Altitis

On my paladin, I finally dinged 80, ending my first toon’s journey to the new endgame.

A couple of thoughts about the latter parts of the journey, if you will.

Veteran of Wrathgate: I completed what some people have dubbed bestest quest chain evar and as is often the case when expectations are high, I actually ended up disappointed. The wrath gate itself, the cinematic (which isn’t playing in my game, had to youtube it) both look like a massive rip-off from Lords of the Rings. Heck, even Bolvar seeing the dragons coming in his last moments smacks of the battle at the Black Gate, when the joined forces of the West see the eagles coming. Now of course I’ve been long aware that Blizzard recycles content and the various easter eggs, cameos and not always so subtle references are actually enjoyable. This transposition smacks of lack of imagination, badly written fanfic, nothing more to me.
And flying through Icecrown later on while getting my exploration achievement just left the same aftertaste: it’s Mordor-on-the-rocks, it borrows really heavily from the visual atmosphere created in the Two Towers when Frodo is at Minas Morgul. Pity.

In a similar vein, lamest dragon ever:

Alexstrazsa, queen of dragons. You may be a massive red dragon with mean looking fire coming off your eyes and whatnot, but the  earrings? horn-rings? totally ruin her otherwise badass look. What’s the point depicting such vanity in a dragon in her dragon form?

Irony is always present in this game. Getting insulted by my future me about my gear? When the future me not only wears the same but manages to have 4.5k hp less than I do? Come on. The future apparently looks bleak, gear-wise.

My future me is apparently totally gimped. Oh well…

So as soon as I ding 80, Steptoe wants to reform our PvP duo. 102 bars of saronite later and a friendly blacksmith located and I’m ready to go with the crafted savage saronite gear. Ret paladin and DK, we’re bound to pwn, aren’t we?

Looks like our start in Season 5 is pretty much the same as our start in Season 2 (when we first formed our duo). Huge learning curve again, and massive fail. 9-1. For all other teams. Geez. 

Oh well. In actuality, I’m wearing kit with more than double the stamina and AP of my future me in Dragonblight, that’s got to count for something.

We also tried out Strand of the Ancients. Fun. With a little help of Megan’s wisdom, I wasn’t completely clueless on the first run. That being said, and to put the record straight, dear Megan:

• There’s always been QQ about PvP on both sides
• The faction which did actually boycott AV in many Battlegroups was Alliance
• I remember in 2005 and 2006 that there was a lot of tears about shammies in BGs, in particular in WSG

And having played AV on both sides (though not since patch 3.0.2) at some point, other mechanisms aside, let me assure you that having to fight through most of the alliance NPCs to get to Vann is a bit different than bypassing most of them when you want to get to Drekk. Which might have been a balancing mechanism due to the fact that Balinda is less of a hassle to kill (and much more difficult to defend) than her orcish counterpart, but as such, it’s badly implemented.

That being said, while the people complaining that alliance have an advantage by attacking first are obviously dumb as a pair of bricks (that is, twice as dumb as I am, I come with single-brick dumbness), the advantage you see of buffing everyone on horde def doesn’t exist. Players trickle in when the BG is started and immediately mount up and race to the beach. You never get to buff the entire raid, at least not with a PUG, and same with assigning groups. Players trickle in and the smarter go either man the canons or look who’s riding to what side before deciding to reinforce the weaker side. Preforms are probably different, but for PUGs, neither side is advantaged or disadvantaged by who goes first, methinks.

I defended Wintergrasp this afternoon, and it was a dreadful lagfest at the end. Manned a cannon for 20 minutes, and then things went downhill for us. Still, it’s good fun, and it’s good honour considering the fun to be had If you haven’t tried it out yet, you should

Last but not least, I keep saying this but I’d really love dual specs to be live.

And this concludes the short report about the last leg of my first journey to 80. DK and mage are next.

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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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… Get out of the kitchen!

While I have another post planned to join the chorus of bloggers writing about their first Wrath experiences, I have come to a realization this weekend.

Let’s call it by its name and not beat around the bush.

I’m a carebear.

I’m a PvP wuss.

Long time readers may remember that I rerolled on a PvP server in Spring to join some friends. Leveling there at late evenings during the last 6 months of the Burning Crusade wasn’t really heavy on world PvP. I had a couple of encounters in areas where you expect them, mainly STV and Hillsbrad Foothills, and a couple of skirmishes in HFP more recently. All against the perhaps dozen alliance players in the same level range, and (I thought) pretty much all in good fun. If we decided not to ignore each other, it was the typical Rock-Scissors-Papers game with the twist that the player who started it would most likely live.

Wrath exposed me to the other side of it, though – level 72+ players camping just outside of Thrallmar on their epic flyers, in twos or threes, hellbent to deny the aspiring DKs passage. Level 78 players escorting their guildies through Howling Fjord quests and hell-bent to slow the progress of the opposing faction level 70-71s around.

I realized, there and then, that I’m not cut for a PvP server. Oh, I do enjoy organized PvP, within the boundaries of the formalized engagements which you can find in BGs, arenas but also outdoors encounters like Halaa. I like more or less balanced engagements where I feel I have at least a shot at at, even if it means being outnumbered.

I however derive no pleasure in ganking lowbies myself, so there’s no sense of compensation in the nature of “do unto others…” from the gankfest. I’m getting pissed off when I get 2-shotted while trying to read a quest text, and that’s been happening far too often for my taste since the 13th.

Steptoe having apparently left on another of his semestrial smoke breaks, I’m again in an almost people-devoid guild.

Which has me reviewing my options.

Anyone has any suggestions for a casual, late night, EU-English carebear horde player? Ideally the server should not suffer from login queues, have reasonable BG queue lines up to 1am server time and horde should win BGs from time to time.

Open to any ideas.

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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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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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Matticus writes about dead WoW Blogs. I’m not dead. I was on vacation, remember?

And since Steptoe actually suddenly reappeared, I’m also back in the game and made level 54 (first level in a month or so) on my mage. Funny thing, by the way. One month without playing and you need to relearn all of the controls. I had a similar feeling a bit before going on vacation while playing a couple of AVs on my paladin trying to get the Olympics pet (and failing because horde actually lost all 4 games I was in, go figure).

Mentioning Steptoe… You remember Steptoe the Warlock, right? He wasn’t just my 2007 arena buddy, he was also my willing accomplice throughout the first TBC year, my lieutenant who tried to keep me from failing to run a guild and then bolted off Ghostlands (EU) to other places where the grass wasn’t greener but the BG queues only took half a second.

Back in January, we were getting our arses handed to us in Season 3, and after a particularly embarrassing hilarious match during which we played so badly that a team of nekkid arena dancers could have beaten us, Steptoe cut short on our cheering and told me “BRB, going for a smoke” (yes, as a warlock he has some very filthy habits. Consorting with demons and tabagism are only the tip of the iceberg, believe me). And that was the last time I heard from him until he suddenly reappeared in the comments section here.

And on Dragonmaw EU, too. Only he apparently has seen the light or something, because Steptoe the Warlock has morphed into Steptoe the Priest.

I know what you’re thinking. From warlock to shadow priest, the only filthy habit being shed is the demon consorting because they sure do a lot of dabbling in the dark arts. And that would be a perfectly reasonable thought, since everyone + dog levels priest as a tenbraic disciple of unholiness.

Like me, you’d be perfectly wrong. My bloody contrarian buddy is levelling as…

…holy.

I kid you not. He has embraced the Light as tightly as he was hugging the shadows before, and I suspect the only reason which prevented him from becoming a zealous paladin instead of a squishy robe-wearer was one year of playing together with the most rotten paladin role model you could have. Me. Oh, and the fact that he noticed I took about 4 times as long to kill anything at 70 than his warlock, but I digress.

Will there be an improbable but equally hilarious priest / mage 2v2 duo making a fool of itself to be formed at level 70? I doubt it, chances are that Wrath will be out before I make it to 70 on that mage. As a matter of fact, if the new and improved Wrath Paladin becomes easier to level that his Burning Predecessor, I’ll throw my previous prejudices in the wind and roll another one.

So if you’re suddenly looking forward to more tales of arena bungling on Altitis because Steptoe has finally finished his cigarette, you’ll be disappointed. Nonetheless, welcome back, buddy.

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Looking through recent Blue posts, here are a few interesting tidbits regarding Tank design for Wrath.

The Summary:

• They haven’t yet a clear notion how threat handling / management will happen at level 80
• They want to keep each tank with its own specialty but improve overall viability (ie blurring the difference between classes)
• They want to make it perfectly possible and viable to raid without any one definite cookie-cutter tank spec
• They want to look at any formerly “must have” talents and integrate most of these into core mechanics to foster more varied spec… flavours instead of one single cookie-cutter approach.

Generic:

It’s almost impossible at this stage to talk about which class can generate the most threat or has the most survivability at level 80. There are no level 80 characters in beta, and we haven’t done our own testing yet. We want to come up with mechanics we like, then we get the numbers in good shape. I’m not saying don’t talk about it — it’s very useful when someone can point out a potential problem, particularly if it’s one we hadn’t thought of. Yes, that happens–a shock, I know. Just don’t slip down the slope from there by declaring the class dead or breaking out the slaps to the face.

There are 4 tanks in WoW. They all are intended to tank 5-player, 10-player and 25-player instances. They all have their specialties, and the warrior specialty will probably remain as the best tank for single, hard-hitting bosses. But if you only have a death knight for that encounter, or you bring a warrior to a fight with a bunch of adds, you’ll still be able to get purps. This is a slight change in philosophy for us, but one we feel is necessary in a world with 10 classes and several specs getting a boost to raid viability.
(Source)

I also acknowledge that hit and expertise are great threat stats, and expertise can offer a little mitigation to boot. The point I was trying to make is that putting strength on tanking gear solves a lot of problems in the game — it can improve dps and threat (and mitigation if we build the talents correctly) without us having to worry about whether plate-wearing tanks are already capped in some other stat. Defense means something different for warriors and paladins than it does for death knights, and unless we build different gear for each class we can’t count on defense as always being desirable above everything else. The last thing we want is for some classes to feel that they don’t have access to the gear to do their jobs properly. (Source)

I know there is a tradition in BC of a prot warrior MT with perhaps another prot warrior or a paladin as OT. If we do our jobs right, there will be some gouprs that run feral MTs with unholy DK OTs in Lich King raids. Crazy, I know, but in the BWL days it was 5 prot warriors tanking, so we’ve already come a long way. (Source)

Warrior:

AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We’ll see how that feels.

The old Shield Block wasn’t fun. We think we can make the new one fun. Numbers are the easiest thing to tweak if that’s all that’s called for. So we tend to focus on mechanics at this stage in development. Once we like the mechanics, we can massage the numbers. (Source)

Warriors need to be better AE tanks without eclipsing paladins. Thunder Clap is a good place to address that problem. If Shockwave becomes the ultimate tanking ability than we’re concerned nobody would want to run a 5-player dungeon without it. That’s not the goal. We don’t want to hand out Consecrate to every tank, but we want you to be able to tank groups better. (Source)

Druid:

The design is for bears to be viable, end-game main tanks. The design is for cats to be viable, end-game melee dps. In both cases you are going to need the right talents, good gear, skill and companions who can back you up — I don’t mean to imply raiding will be easy.

If you want to do a little tanking and dps, you probably won’t be as optimal at either, though you’ll probably always be better at switching between the two than other classes. In order to be as good at tanking as the other classes, you might have to give up a few talents that maximize your dps, and vice versa. This is a good thing — it lets you choose to actually be a main tank.
Don’t worry about your bears. The armor and other changes were done to fix itemization issues, not to nerf druids. You’ve already gotten the ability to drink pots in bear form and benefit from weapon enchants and windfury. We have plenty of knobs to turn to make sure you can do your job even better than you could in LK. (Source)

Paladin:

Like I promised, the paladin changes were more sweeping than most changes. As such, it’s going to take us some time to go through a second pass on the abilities and get everything polished up enough to evaluate the shiny, new paladin. I expect we’ll be a lot more active on this forum when that happens. (Source)

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Leafy took a clear stance on Wrath content and marked his blog Wrath spoiler free. This initiative of his got me thinking about how to position Altitis in that respect.

Now as you will have noticed already, I’m quite interested myself in speculating about different changes introduced in Wrath will affect and evolve gameplay.

I understand, however, that some of my readers would rather not be spoiled at all. To this effect, and in the spirit of Leafshine’s own approach, all Wrath-related posts from now on will be using the mark below on top.

If you see it and don’t want to get spoiled, skip to the next post in your feed reader. I admire and envy the people who plan to start playing Wrath with a fresh mind. My curiosity prevents me from doing the same.

This badge, therefore, is mainly for all of you who have the self-control I’m lacking.

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