It's the Little Things...

DIE DIE DIE DIE!

Just a brief note to say how much I want to scream and throw myself out a window when I'm doing a major edit on an article, using Blogpress for iPad, and the app crashes. This is like a PC in late 80s when it could really blink off with all your work. These things aren't supposed to happen anymore!

But hey, make lemonade. I've been wishing for a way to issue brief bursts of cursing when the blog gets affected by things like this, and BP inspired me to go make the shoutbox over on the left. Um. No actual cursing please, unless it's "Rassle-frassing long-eared varmint" or the ever-popular "$%@#!"

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Healing Changes: Netharea posted today about some immediate hotfixes to healing priests and my beloved Shaman.

Power Word: Shield is nerfed with a substantial mana-cost increase. The reasons given were largely cited as the PvE Disc. Priests getting too reliant on their one spell. But indeterminate PvP reasons were also cited. But I think I know what they were: The other night, I went to Tol Barad very very late in server time. There were only seven people in the raid group. But up at Warden's Vigil, there was this one stinking disc priest who had all his insta-cast defense and healing spells lined up and a line-o'-sight breaking pattern to run that kept four of us tied up for forever. I'll be honest, it was good playing on his part, and kinda irritating that not one of us had a reasonable stun. But I swear that smacked heavily of OP.


Shaman's Purification received a massive, super-huge buff, taking the bonus on all our healing spells from 10% to 25%. There had been a lot of numbers pointing to low shaman output again, but I'm surprised that they made such a large buff to our "enhance everything" kind of talent. Devs usually go for small tweaks to situational spell enhancements. I fear that a few weeks from now, this buff will get reduced.

Neth also went on to say that the dev team is really looking into Shaman (and Druid) lack of major CD powers. Next patch, she says. This makes me happy. Devs brought these kinds of spells out at the beginning of Lich King and then gave them to half the healing classes. Nothing says "ur useless" like lacking a major type of spell that somebody else has. 

I hope they go into mobility problems. The added time to Spiritwalker's Grace is hardly a whiff of improvement. To be honest, I have a very hard time targeting players, hitting the buttons I need while also moving and steering myself at the same time. All this mess for a potential 12% of our fight time? Y'know, I just don't think the devs really have any idea what to do about shaman mobility. They can't cut the CD on SW Grace without getting the PvP harpies mad, and the whole spell now is an inelegant, insufficient solution to the PvE problems they have forced us into.

Low Shaman-healing is going to continue in raids til mobility gets addressed somehow. It's raids, with their extreme scrambling mechanics where this problem shows the most.

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Totem Changes: I'm very happy with the changes to Mana Tide Totem. The patch change coordinates with my reforging a few hundred more spirit into my gear anyway. But I can regen around 50% of my mana bar now, which is way up from the 25-30% I got from it before.

The Tremor Totem nerf is pretty well the unmitigated disaster I thought it would be. I can never get to it when I really need it, and the CD is so long. It goes into the "too little benefit, too much trouble" box right there with SW Grace until I figure out what to do with it.