Casual Addict

Well, it’s time to head off into Northrend now, and much like the previous expansion this means a lot of gear just got sorely out dated. This means I have a lot of bank space that could be put to better use, including some vanity pets that got lost there months ago and never go uploaded into the new portable stable. I hope they didn’t need food. I’m sort of bad with plants and animals.

A quick note about the gear differences. When they released BC, they drastically changed the way that they itemized things. The biggest change is that stamina was suddenly a lot cheaper to budget into an item, meaning items had a lot more stamina for their level, maybe 50%.

The next thing is that the released random greens and blues that people would actually use. If you look back at the old Dungeon Set 1 you’ll see gear that was mostly just a collection of the five basic attributes, with maybe a bit more than other gear. The philosophy back then looked to be that adding more types of stats to an item made it better, so your tier gear could have Str, Agility and Stamina (yay?). In BC we see a lot of strong and focused gear with the stats you actually care about, like spell damage or crit rating, making them a lot stronger than equivalent gear from before.

The last thing they did was increase the item levels by a lot. Item levels determine how much total stats the gear can have. It could be dumped all into one stat, making it really high, or spread out among many. BC gear had more to spread around, meaning stats were higher on average.

Wrath of the Lich King is a little different. There isn’t a huge shift like the stamina change or a difference in itemization philosophy, and there is a fairly moderate boost in item level. What will really change things is the rating system.

The rating system was implemented so that a lvl 40 item with 2% crit wouldn’t be better than a lvl 60 item with 1%. Percentages scale with gear and level, while static bonuses like attack power do not. To make percentages scale they changed all percentages to a rating system, which causes a given amount of crit rating to actually give you less crit as you level up, making you replace it and making the higher-level gear better.

Level 60-70 sees the ratings go up by about 50%, meaning that at level 70 the ratings are only worth about two thirds what they are at 60. Not so bad. 2% crit at 80 becomes 1.3% crit at 70, which is still more than 1% on lvl 70 items.

Level 70-80 sees the ratings go up by over 100%, more than double. This means that your item that gives you 2% crit now will only give you 1% crit at 80.

This makes it very hard to hold onto level 70 gear going through Northrend. Every level you will see your rating-based stats drop, making it a constant battle to keep them where they were. Granted, you will be gaining a lot more in the static stats such as stamina, attack power, and spell power, so your over-all damage will go up, but it might be a little disheartening to watch all that old gear get worse and worse.

What does this mean for me? I’ve vendored basically all the gear I won’t be using to level up. It just won’t be good enough past 75 to be worth keeping in my bank. I also vendored all but the core of my DPS and tanking sets. All that pally healing gear that I had gotten because no one wanted it and we had no disenchanter is now contributing to the size of my wallet instead.

Oh yeah, and you probably don’t need to hold on to two stacks of Bottled Nethergon Energy.

I am a retribution paladin and I approved this message.

I’m going to say it, retribution paladins are overpowered at the moment.  It seems the thing that everyone but the ret paladins is saying, while the ret paladins are too busy smashing faces and enjoying being able to DPS for once.

What I see is mostly my experience with recent raids.  I was protection up until two weeks ago, when I tried ret after hearing so many good things.  My previous experiences with it were very lack-luster, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

I grabbed my two pieces of epic ret gear I had collected from Kara, which included a two-handed axe, and picked up the Crusader’s Scaled Battlegear and gave it a shot.  I think my first run I was at about 800 DPS.  This would have been great if our Kara-geared DPS was still doing only 600 DPS, but they were all up around 1000 now. Still, it was nice to be competative as DPS for once without too much work.

I’ve since done a lot of gearing up, having only one tanking piece still in my set.  Last night in ZA, Gruul’s Lair, and Magtheridon’s Lair I was up at 1600 DPS.  I lead the charts both times.  It’s no wonder people think we’re overpowered.  When a person that still has some blues and greens can top the DPS charts over a full-epic hunter, then perhaps their DPS is a bit overpowered.

But there’s one thing that makes me wonder.  The other two ret paladins in the 25-man runs were only doing 500-700 DPS.  Am I missing something here?  I feel like I could get 800 DPS with just autoswing and Crusader Strike now.  I try to point this out to the people who I out-DPS to show that it isn’t just part of the class and to maybe attribute it to my specific gear choices and skill.  I did spend a lot of time at MaxDPS.

In the end we have to remember that any imbalance we have now will be moot in two weeks.  Classes are currently having their powers balanced around level 80, and that means that some might scale oddly for a month before release.  I’m told ret paladins are back where hybrids ought to be in Naxx raids.

For the time being though, I’m having to think really hard about my plans to switch back to protection at 75.

I know I haven’t posted in a while. I got married and just started school again, so my spare time on top of work and WoW has greatly diminished. However, with Wrath of the Lich King just around the corner I believe there will again be a lot to say.

I was reading my usual RSS feeds this morning and found a post on Resto4Life which in turned linked to this post on Part Time Druid about druid healing. It was written bbitack on October 12th, and so is a little out of date. I’ve done a few runs since 3.0 and although it is great information about druid healing, I have a few things to adds. Here are my observations.

Addons

First things first. A few addons can really help you increase your healing throughput by giving you more information and putting it all in one place. Some people like to say they don’t need addons, but the fact of the matter is that they help. You can get by without them, but the people who have them are going to be able to be just that little bit quicker that gets the heal in before you or saves the raid when you can’t.

The following are my healing-related addons and macros:

• Grid: Grid is a great mod for two reasons. First is that it’s nice and compact. It can show a lot of information in a small amount of space. This means you don’t have to move your mouse far to get from one unit to the next, and your eyes aren’t moving all over the screen which makes you faster to react when something happens. The second is that it is infinitely customizable. Take a little while to figure out the configuration. You can see from the picture a few of the things I have configured in. Grid lets me see everyone’s health, presence of debuffs, absence of buffs, aggro, and hots currently on the target. After using Grid I wouldn’t go back to any other unit frame mod.
• GridStatusLifebloom: This addon is used with Grid. What GridStatusLifebloom allows is the display of the time and number of stacks of lifebloom on all the targets in my raid. I can even display the time left in number of global cooldowns so I know just when I am past the point-of-no-refresh on a tank. This lets me keep track of who has lifeblooms and when they’re about to bloom, which is essential for rolling stacks and timing singles.
• Mouse-over macros: These are great in conjunction with Grid. They are generally of the following form:
  

  /cast [target=mouseover,help] [] Regrowth

  This macro uses two conditionals, which are checked in order. The first sets the target to your mouseover target. If that is a friendly target, which requires it exists, it will cast on that target. If that fails, it will then cast as normal, as the [] is always valid and true and doesn’t alter the casting of the spell at all. This way you can still use the buttons as normal when soloing or when you don’t have a mouse-over target, but you can also mouse over friendly targets to toss on heals without having to change targets. This is really the biggest boost to my healing from interface modification

Spells

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s look at the spells again.

Lifebloom

Still one of our greatest tools. They reduced the amount it heals for and increased the mana cost. However, with new talents like Master Shapeshifter and Genesis, and the new Tree of Life I think we were able to make up for the difference. In a 10-man raid my Lifebloom 3-stacks are rolling for about 700. I only just hit the 700 mark in the month before 3.0, and I haven’t upgraded my gear much since, so we are probably within 5% in that respect.

I find myself letting Lifebloom stacks go more often now. With all the other tools we have that have been improved I don’t feel Lifebloom is more of a choice than a necessity. If we get into a heavy-AE phase of a boss I no longer try to throw in healing between my lifebloom stacks, but rather might shift to AE healing all together! Who would have expected a druid to say that.

Wild Growth

This is our only major new healing spell in 3.0. I was very skeptical at first. It seemed to heal for very little and cost huge amounts of mana. In the weeks leading up to the patch they sweetened it a enough that in my debate between a little more balance or going all the way with resto I ended up grabbing Wild Growth.

After testing I am impressed. In my first ZA run after that patch, when I was still getting used to things, this heal was 44% of my total healing. Granted, at the time I didn’t have GridStatusLifebloom set up yet, so I was having trouble with Lifebloom stacks, but even afterwards it still came in as my second-most beneficial spell to the raid. It is great to have a selective heal for the raid. When I see that more than 3-4 people are taking damage who are likely to be standing near each other, I pop this spell out for some great healing-per-mana. I feel it is very close in power to Circle of Healing and Prayer of Mending, giving us that extra oomph we really needed on AE healing.

This is a happy druid.

Healing Touch

The last thing I want to comment on is Healing Touch. On its own this spell is still too slow and costly to be particularly useful. The way it found a way back onto my main spell bar and got use outside of a Nature’s Swiftness macro is through Glyph of Healing Touch. I have fallen in love with this spell now.

The glyph effectively transforms Healing Touch, the slowest heal in the game, into Flash Heal, one of the fastest. This gives us an answer to the situations when high healing-per-second is needed, and allows us to react quickly to damage. When that player gets hit once by a splash ability and you don’t want to have to wait for a HoT and or Regrowth, you can now pop a Healing Touch on them. It still heals for more than Regrowth, though with a lower crit rate, and has decent healing-per-mana.

How does it compare to our previous quick heal, Swiftmend? Swiftmend will still heal for more because Swiftmend effectively gets the scaling from HoTs which scale very well. However, you don’t have to have a HoT already on the target, and you can spam it. Both these things make it ideal when you have to react to some damage in a place you weren’t expecting it and don’t have time to set up your HoTs. It is also great for adding some extra healing between all your HoTs when they just aren’t enough, saving your Swiftmend for the real bursts where 1.5 seconds isn’t fast enough.

The best part is that you can annoy the priests by getting your heals in first now that you have a 1.5-second cast instead of the bit-too-slow Regrowth.

Conclusions

The 3.0 patch gave us two new tools, an AE heal and a quick heal. Both have their places in our rotations, both have their strengths, and both have weaknesses. Really they both just fill in places where Druid healing was frustrating or sub-par before, and fortunately we didn’t have to sacrifice anything to get there. I’m sure the great healers among us have trouble not

I will miss being able to chat during boss fights, even if my sentences had to be typed in six seconds or less.

Runycat from Unbearably HoT has corrected me that this no longer works. I was under the impression that officially it wasn’t supposed to, but that it did. Has anyone actually tested this lately?

I was just reading Runy’s thoughts on the new Recruit a Friend program. I wanted to share a few gems of knowledge I’ve picked up in the last two weeks.

If you don’t know about Recruit A Friend then you’re probably illiterate because Blizzard is pushing it everywhere. It’s on the launcher, the official site, and they keep name dropping it like they just had a new baby. There are some interesting perks, like summoning your friend for free, but what really has everyone salivating is that you get a 3x experience bonus when grouped together. With many people dreading the 1-60 grind this has gotten a lot of people thinking.

They may have fixed it, but I have essentially found a way to get your 3x experience bonus without paying a cent. I’ll explain.

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I’m sure everyone and their mother’s uncle’s niece’s husband’s child is going to be mentioning this change. It’s huge. It starts with this post by Wryxian

As you may have noticed, in this latest build we have updated spells and abilities using mana. These no longer cost a fixed amount and instead they’re a percentage of your base bana, not including any mana increase from Intellect. For the most part this should mean mana-based spells and abilities are costing roughly the same amount as they do in the live game, though there might be some slight changes either up or down. But we have tried to keep them as close as possible to the same mana cost for a level 70 as they are now in the live game.

What will change though is that lower rank spells will lose their appeal. We have made this mana cost change purely to prevent downranking, which is an unintended technique that we were not at ease with. We’ve previously tried ways to discourage it, but have decided that we’d rather find a solution than continue to find ways to penalise those who choose to downrank. The solution we chose was to make downranking obsolete, encouraging people to always use their highest rank of each spell and nothing else.The highest rank of a mana-based spell or ability will now remain the most powerful effect, but at the same mana cost as earlier ranks.

We’re certain that for some people this will cause a period of readjustment. Hopefully removing a few more of the extra buttons you’ve been pressing will eventually be seen as a good thing; it might also be easier for some people to do their role without having to learn to downrank. We are anticipating such a big change may have some teething problems, perhaps causing balance issues, and we’re all set to deal with them as they arise. In the meantime, we appreciate any comments and feedback related to this change.

This changes a lot of things. Some for better, some for worse. Here are a few of the obvious implications.
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As you progress in the game, invariably progress slows.  It’s just a fact of the game that efforts bring diminishing returns as you progress.  Once you hit the level cap, suddenly your advancement depends on doing things with other people.  You start with some 5-mans to pick up blues, then move in to 10-man Kara and heroics, and then it’s on to 25-man instances.  If you’ve every been in a 20, 25, or 40 person raid you know it can be quite a feat to get that many people in one place at one time.

I’m at the stage now with two characters that I am done with reputation grinds and 5-man instances.  I’ve gotten at least a few quick drops from Kara, and I don’t plan on picking up any badge gear that doesn’t cost 100.  There is a lot of time between Kara runs and I’m not a fan of running 20 heroics just to get one piece of gear, so what should I do?  Start an alt of course.

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I was going to finalize a healing efficiency calculator I was working on, but seeing the spell power changes coming out of the beta mean it will have to wait. Coefficients are going to be changing all over the place, so it doesn’t feel like it’s worth investing a lot of work in now.

One thing I noticed is that down-ranking will probably be much more common in the expansion, if—and I cannot stress this enough—they do not change the way downranking works. With the spellpower changes they might be changing a lot of things. Downranking was designed for level 60 characters, not 80. Downranking is 33% less of a penalty at 80 when compared to the penalty at 60.

You might be asking, what is downranking? As your level increases, less of your healing or +damage (I’ll refer to both as spellpower generically) is applied to the spell. This is to counteract high amounts of spellpower making low ranks of spells amazingly efficient. For example, a Healing Touch(Rank 4) only costs 185 mana, while Healing Touch(Rank 12) costs 820. If you had 1000 +healing you would get all +1000 healing to the spell since it has a 3.5 second cast time. Rank 4 would heal for 1404, 7.59 healing per mana, while Rank 12 would heal for 3577, only 4.36 healing per mana. This doesn’t take healing per second into account, but it was very common before this was introduced, for people to use lower ranks of spells to save mana when the HPS or DPS was not important.

So what happened? They changed the formula so that high-level characters would be severely penelized when using ranks under level 20, and penalized for other spells based on their level in relation to the intended levels of that rank. The penalty is equal to the level the next rank is learned +5 divided by the players level. Healing Touch(Rank 5) is learned at level 26, so Healing Touch(Rank 4) started to be penelized at

(26 + 5) = 31

and you would only receive a portion of your +healing if you are above that level. If you are level 70 then you only get

31/70 = 0.44 = 44%

of your +healing on Healing Touch(Rank 4). This brings its healing down to 844, only 4.56 HPM, much lower than the 7.59 before and much closer to the 4.36 of rank 12.

The funny thing is that using a specific rank of a spell gets worse as you level, but down-ranking by a number of ranks gets better. A 10-level pentalty at level 40 is

10 / 40 = 0.25 = 25%

while a 10-level pentalty as level 80 is

10 / 80 = 0.125 = 12.5%

So down-ranking a single rank isn’t really a big deal at 80. Let’s look at Healing Touch again. As a level 80 with +2000 healing, here is the healed total and mana efficiency of various ranks.

Look at the difference between rank 15 and rank 13. The mana efficiency difference is 0.46. It may not look like much, but it’s a gain of 9.5% healing. That would mean you could do almost 10% more healing before running out of mana if you were spamming healing touch. In an environment where it might mostly be overhealing anyway, you could come out way ahead of the other healers on a long fight.

The mana cost of spells in Wrath of the Lich King is much higher than their previous counterparts. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a lot more downranking going on, particularly with our healers.

I recently visited the dentist.  She said my teeth are damaged from grinding.  I don’t grind my teeth when I sleep, but I have a problem with grinding my teeth while I’m concentrating hard or performing any activity that gets me into that focused state of minimum reflex time. I wasn’t sure what was causing this, so she told me to pay attention to my activities during the day and watch for grinding, and I should avoid those activities or wear a mouth guard while doing them to prevent more damage.

I quickly realized where a large amount of teeth-grinding was coming from: tanking. Tanking is different from other group roles because not only does so much rely on you, but you are directing and leading the entire group. The tank sets the pace of the pulls and has to constantly be watching out for the health and well being of his party. Now, I have two options: wear a mouth guard while tanking, or try to avoid them.

Fortunately I have been leveling up a healer. I find healing much less stressful than tanking. As a healer I only have to stress about one out of twenty pulls, while as a tank I was stressing all the time. When you have an over-eager DPSer who is constantly trying to pull aggro, it first falls on the tank to prevent that, and only if the tank fails does the healer have to react. Additionally, the majority of pulls aren’t hard on healing, though that may be because the tank is working hard to make it so. In short, as a tank I was constantly stressed, while as a healer I spend most of my time relaxing and casting Lifebloom.

I guess this means I’ll be doing some more healing in the future, and cutting back on my tanking. I forget sometimes that as a game it is supposed to be relaxing, and on a stressful week the last thing I want to do is come home and stress out some more.

This post is a day late as I was out of town this weekend.

I have been playing Specturm—a tankadin—since I started playing World of Warcraft again early this year. My paladin is level 70 and starting to run Kara. I’ve tanked every five-man instance in Outlands on him, many on both heroic and normal difficulty. My wife was playing her enhancement shaman with me, so we always had a tank and some decent DPS while leveling and for any group quests or instances we wanted to do.

Around a month ago I decided I wanted to try a healer. I was split for a long time on Shaman vs. Druid, and eventually I remembered I had a level 40 druid on another server from over two years ago that I could transfer, saving myself at least a day of play time. I knew I wanted to be a healer, but was really only interested in doing so in The Outlands, so I hit 58 as feral, did a few levels as balance to see what it was like, then respecced resto and started the instances.

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Phaelia over at Resto4Life made a post today about preparing for Wrath of the Lich King, even going so far as to start a shared topic on Blogging Azeroth.Many responses to this topic that I’ve read are about gathering gear. I’m less concerned with my character’s preparation, and more concerned with my psychological preparation. I’ve written about this previously when I railed on the culture of hunting down pre-patch info before Alpha had even started. With the Family and Friends Alpha in full swing and hemorrhaging game data, it may be time to revisit this topic.

In general I am of the opinion that if you want to enjoy your WoW experience you need to approach the game casually. Once you let the game become a job, you start to find it lacks the enjoyment you found when you started. This is usually something you realize long after you’ve crossed that threshold and it may be too late to turn back. It can be that moment you realize raiding has become a chore, or when you find yourself frustrated at the lack of drops or stupid teammates you hate but know you need. It could also be that moment you find yourself lacking the desire to play because that new expansion is going to come out and wipe out all your progress.  Wrath of the Lich King threatens to just that.

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