if priests were better at hots than druids etc. then people start to wonder why they should ever bring the other classes. I realize you can turn that argument around, but still the flexibility needs to count for something. We do not view priests as weakened versions of the other classes either in the way we design them or in practice.

All that said, I do hear a lot of priests saying that they want to be really good at something and I do hear a lot of priests saying they want more tools that are more interesting and not just equivalent versions of other classes’ spells. We get this message loud and clear. It’s certainly something we will keep in mind as we sit down to work on the priest for 3.1 and beyond.

This is what the blues have to say on the matter. Now, I don’t quite consider that being flexible makes someone not as powerful, in fact I would agree 110% that being flexible makes you far more powerful than if you were pigeonholed into a certain role, not out of choice, but out of class design, for example, the lol-worthy Paladins.

Anyway, on with the show…

So, the AoE healing nerf is edging ever closer, and boy can I say… I am really looking forward to it now! Let me show you why…

Now, I blurred out the names to protect the guilty, but I decided to make him a new keyboard all the same…

Yes, you saw it here first, these were going to going on sale, but sadly Blizzard put a stop to the pathetic Wild Growth spam! What a tragic shame!!!!

Sense the sarcasm

Also, if anyone wants 10,000 useless 3 button keyboards give me a call.

P.S. Don’t go hating me, our guild has useless Restro Druids, I have nothing against the awesome ones out there. And Ville, when he’s Resto. He rocks.

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Week started off well, we managed to do 3 wings of Naxxramas 25, doing most of it with 5 healers. Not bad going really, on Monday we return to finish off the 4th wing and do Sapph and KT. Should be interesting to say the least, lets hope people get their frost resistance gear in order by then.

With 25 mans on the calendar, we got given the all-clear to take a quick in-guild “pug” Naxxramas 10 man on Thursday, and this is where the drama came in to play. It has happened before in almost the exact same situation, we have 25 mans on the calendar, and when people want to organise their 10 mans during the downtime, certain people feel they are over-looked, and it spirals from there.

We had one Hunter /gquit on Thursday, and our resident know-it-all arsehole took it upon himself to rant on about it for a good while. We have a few resident arseholes in our guild, but generally they know to shut up in raids, unfortunately in between reading guild chat can often cause me to want to claw my own eyes out.

I digress slightly. The resolution to these conflicts was decided upon before we even got back into raiding in WotLK, however the system that was in place perhaps wasn’t working out now that we have regular 25 mans in place. I don’t personally know the answer. I do know that I find healing 25 mans boring as hell, and I would much prefer to purely run 10 mans. I don’t quite have the opportunity to do that currently, not knowing 10 people I would go with.

I’m quite happy in my current guild when certain people keep their mouths shut, however I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with said people.

As I’m on a raiding rant, I may as well get onto healing. I quite enjoy healing when it’s engaging and there is quite a lot going on, for example in our 10 man Naxxramas group there was just myself and a Shaman healing, and it was great fun, always had to be on the ball, and we coped very very well, cleared the whole place in about 3 and a half hours with 2 healers. However when I’m in a raid with 2 Paladin healers, I feel like all I’m there for is Spirit buff. I tend to sit about twiddling my thumbs and causing people to overheal far more than they should be.

I don’t really know the answer to that either, 25 man raiding has better pay offs, but its far less entertaining, I find myself sat around far more than in 10 mans waiting on people.

Anyway, that’s quite enough about raiding.

Esti the rogue is now level 43, and exalted with both Undercity and Orgrimmar, and that means she has some pretty mounts to stroll around on! One of my main aims for this character was to complete every quest possible, so progress may not be very fast, but at least with the achievements clocking up I can see my progress!

In other news, this evening Ville decided it would be interesting to see just how large he can make his mammoth. Turns out it can be pretty large. He made use of a [Gigantic Feast], [Winterfall Firewater], and Bloodlust. That about did the trick to make a crowd gather in Orgrimmar anyway!!

We tried to come up with some ways of making him even bigger, so far we came up with the Berserking buff from the battlegrounds, any other ideas?

That’s all for this week, we’re back into Naxx 25 on Monday, so we’ll see how that goes with our current healer situation!

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I haven’t got around to making the CSS for the blue posts just yet, so you’ll have to deal with the lack of prettyness in this post, I will get on with that this weekend, but I didn’t want to miss the very first target I set myself as a new years resolution, that wouldn’t be a great start now, would it?

Patch 3.0.8 is fast becoming quite a large patch, there are a lot of changes heading in, some of them pretty good actually.

• Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped. 
• We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. 
• The Loremaster of Kalimdor Achievement has had its quest amount reduced. 

Of the non-class specific or crafting related changes these are the ones that interest me the most. 

Tapping was a major issue when I was levelling my Priest as Shadow, granted it was in the first week of the expansion and there were more people around than I imagined there would be, but it still became a major, major annoyance to me when people would tag my mob right after I was done DoTing something up - infact I’d go as far as saying I said things that would make Jimmy Carr blush down ventrilo on more than one occasion.

The next two are more related to Esti my little Rogue, I don’t die a huge amount, but there are a couple of corpse runs that are just plain annoying, so this should help considerably.

I’m not sure how extensive the changes are to the Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement just yet, I assume not major. I won’t complain, less quests for me to try and trawl about to find the better. She’s not doing too badly for level 40 I don’t think, about 620 quests complete overall, with 349/700 done towards Loremaster of Kalimdor. I am fairly happy with her progress towards these achievements!

• Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them.

This is awesome news. Dream shards were effectively useless, and my Enchanting is sitting at around 335, so any way I can find more people to do enchants for to get the last remaining skill ups is more than welcome. Some of the current material requirements are just plain silly, the useful guys over at MMO Champion have a full list of the changes to material requirements.

• Wild Growth now has a 6 second cooldown.
• Holy: Circle of Healing now has a 6 second cooldown

That’s right, you one button wonders will now have to work for a living, what a shame. I can’t say I’m unhappy about these changes, I just wish they had taken the nerf bat to Chain Heal while they were at it, but apparently it’s fine because it has a cast time. Go figure. I was under the impression Blizzard were trying to edge people away from being one button classes, however there’s a druid in my guild who does nothing but emo about the fact Wild Growth is getting  nerfed, and having seen the healing meters from tonights raid I’m not that surprised, it accounts for around 70% of his healing.

I look forward to this patch coming along, there are some welcome changes. I’m still (trying) to hold my breath to see them sneak Dual-spec in there as well, although this would delay the patch a little longer. I’d be very very happy.

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I’ve tried to think of ways to make my blogging more structured, and therefore more regular, and the best idea I’ve come up with is to make myself blog twice a week, the first blog will come on a Wednesday, and that one will be highlighting any blue posts or other wow news that affects me as a Priest, Raider, Crafter, etc.

The second post will be on a Saturday and will take a more journalistic manner, chatting about what I got up to recently, probably throw about some screenshots, and generally make a nuisance of myself wherever possible.

Also on the blogging front I’ll be tidying up a couple of things, firstly the colours on the item linking facility will be tweaked as per Bellwether’s suggestion (thanks!) - secondly I’m going to sort out the bar on the right a little more, I added the “recent achievements” section rather hastily, so it needs tidying up.

Other than that…

Lucidity is progressing through 25 mans somewhat, we’ve cleared 3 wings of Naxxramas Heroic now, and I’ve gotten a fair amount of gear upgrades in that time, I’d say I’m one of the better geared healers in our guild now… However I find 25 man content terribly boring to heal at the moment, I hope it gets somewhat more exciting…

Esti kicked ass over the Christmas break, she’s now level 40 and getting through the quests at a reasonable rate which is quite nice, I hope to get through at least 100 quests per weekend, as play time on her during the week is kind of limited due to raiding.

Well, a long bunch of text with no pretty images… How tragic… Here’s a nice picture of Patchwerk bending over to have our melee crawl up his ass. Classy. Ignore the overhealing. It’s not there. Honest. Having two Paladin healers in the raid sucks.

No related posts :(