Altitis

The risk when you’re running as a healing / tanking / DPS hybrid (paladin) with a DPS / tanking hybrid (DK) is that you’ll end up having to heal your buddy who’s tanking to ensure the core of an instance PUG is covered.

We wanted to do the amphitheatre of Anguish last night, and you guess where it ended, I finally bit the bullet and respecced Holy.

And while I will readily admit that the wrath healadin is better than the TBC healadin, despite the new toy (Beacon of Light) or the improved old toys (6 seconds Holy Shock, and no, I’m not really using it unless things get hairy, and long distance judgement of Light), it’s a lot less fun than Ret or the Death Knight.

That being said, I somehow managed to get us through Amphitheatre of Anguish, Gun’Drak and Violet Hold, clobbering together about 1070 spell power and 11k mana out of spare kit I had been assembling in prevision of this very situation, two AH purchases and a couple of well-timed drops in the above instances.

Fun situation: in VH, the run was 4DK + me. A tanking cloak drops off the Aroakka boss (if memory serves). A level 73 DK needs because he wants it for his tanking set. I need for the same reasons. And after I win the roll, he starts whining that I stole it since I’m holy spec.

Memo to the clueless whining noob with a misplaced sense of entitlement: the healer has the same right to need on off-spec gear as a DPS, and if you have an issue with that, you make sure you get really good with combat bandaging. Especially when said healer blew over 200g in respec and AH gear cost to drag your underleveled arse through the instance.

Beacon of Light is an interesting spell. Using it properly at the right time is probably a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve been tossing it on anyone taking a HP dive at the same time as Steptoe (the tank, duh) and it seemed to work OK.

That being said, it took me a moment to figure out how to macro it properly to speed things up, and here’s what I came up with:

#showtooltip Beacon of Light
/cast [target=mouseover, help][help][target=player] Beacon of Light

Binding the macro to a key then allows me to hower over an unit frame to cast, or select a target, or if nothing else is selected, cast it on myself at one single keypress.

That did the trick.

Later, I went outside and tried to kill something with my holy spec. And wept bitterly. Never gonna make 80 with holy spec. I hope the bloody dual spec feature doesn’t get delayed too much, it’s really becoming a must-have feature (and we haven’t even tried it out yet…).

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Being away and with little playtime to try out things has some advantages, I don’t get to react to strings of nerfs + partial reversals as they happen.

I got some playtime on my paladin (now Ret with the blue honour PvP set), and did some Shattered Sun dailies. And currently, despite the nerfs already live (and before the rest to come), from a pure solo PvP standpoint, the changes definitely feel good. Stuff dies a lot faster than before 3.0.2.

PvP? Haven’t had a chance to do more than one single AV, and I don’t think there’s any justification for me to start playing pretend DPS. Healing remains an extremely rare commodity in BGs, my PvP healing set is half season 1 and half season 2 kit from back in the day, I’ve only started to use some of the Ret healing toys a bit in the mix. In other words, I haven’t had a chance to experience that so badly decried uberness which has led to this uncessant string of nerfs.

That being said, what this past month has, again, amply demonstrated, is that Blizzard still has no clue about the paladin class. The sequence of “Ret is fine, stop QQing” leading to “it’s a bit too high, we’ll tweak a bit” followed by the implementation of “To the Ground, Baby”, a modification to the TTGB nerf, and now the backtracking on Avenging Wrath / Bubble / Forebearance, combined with the dramatic side effects on prot threat generation and holy solo-ability, shows a team of class designers in total disarray.

There is no plan, there is no coherent vision, there is also no consistent message and there is ample evidence of QA (including player testing on the beta and the test realms) being a shameful mess.

Ghostcrawler, initially applauded for a new approach to dev / player communication, is seeing his credibility dropping week after week.

An example, when he answers the forum question “How do you come about your decisions and numbers to boost or nerf paladin class related abilities?” with the following gem, illustrates that we’ve moved from open communication to defensive PR bullshit:

“We do very extensive testing on all aspects of combat balance. Remember, as a large company we have access to testing capabilities far beyond that of the average player. As developers of the game, we also have access to a large number of tools that we don’t make public.”

Sorry, Ghostcrawler. When 3.0.2 went live, you first told us Ret was fine, then perhaps slightly too strong in PvP, then massively too strong in PvP and PvE and again still too strong in both aspects (oh and we don’t know how to handle burst damage sorry but in another couple of months we’ll revert a lot of the nerfs because contrary to what we’re saying now Ret won’t be scaling well at level 80 beyond Naxx). I’m not questioning the reality of the class’ balance state, I’m simply unable to reconcile the evolution of your claims with the notion that you do extensive testing.

Or perhaps you’re simply unable to interpret the results.

The final nail on the Paladin class designers’ coffin is this gem hidden in the announcement of the next nerf (they said to the ground, after all):

“Yet bubble+wings currently is used a lot in BGs and Arenas and helps contribute to the feeling of being destroyed by a Retribution paladin while you are unable to respond.”

Hello, Blizzard, ever heard of stunlocking? For four years, you have nerfed every other class who had the capability to kill another player while they were unable to respond. Never has stunlocking been touched. If rogues are to be the exception, fine, but you could start being open about it, and cut the crap like shown in the post above. As a former warlock main who’s had chain fear nerfed time and time again, I’m getting really tired of this.

That being said, since Blizzard has no clue, there are extremely smart bloggers out here who’ve come up with many suggestions to diminish the frontloaded burst potential of a Retadin in PvP without affecting PvE damage on longer fights nor holy / protadins.

The first, repeated often, is to stop seals proccing on special attacks (and adjust damage accordingly to make up for it). Almost every Retribution paladin who has given some thoughts to the matter recommends the same thing.

Blessing of Kings’ Rohan, perhaps the smartest of us all, has an extremely well thought out post with a whole set of measures to fix the issues. While I encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself, here’s the TL;DR version:

“Have Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, and Consecration share a 3 second cooldown (in addition to their normal individual cooldown).

1. 1. Change Judgement as follows:
      1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
      2. Increase damage by 20%.
      3. Change Improved Judgements to increase damage by 10/20%.
      4. Increase the duration of the debuff to 30s.
   2. Change Divine Storm as follows:
      1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
      2. Make it do Holy damage once again.
   3. Remove Seal procs from specials, and tune abilities upwards as appropriate.“

If the burst frontloading is the issue, address the frontloading. What Blizzard is currently doing is lessening the value of every talent point invested in Ret more and more. They should make up their mind. If they want a holy-based burst class in the game, they should fix the frontloading. If  not, they’ll have to rethink the holy-based burst aspect from scratch. Either way, this is the fourth time they’re messing up the class in the same amount of years. Whatever they’re doing, it’s not working.

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As you’ve heard already, Blizzard plans to bring an option to switch between two specs at the drop of a hat (probably out of combat) including switching your gliph selection in the process. A neat feature on the surface, right? In particular for all tanks and healers.

See, when you’re actually not needed in your main function for a specific fight, you can switch specs and gear and take a second role instead of being either nigh-useless (and thus a liability to the raid) or even switched out.

It is a very exciting prospect, but it also carries an inherent risk. Until 3.1 hits and the system supposedly goes live, Blizzard has to at least pay lip service into improving solo viability and possibly fun for the tanks and healers out there. After that? Not so much.

If there is currently fear that healadins switch to Ret in droves because dealing DPS is more fun than healing in Holy’s present shape, Blizzard will at least have to consider the issue (their knee-jerk reaction right now is exactly the same as last time Ret was fun to play, which takes us back to patch 2.0.1 before TBC went live: oh noes, Ret does damage, nurf quick). With dual specs, though, the standard answer risks to simply become dual spec Ret for soloing, and be a brave little one-trick FoL-bot if you want to raid.

I think the risk to see this happen as very real, and it will be supported and sustained by the droves of players who can’t just say “I experience things differently and find healing fun myself” but have to post, ad nauseam, that since they actually find something you loathe fun you must either find it fun too or be severely brain-damaged. You can find examples of this attitude in any of the o-boards’ healing class forums. Never mind that these players shoot their class in their collective foot, though, we all know that the most vocal individuals on the o-boards aren’t usually the brightest crayons in the box.

With 3.1, we will need more than ever to be vigilant about Dual Specs as an excuse. Never, ever should “just spec DPS on your second spec” become admissible as answer to issues within one specific talent tree. And players should really avoid at all costs to resort to “Spec X is fine, dual Spec Y if you don’t like it”. We cannot afford to leave Blizzard off that particular hook, at the risk of ending with a constant downward spiral in terms of gameplay quality.

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With time and many tweaks and adjustments, the WotLK beta has wrought many changes from the initial beta outlook. As we get closer to patch 3.x and its class overhauls, I took a long, hard look at the current state of the healadin.

And I don’t like it.

Admittedly, it is hard to make any truly informed decision from outside the beta – the latest changes for instance are still not final, nor does reading patch notes or second-hand accounts really give a feel of how the new trees will actually play.

That being said, from the looks of things, the hopes I had been harbouring to see an evolution of the healadin playstyle seem to have been in vain.

Due to a combination of factors which include mana cost adjustments, the nerf to the Infusion of Light talent and the addition of the admittingly interesting Sacred Shield spell, complex and more varied healing cast rotations which include Holy Shock appear to be, again, on the backburner compared to using our TBC single trick, spamming Flash of Light. Granted, on longer fights you’ll be keeping Sacred Shield up every 30 seconds (Woo! Sacred Shield is the new Seals) for variety, and if you spec all the 51 points in holy you’ll even get the option of keeping Beacon of Light up every minute.

But from where I’m sitting, it looks like the Wrath healadin will be, again, mostly a FoL-bot. So much for versatile and more interesting gameplay.

Not to mention that the Infusion of Light “adjustment” just killed, again, any semblance of 2v2 and 3v3 arena mobility for the holy paladin, one of the biggest issues holding the class back and keeping its number massively under-represented in those two brackets.

On the other hand, you can spec into a solid protection tree, said to provide much more damage (and hence solo viability) in Wrath than TBC, or an extremely sexy reborn Retribution tree which doesn’t just provide better DPS than ever before (OK, let’s cross our fingers, between patch 2.0.1 and TBC go-live Retribution was massive, too) but also pretty solid healing capabilities with the Art of War and Sheath of Light talents. Add to this that you can actually spec up to 5/5 Illumination in holy with 51 points in Retribution for off-healing or 5-men main healing, and you have (as it currently stands) not merely a good, non-gimped, non-laughingstock spec but you have something even more invaluable to many paladin players.

The realization, at last, of the Paladin vision of old: the dream of a holy warrior who can both smite his enemies and keep his allies alive, by staying in the thick of battle. And that alone is heavy enough in the paladin player psyche, especially among those players who stuck to the class through 4 years of disappointment and clericking for the lack of alternatives, to make the Wrath Healadin, as it stands now, the least attractive spec to come.

Caveat Emptor: As mentioned in the beginning, I’m merely theorycrafting. Actual results, in the beta or after a couple of additional adjustments, may change between now and level 80.

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Cambios is a game dev who may just have started his blog recently, yet posts interesting stuff from day one. Taking on some of the more visible flaws in raiding in current MMOs, he writes:

So 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 people work together to mindlessly clear trash, follow their little script of brain disconnected button pushes to beat the boss, and now he drops 2 or 3 pieces of loot. This loot will often be useful/needed by multiple players present, so someone loses out. The same item might drop many times in a row, resulting in certain classes feasting while others enjoy famine. Or sometimes loot will drop that nobody can use, and it just gets blown up or sold to an NPC Vendor. NEVER is the entire group happy with the loot that drops or the way the loot gets distributed.

Indeed. One of the major issues at heart of the old Welfare Epics feud of 2007 lies with the difference in loot distribution between PvE and PvP. I think Blizzard recognized the issue when they started expanding the badge system, but I also think they need to make it really pervasive. All instance drops should be token-based in some form, and there has to be in-game rewards for participation for every raid member (as opposed to out-of-game only systems like DKP).

So may elements of boss encounter design are absurdly arbitrary. I have fought bosses who did incredibly ridiculous things that were clearly designed solely with the idea of nullifying a specific class, tactic, or ability for no logical reason other than the devs thought it would be funny. I have fought raid bosses that were immune to all sorts of standard abilities for no apparent reason other than to make you feel impotent. I have participated in raid encounters where mages had to tank a boss… just because. People don’t make mages because they like tanking, folks. They make mages because they like to make things go boom. I have fought bosses where they you have to interrupt some of their spells, but not all of them, because being too good at interrupting their spells triggers some kind of Uber Spell. If the boss possessed the ability to perform this Uber Spell, why isn’t he just doing it all the time? Why punish people for being GOOD at a core mechanic (interrupting spell casting) with this arbitrary result?

In their currently stated best intentions, Blizzard claims to be trying to design designing new encounters more for roles and less for specific classes:

We are adding a new class to Lich King, as well as improving the raid viability of specs such as Arcane mage, Survival hunter and Balance druid. That means you have 30 available specs for 25 slots. There are two ways to design around this problem. One is that there are 25 mandatory specs and 5 that shouldn’t be raiding. Boo. A more fun, interesting and ultimately fair direction is that you actually have some choices in who to bring. Imagine running a raid with no warrior tanks at all.

These are good intentions, though. Designing encounters in a way that any combination of these 30 specs can successfully fill the roster in broad categories like tanking, healing, dps, CC and decursing will probably require quite a lot more overlap between classes than we see in TBC. And the first raid to put that theory to the test will be the new Naxxramas. Because unless memory fails me, frost and shadow-heavy builds for mages and warlocks respectively didn’t exactly fare well in there.

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I probably should have known better. I actually used to.

With the latest beta build, DK tanking talents appear again to spread across all three trees. Again, not much of an issue in general (except that now you actually will have to make some choices as currently not every single of them can be picked anymore), just that with the rate of changes, the class is currently too unstable to try and predict much about it.

As I said: I should probably have known better. I actually used to.

That being said, on the paladin front, not only do current tanking and healing specs look very interesting, it also appears even lower level gameplay may be smoother, making leveling another one a more interesting prospect than before. Looking forward to that aspect – provided it doesn’t get nerfed until live.

As others have noted, class-specific glyphs (inscriptions) have been introduced. See the same MMO-Champion link as above for all details, but some of these just sound too good to remain untouched.

To wit, some of the pallie glyphs:

• Glyph of Blessing of Might – Your Blessing of Might also grants offensive spell power equal to 10% of the attack power it grants.
• Glyph of Holy Light – Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target.
• Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom – Your Blessing of Wisdom causes your target to also regenerate health at the same rate as mana.

These three appear pretty much quite powerful.
Or Shammies?

• Glyph – Chain Heal 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) – Your Chain Heal heals 1 additional target.
• Glyph – Healing Wave 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) – Your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the healing effect when you heal someone else.

Can you say battle healer?

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To follow up on my previous post, via the EJ thread linking to it, someone wrote about his experiences group healing in the Wrath beta on the o-bards:

“The Good – Holy shock and Infusion of Light
Holy cow, it looks good on paper, but man for 5 man healing, this is amazing. Literally amazing. My staple heal for small pulls was Holy shock. The 6 second cooldown feels right, and it was critting for me for roughly 4200. Hot. I saved people multiple times.

Now for the ‘power’ infusion. This changes everything completely. I had 28.5% holy crit and 34.5Holy Shock crit. It was critting a lot, and the power infusion gives you a full 15 seconds to decide when to use it. The beauty of instant holy light heals is just out of control. It will wreck raid healing in terms of cast time heals all landing after a Huge ol’ Holy Light. But for the 5 man, it is just sick.

It saved people who pulled threat multiple times, and the librarian boss did a fair share of aoe damage, and yet I didn’t feel like I was gonna be screwed for it. I was using Holy shock to top off the paladin, flash of light the small damage on the rogue/myself and just watching the warrior before blasting him with a max rank Holy light. For a while I was reluctant to use the instant IoL on a downranked HL, but the more comfortable I got with it the more I loved it.

Another amazing thing. You are going along, just flash spamming for small damage here and there. Lacing it with Holy shock on occasion, although I found this to be unnecessary unless they took a sudden huge hit. But if the Damage spikes FAST and you wanna quick way out, I found that popping Divine Favor, holy shocking the lowest person, then max ranking the next lowest person was a great way to not only heal for a lot (many times HL crit too so 12k healed in like 2 seconds), but this would get my lights grace fired up which would lead in to many consecutive max rank Holy lights to top people off.”

This pretty much confirms my previous theorycrafting about weaving HS into a healing rotation. Barring any bad surprises with the mana cost of the last two levels of Holy Shock (currently the last 3 levels are all at 650 mana which seems odd), it looks like there will be a lot more variety in healadin gameplay in Wrath. Gone are the day when they were mostly flashbots, but gone as well is the helplessness when things go South, Lay on Hands is on Cooldown and your only chance to avoid a wipe in the next 2.5 seconds is praying that the HL you’ve just started casting crits.

At the very least, it will make things a lot more interesting.

The same poster however has also some very bad experiences with Sheath of Light (bugged or bad implementation? Hope it isn’t final) and aggro management with Hand of Salvation instead of the old Blessing appears to be funky at best. If you want the full details, go read it for yourself here.

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From a first look at the paladin spells from 70-80 as displayed on MMO Champion, I was struck by the jump in mana costs for the new two ranks for both Flash of Light and Holy Light.

Using a quick spreadsheet to compare and calculate evolution in healing per mana (HPM) for the new ranks, this is what I came up with:

As you can see, there is a sharp drop in mana efficiency, in particular for the former one-trick pony casters using FoL for their bread and butter healing. The ranks are, of course, FoL 5 to 9 and HL 9 to 13, respectively.

The graph appears to be spelling the end of the healadin as the game’s mana efficiency caster (though in all fairness I haven’t looked at what happens with the other healers so far), but this is, actually, not the whole picture.

If we work under the assumption that the MMO-Champion numbers are correct AND final (which might be something of a stretch, see below), we will start having to take the paladin’s third heal into account. Indeed, in Wrath, Holy Shock moves from a lackluster and highly inefficient heal on a 15 seconds cooldown to something much more useable running on a 6 seconds cooldown instead – a tool which could very well become a standart element in any healadin’s spell rotation, moreso since with the appropriate talents, a crit Holy Shock will accordingly make the next Holy Light spell instant. Or, to put it differently, if a paladin suddenly needs to step up his heals in an emergency, within one single GCD he can drop a crit HS followed by a max rank Holy Light for almost 7.5k raw healing done – before even factoring in spellpower.

Here’s the graph with Holy Shock included. While it looks very good for the new and improved Shock, there’s one big caveat which makes the whole thing look a bit, well, fishy to me. The last three ranks (HS 5 to 7) are all listed with 650 mana cost.

Which seems odd, to say the least.

Nonetheless, healadins were lacking any serious Oh Crap! tools in their arsenal in TBC. The transformation of Holy Shock, with the added talent to make a crit HS followed up with an instant HL as described above, when properly geared, may very well top off any tank who just moved from normal operations into the realm of “incoming wipe risk”.

Most definitely something worth watching out for.

EDIT: the graphs should now look less like something my 3-year old daughter made in a hurry

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Unless you have been removed from the news cycle, you already know these two important tidbits of information:

• The Wrath Beta has started
• The NDA has been lifted.

In other words, any proposed changes are now public, in the open, and up for legit discussion.

To kick this off, a few highlights from the beta patch notes (first edition):

Maths get Nerfed

Less stats to cope with: 

 While theorycrafting is fun, there’s a point when the amount of maths you need to evaluate your gear upgrade paths gets in the way of things, and simplifying these by removing some stats is a good move in my book. The first change will benefit all classes who today combine melee and magic to a certain point, like hunters, paladins, druids and shamans for instance. The Spellpower change is a no-brainer too: healers won’t have to build a separate gear set for damage anymore.

Hunter Love

Several hunter changes which should rejoice all pet maniacs everywhere, among others:

While I haven’t taken a hunter up high enough to be able to fully measure the amplitude of all the other changes, the above are no-brainers. Finally completing unique abilities for all pet families is something which hunters were waiting for since patch 1.7… and that was 3 years ago. Loyalty won’t be missed. Auto-levelling new tamed pets within 5 levels of the hunter? This has to go live. It just has. Bite and Claw made equal? Again, no-brainer. Min-maxing had killed Bite-only pets in TBC. Welcome back, I say.

Paladin Sanctification… and Cursing

Again, way too many changes to list them all. Here are a couple of chosen few:

 Lovely start here… except that a longer daze effect on Avenger’s shield gives indisciplined DPS more time to rip aggro off a pull before it even reaches the paladin.

Blessings renamed into Hands… Mmkay.

I don’t like the sound of this change one bit. Salvation was pretty much a cast & forget blessing. Now part of the responsibility of personal aggro management gets shifted from the DPS to the paladins. I can already hear the arguments after a wipe. Instead of fostering personal discipline, the bad DPS will just blame it on a paladin too busy to cast a hand to shed the extra aggro they shouldn’t have gotten if they had been better players.

Several changes which appear to attempt to foster more hybrid gameplay or talent builds. It remains to be seen how this plays out in practice. I’m skeptical at this point. However, the big Hammer Tossing contests starting when a boss goes below 35% of health are sure to amuse for at least a week or two.

Combat Log changes

• The combat log now differentiates between a spell failure due to resistance and spell failure due to missing the target. Where once both events reported as a resist; a spell missing the target is now reported as a miss.
• Overhealing is now reported in the combat log.
• When a source of damage is entirely prevented (by a shield block, a full resist, or a damage shield like Power Word:Shield, the prevented amount will now be displayed

Lookie, that starts making sense.

As you will have guessed, there are way too many changes to comment them all in a hit & run post like this. There will be more later, but in the meantime, you will of course get class-specific commentary from your favourite class-specific blogs.

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As I mentioned previously, I’m currently leveling a mage on a new (for me) realm. I picked mage for its fast pace and ease of getting to 70, because for many other classes, having a little stash of gold to buy the best gear available at the AH can make a lot of difference.

Turns out it will be even more so, at least on the realm I’m on. Aside from a steady supply of spirit greens, the AH is desperately devoid of usable kit. Nobody’s really running Azeroth instances any more, and world drops still are heavily tilted in favour of the most useless leveling stat for anyone but priests.

I still believe Blizzard could provide a simple and painless remedy by replacing most of the spirit-based suffixes by the new BC-introduced stuff. That would actually help. It’s something I was thinking about a year ago, though, and I’m not holding my breath. But I digress.

In terms of cap level gameplay, druids and paladins offer the most versatile classes for the casual player who wants to join into group activities with a couple of friends. Groups will always require at least a healer and a tank, and these two can fit the bill. I loved tanking as a pallie, and didn’t mind healing as one either. But that toon is sitting on a PvE realm, and I’m currently playing on PvP.

I’ve never managed to stick to druids beyond level 21. Both classes are toons I’d love playing at level 70, but in both cases, leveling another one up all the way is something I just cannot stomach, at least not for the time being.

While my ideal scenario would be to have Blizzard actually unlock the option of rolling ANY class at level 55 with Wrath, it’s not going to happen in a hurry, because that would officially mean they are admitting old Azeroth is dead and done with. There’s an awful lot of content in there, and I just don’t see them officially putting a nail in its coffin (which they would be doing in that case).

So my plan is to have the mage provide the material support for the rest of my toons on this realm. Once she reaches 70 (assuming she makes it before wrath gets released), I’ll start up on another shammie to eventually have a healer handy.

And the DK? Pretty obvious, of course. It will provide me with a tank for those level 80 group activities. It’s simply going to be the most efficient way to have as many options as possible at my disposal, and starting at level 55 will remove 54 levels of grinding and redoing the quests I start being able to do in my sleep.

And I’m looking forward to it. I just hope the class will be well designed enough to hold its own in that tanking role from go-live onwards, instead of the 3 years of adjusting and tweaking it took for the druid and the paladin to be both viable and accepted as such.

Call it Welfare Leveling

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