Weekend leftovers
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving (except for the nation of Canada, who had a head start on all that) and got to spend the weekend hiding from family and exploring the post-Shattering world with alt and main alike. And pie. I hope you all ate lots of pie.
My precious rocket boots, neutered
My outrage du jour. Scratch what I said about rocket boots theoretically being still useful in Cataclysm raiding. They’re dead.
Two changes finished off our old friend: (1) rocket boots are now boosts and attach to the belt, and (2) they can backfire in raids. The first means that we have to choose between a damage absorption shield and buggy boots, of which the answer is painfully obvious for a tank. Even a tank that needs to enjoy a brisk jog before he or she can reach a mob. The latter means that it’s a poor choice, to the point of being negligence, to chance a backfire in the middle of a pull.
And not only can you shoot yourself up in the air, but hey, you can also roast yourself alive. Debuff can last for 8 seconds, meaning up to 120% of your health can be burnt off. The upside (if there is one) is resilience apparently reduces the damage of the debuff, so I suspect our tanking damage reduction effects will as well. So the debuff won’t likely kill you, but I’m sure healers will be thrilled at the prospect of competing with a major DoT as you’re picking up the boss.
Here’s my question about all this: why? Not so much why do we have to choose between boosts and a absorption shield–tinkers stacking with enchants can sort of explain that–but why suddenly do tinkers have to backfire in raids? What changed there to prompt such a change? And why such an asinine backfire that you can be nigh roasted alive? Any other profession bonuses that can murder you, that I’m missing? (Seriously, being fired up into the air is a non-issue, relatively speaking, that’s what parachutes are for. Justify the DoT to me if you can.)
Perhaps I’m taking this harder than I should. For months now I’ve been using the Nitro Boosts as a crutch for my quixotic desire for a gap closer. And then they rob me of even that. It’s enough to make me want to RP walk to bosses in protest. Or something.
A second wind for the druid
I hate Taurens. There, I said it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind other Taurens. (For example, Linedan is a stand-up bovine.) I just can’t bring myself to play them. I rolled a druid a while back and was having a good time with it, but couldn’t bring myself to truly enjoy the character. Something was off.
Then I realized it was the character’s race: it’s slow, lumbering, beefy mortal shell. It didn’t appeal to me at all, and my interest in the druid slowly fizzled until it dropped off completely at level 70. Cataclysm brought it back when they announced Troll Druids and since that trailer’s debut I spent a goodly amount of time counting the down to the moment Bhruin the Druid would get his second wind.
First thing I did last Tuesday when I got home was fork over the $25 to race change Bhruin from a gross hunk of sirloin to a lean, mean, nature machine. And it was the best $25 I ever spent.
I look forward to having Bhruin at max level as my “main alt” in Cataclysm.
Years behind, but we’re close!
The guild’s been hitting up Uld25 the last few weeks on Sunday nights, farming hardmodes and Val’anyr shards. We finished up in Ulduar last year with poor Dara only having something like 19 shards, nor a single Yogg25 kill to our names. With the advent of the guild perks system on the horizon, we’re trying to shore up any corners that will give us a boost in the system. Legendaries are an obvious easy target.
Thanks to a healthy addiction to off-night old-content raids, we’re only one off hand glaive and one Val’anyr away from having the full deck of Legendaries in guild. Which is pretty cool.
Also cool: picking up achievements I didn’t have before, and regaining my footing on my way to 9000 achievement points.
In any case, it probably will be another few weeks, but pretty soon we’ll right the lingering wrongs of our majestic failures in Ulduar, score a legendary, and put down an Old God in his 25man incarnation.
Armory Feed
I sure can’t wait to Rocket Boost out of the Cata-equivalent of Defile and blast into the air, which if it behaves like Disengage (where you are still considered to be in the same space until you land), would inflate Defile a TON and immediately wipe the raid. :|
Not only do they fail they fail a LOT. Since i tinkered my belt on Thursday i’ve had it fail on me ten times. They definitely seem to have raised the failure rate.
yeh i was sad to rhidach…i feel ya man….my poor gap closer :(….been going back and reading your post for engineering for tanks…im still trying to decide if its going to be worth it, to keep it…
Yes, but rocket boot failures are now sources of truly epic humour, for at least another few raids.
After that, it will be frustrating, but for now… hysterical.
@Rhidach
30 November 2010 at 11:27 am #
That’s an awfully short window, haha.
1) I noticed the boosts missing from all of my boots in a pug’d ICC10 run last week and promptly filed a ticket.
2) I read this and suddenly feel like a sub-literate douchebag who can’t read, can’t keep up-to-date on his professions, and likes to whine to GMs.
Wonderful.
/cry
Joe Ego’s last blog ..Glyphs in 403a for PvE Holy
Race preferences are a funny thing. When I originally rolled my paladin, she was a dwarf, and I adored her stout little shiedly dwarfiness. Then I tired of my Horde hunter but not my Horde guild, and it happened they really badly needed a tank, so I faction transferred.
I loathed being a blood elf. LOATHED it. I twirled my hair, I cocked my hip, I looked like one good solid hit would shatter both wrists, I got lost in every group screenshot. I also started my tank project and started flirting with every other tanking class and plotting to make one of the others my main come Cata.
Now I’ve race changed to a big slow solid slab of beef, and I never would. Paladin? Love it. Just as long as I can do it with horns and hooves. Really odd to me how much of my dissatisfaction simply *evaporated* as soon as I was no longer playing a race I hated being.
LabRat’s last blog ..Gone Fishin’
@Rhidach
30 November 2010 at 11:27 am #
Yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me, great word choice with “evaporation”. I kind of feel bad to be (subconsciously) so rabidly anti-Tauren, but I can’t help it.
If you have any kind of identification with your character, some races will feel appropriate and some won’t. All the alts I actually play are either tauren or trolls; I don’t seem to connect with any of the other Horde races.
You can be rabidly anti-tauren over here with me in my rabidly anti-blood elf corner.
LabRat’s last blog ..Gone Fishin’
The change to engineering, yet another thing that I don’t remember reading in the patch notes. And here I was wondering why I suddenly shot into the air when I was tanking Sindy… /grin
This is bloody freaky.
My main is a tankadin (natch). We’ve been recently polishing off 10 man uldy in hard mode for the rusted proto’s (I got mine this week – yay!). I got those same ach’s this week, and oddly I was floor hugging when we finished it too.
Oh, and I hate trying to play Taurens too. My previous Druid attained the lofty levels of 14 before I faced up to the fact I was bored stiff of her.
As soon as 4.0.3a hit my first action was to roll a Troll Druid, and most of my time since has been spent on him. Enjoying it a lot, so much so that I expect him to become my main alt, over my current IC25 geared forsaken Mage. Who is an alchemist / engineer :)
@Rhidach
1 December 2010 at 10:39 am #
Grats on getting your drake! :)
Everybody’s got races they do and don’t like. Me, I like playing Tauren, and I’m so used to it that when I try tanking on my other prot warrior, a female human, the size difference subtly throws me off. I think that’s why I’ve never played a gnome for any length of time. Silly punting jokes aside, I keep my camera zoomed so far back that a gnome would simply disappear into the middle of my screen.
Linedan’s last blog ..I feel for the poor guy- but…