Highs and lows

Low point

On Saturday I was struck with the desire to bring my lvl 65 hunter (my very first WoW character, rolled the day after the game was released) out and try to finally get him going again. I bought 145 emblems worth of heirloom items, paid for normal flying, and then tried to figure out how to play a hunter again. I lost interest immediately.

High point

Rolled a new warlock instead–yes, this is on top of my other alts: the 42 druid, the 41 shaman, the 48 mage, the 80 DK–I have Alt-ADHD.

Spent the better part of yesterday leveling it with Cendra’s new rogue. Was pretty fun, and I love all the spells it has at such a low level. I’ll probably play it until 40 or so and then get bored.

Low point

Saturday I threw together a somewhat impromptu Undying run. Razuvious was the raid weekly this week, so turns out half the people invited were saved already. Finally decide we’ll just 8 man it, everyone’s pumped for a fun drunk raid, and we go to do Razuvious first. While manning one of the Understudies, my pet frame was turned off and I couldn’t drop mine in time to save Zilga’s from dying. I pick Raz back up, we’re doing good, last 10% of health. Then I lose aggro, Razuvious runs over and instagibs a poor warlock and then before we can all flee to reset, the boss dies. I screwed up Undying on the first boss.

High point

Went and did ToGC-10 instead, finished it with 48 attempts left. Got a few upgrades for the warlock, who I hope will start raiding soon. One for the win column, overall.

Low point

After that tried a late ICC-10 alt run. Never got past Marrowgar because people couldn’t switch to spikes or avoid dying in the fire.

High point

No one got saved to a fail run.

Low point

Didn’t kill Putricide last night in ICC-10 (mains run).

High point

On our best attempt we got him to 26% and there was a marked improvement every attempt that didn’t have some crazy RNG screw up early on (ie, every “real attempt”). We definitely could have killed him with a lot more time.

Also, as you might have guessed, we killed Roface on 10man for the first time. We had a third healer in the group switch to actual heals for the fight and it reduced a lot of the “one healer dead = wipe” issues we had last week. Our first try we wiped at 7%, second at 1%, third a clean kill with no deaths. Was a thing of beauty.

Low point

Went into an AV yesterday to drop a Great Feast and score my Dinner Impossible achievement. Someone asks if there’s a tank and some tool responds he can tank it. Another guy says “Rhidach has 51.1k” (no wasn’t me) and the tool retorts “I’ll out threat him and live longer.” I kept trying to type in /raid a witty riposte (“Oh ho ho, so you think …”) but I failed to realize that you use /bg to talk in the battleground raid channel. I lose my chance to salvage my ego.

High point

I haunted him the whole way to Vann where he pulled and after a few seconds I pulled aggro by out tpsing him. He taunted back, the healers didn’t have enough time to react, and he died. And I lol’d. Oh, how I lol’d.

I fear for LoH’s safety

We may have dodged the bullet last week, but there’s no denying that Lay on Hands is clearly in Blizz’s crosshairs. Hell, Pallies in general are. Damocles’ nerfbat is dangling precipitously above our heads.

Ghostcrawler recently asserted in a thread on the forums that “for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment.” And approvingly quoted a poster who said that Paladins differ from other hybrids in that our healing capabilities are much more baseline.

Fair enough, but this peek into GC’s thought process bodes ill for our future situation. It appears that the developers intend to differentiate Paladins a lot more based on what spec they are. That is,

if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend [sic] about the Prot’s ability to self-heal or the Ret’s ability to tank you.

What does this mean for us? For starters: LoH doesn’t have a very bright future ahead of it. Because it is such a massive heal, it’ll probably be dumped deep into the Holy tree, much like Spiritual Attunement was back in 3.1. Our spellpower might be further nerfed so our off-healing capabilities can’t even begin to compare with Holy’s, and our damage dealing will surely be dealt a body blow for a nice double whammy of neutering Prot pvp and pve tps in one fell swoop.

Concerning my first assumption, to drop another quote bomb, GC went on to explain that they don’t consider the long cooldown on the ability (or the inability for it to be used in Arena is a balancing factor). Rather,

We don’t think “Sure I can heal myself for 25,000+ health as a dps spec or 50,000+ health as a tank, but not very often,” is balanced. Abilities can be unbalanced even if overall a character is not.

Gulp. Notice he specifically invalidated LoH for Ret and Prot in that example? Nice knowing you, old friend. Tell the Holy Tree we said hi.

The future of Paladins is probably this: Holy will have access to impressive self-heals (including LoH) but have little damage output, Prot will be a damage sponge but unable to kill anything or heal itself (basically, just slowly die in pvp), and Ret will be a paper tiger (good luck getting them to reverse the burst nerfs once you guys are mortal).

Normally, I wouldn’t mind this “recalibration” of the specs, but like most balancing matters, Blizzard will fail at the follow through. They have a bad habit of nerfing or buffing X to make up for Y, and then when they finally remove Y as a balancing factor, they don’t put X back to where it used to be. When Prot doesn’t have a third “cooldown” anymore, once LoH is gone, what is going to be the balancing factor to remove disparities?

Side question: does Blizzard even consider LoH a tanking cooldown? Admittedly, the reason I keep putting the word “cooldown” in scare quotes is because the classification is scurrilous at best, considering LoH is used more as a panicky free-heal and usually contributes to overhealing more than anything concrete. Still, the question is, do they factor its existence into the equation at all for us?

It’d be nice to get an answer on that.

To return to my previous point, another example: Blizz decided Ret was too bursty, which rubbed up against their survivability, and made it so their damage ramped up (expecting that they were going to live that much longer, so a ramp-up was justifiable). If Ret’s survivability craters, are they going to shift back to a bursty dps model? Of course not.

If I seem overly pessimistic, it’s because I am (pessimism is a bad habit of mine). Blizzard has a knack for going overboard, and I can just see them “recalibrating” our class and badly handicapping us as a result.

Death to the(ir) king(s)!

This actually happened last weekend, but Enveloping Shadows did a strike against all four alliance leaders. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t think it would go as well as it did.

We had about 30 or so guildees, and pugged the remaining 10 spots. While our forces mustered on the shores of Stranglethorn Vale, the rank and file amused themselves by dueling outside of Grom’gol and repelling any dopey alliance who attacked the settlement while a 30-strong force of Horde sat nearby.

I still question why none of those alliance who saw our huge group didn’t put 2 and 2 together and warn their friends that an attack on Stormwind was probably imminent. Did they think we were putting two concurrent ZG raids together?

Anyways, when everyone finally arrived the shamans cast water walking on the raid and the DKs put up Path of Frost. We then marched north up the coast, along the Westfall littoral, and regathered just south of Stormwind Harbor so we could summon the stragglers. When everyone was ready and buffed, we then let out some cheers of “FOR THE HORDE” and rode north into the Harbor.

We dashed through the city until we made it to the keep. Initial guards were dispatched and I sprung forth, cast my shield at the long-faced thug-king of the Humans, and pulled him into a side room where we would assassinate him in peace. Some token Alliance resistance sprung up attempting to disrupt our attack, but a contigent was left at the entrance to the side room with the charge of keeping the defenders out.

In no short time Varian Wrynn departed this mortal plain (at least until next respawn) and, triumphant and with the taste of blood on our tongues, we exited the Keep and rode for the Tram.

Once in Ironforge the Allies were clearly onto us, and there were some stragglers feebly attempting to protect the Dwarven king. But we smashed through their resistance and once again I pulled the king and held him next to his throne. Magni does this very annoying knockback move that drops threat so I found myself taunting him back more than I cared to. He also hits like a girl as far as I could tell.

In any case, we downed him fairly quickly and the mages hastily threw up portals to Orgrimmar so the raid could escape to safety.

Everyone was then told to regroup at the Zoram’gar Outpost in Ashenvale. After a needed break, and perhaps a little more time than it should have been, the full raid mustered again and we once more buffed. Path of Frost and water walking was spread around and we dashed up the coast to Auberdine where we would hijack a ship to Teldrassil.

Luck favored us clearly, a ship was there waiting for us. We all ran aboard, slaughtered the deckhands, and rode the vessel to the shores of the Night Elves’ new world tree. This time no defenders showed up to stop us, probably based on the fact that no one wanted to trudge all the way out to Darnassus. In any case, Tyrande was put down easily. (More like Whimperwind, amirite? …sorry couldn’t resist.)

And last but not least, Prophet Velen. We took the ship back to Auberdine and found again that there was a boat waiting to take us to the Dranei islands. We hopped aboard and upon exiting quickly stormed the Dranei capital (which was conveniently located right next to the dock). Velen was annoying to kill because he had the audacity to heal himself, but nonetheless he put up little resistance.

The raid victorious, we all trickled away to share our war stories with all those who didn’t care to listen and to collect those large bears that Thrall had helpfully crammed into our mailboxes.

Lok’tar ogar.