Tuesday, May 10, 2011

How to Resto, Post - Patch 4.1

Wait! Where's mah mace?
It's been several months now since I really evaluated what I wanted to do with my specc for Cataclysm, and the fact is that so much has changed in these months. Co-efficients have been rejiggered, new abilities designed, other abilities redesigned. So, it's time to take another look at stuff.

A few quick points that will have more detail below:
  • Deep Healing mastery was pretty lackluster for resto in its initial design but the numbers for Deep Healing have been significantly increased and now also include indirect healing effects.  This makes it worth another look.
  • Focused Insight has fallen out of favor for PvE.
  • Telluric Currents remains contentiously debated. 
  • Wind Shear no longer misses, making us lean, mean, interrupting machines. Make no mistakes about this: wind shear is the best interrupt in the game. Best. In. Game. Suck on that, rogues.
  • Spirit Link Totem would be great if other players would stop running away from it.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

How Many Buttons Do We Want?

More Buttons! Push More Buttons! Hit it like you mean it!

You have just got to love Ghostcrawler: whether he quit the forums out of frustration or if his boss suggested it might be time to take a break there, the guy just wants to communicate with the WoW Base so much that he goes and creates, not one, but two different blogs so he can keep some flow of thoughts going.

Of the two, the "Blizzard Blog" may be already dead from inertia. But the second one, "Coffee with the Devs" (Or perhaps "Developer's Watercooler." They seem to have different names in North America and in Europe) generally gets my interest going each time. It's casual, it's not a big deal, and it's just good insight without pages and pages of flaming replies from forum trolls.

In the midst of Troll Fever this week, GC released a new one of these, focused on the number of abilities the devs try to put into each class and specc.

Ghostcrawler's missive can be read here:

At heart here is real discussion about all the class changes that just keep rolling in and why they are rolling in.  GC makes a number of really astute observations, but a few things that I wouldn't really agree with too. Be sure to read the full post of course, but come on back and let's talk about this.