Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Resto Druid Tier 10 Bonuses!!

So tier10 bonuses are up on MMO Champion!


Wow way to use some pretty sketchy wording there Blizz. It took me WAY too long to figure out the heck my 2 piece bonus actually is. It seems as though it removes the tapering effect on our wildgrowth. Apparently this isn't a huge thing because as we get more and more spellpower, the potency of the dropoff becomes less pronounced. 4 piece sounds really really interesting. More or or less a chance to proc a one jump Prayer of Mending off of every tick of Rejuv. So thinking about it more. Rejuv will have a 12 second duration, 15 when talented. Assuming any druid with 4 piece will have a 15 second Rejuv that's 2%*5 ticks = 10% chance for a full duration Rejuv to jump during the course of any one Rejuv. Factor in that that free Rejuv that jumped also has a 10% chance to proc another jump. I can't wait to see how this plays out on the PTR. Needless I'm much more excited about this than I was about critting Rejuvs.

/Rant (you were warned)

It's been kind of a meh week in wow, guild frustrations abound. I'm in a casual guild, we raid twice a week for 4 hours each, in theory, but lately we haven't been doing that. Tuesday is our loot pinata day in which we storm into ToC25 and destroy that then port to Theramore and one-shot Onyxia, then call it a night, and break up into two or so ToC10s to farm badges. Thursday we usually manage to scrounge together 25 people to try ToGC, but we constantly battling attendance issues and have canceled more than a few raids due to a shortage of people. Last week we put in a measly nine attempts on beasts before calling it. We weren't making much progress, wiping pretty consistently the first time we got toxin on the raid, but honestly? Tab out look up some strats, yell at people to ACTUALLY spread out and oh yeah major pet peeve, kick the healer who DCs 5 seconds into EVERY attempt. Our healing is having trouble keeping up and the fact that Miss Resto Shaman can't stay online thus we're five-healing definitely doesn't help. Basically progression raids have been incredibly frustrating due to lack of persistence and personal accountability.

Enough of that rant I have more! My ToGC10 is a collection of some of the better players in my guild: myself, my mage boyfriend, a couple people we've guild-hopped with (rogue, ret pally, prot/fury/arms warrior, shadow/disc priest [who's been flaky of late]) the GM of my guild (resto sham), officer #1 (prot pally) officer #2 (feral deeps/tank) officer #3 (hunter). So it's kind of a loaded group of friends and all of the important people in our guild. ToGC has proven to be very easy....until Anub. It took us I think two weeks to down him, mostly because of time constraints and not being able to find time to finish up our raid. When we finally downed him we got A Tribute to Skill and figured we'd be farming it from then on. This week we got to Anub with 50 attempts remaining (no pressure right?) Wiped the first time, which took off a little pressure, but as we got closer to 45 attempts, that pressure mounted again. We took a five minute break before our 45th attempt to try to relax, came in and wiped. My thoughts were something like "oh well, we'll get it next week. Pressure's off let's kill him" Officer #1 says in raid: "I have stuff to do I gotta go, night." What?! no heads up, no: "Hey guys I have to go in a half an hour or so." I almost feel like it was emo logging. Not everybody could make it Monday (the next day) and so that was it. Anub didn't die. I'm 3/5 T9, I've been counting on getting a trophy from 10m. Wow, so frustrating.

I know I'm in a casual guild, but I've always been a bit of a hardcore at heart. What's always stopped me is my terrible computer that gets me as low as 2-4 fps in 25m raids at times. Poison circles on the ground? Nope, can't see them. Nowadays, even with the same terrible computer, my friends keep me in casual guilds. We move as a group, and there are six of us. Hardcore guilds would never have six main raid spots, even though we're all very skilled players. I've always been content being casual, wanted more, but content. I'm starting to reach my breaking point, and the less we raid the more tantalizing the better guilds on my server look.

Kind of curious to see how ToGC10 goes tonight nonetheless

I need to figure out how to make this pretty sometime, but I know nothing about websites

Friday, October 2, 2009

3.3 Oh No!!

I've been waiting for it for a while....but patches have gone by without a lifebloom nerf (Blizzard's all time favorite spell to nerf). We druids haven't been spamming lifebloom all that much though, Rejuv has been my ohsotasty go to button when the raid's gonna get hurt. We all got a preview with the nerf to the T8 set bonus (50% reduction in the initial heal applied). I don't know how many of us were too angry about that and honestly I was almost expecting it after I looked at my guild's World of Logs parses from a night's raid and found out that T8 set bonus was accounting for 10%+ of my effective healing, and any set bonus that's so juicy that it has me taking off my T9 to heal for our guild's raids might need a little tweaking. Anyway to get to the point, Blizz is applying a "bug fix" reducing the duration of rank 15 Rejuvenation to 12 seconds. This means one less tick before it expires. There seem to be two ways of looking at this bug fix (it's blatantly a nerf, even if it's fixing a bug). The first school of thought has been saying: well it probably all went to overheal anyway, it's just one tick less, while the second says that I'll have between 1 and 2 fewer rejuvs on the raid to tick when BIG DAMAGING ATTACK happens and it's gonna gimp my healing. I belong to the second school of thought. I'm definitely not looking forward to this change but as always, we'll adapt.

The other nerf on the horizon is what seems to be a 50% nerf in the armor Improved Barkskin provides us with: from 160% armor contribution from cloth and leather items, to 80%. This is going to hurt, literally. Barkskin is my ZOMG ROGUE OW OW OW button when I'm totally stunlocked and OMG I'M STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO A WARRIOR AND HE'S GOING SPINNY SPIN. I think most of the time I'll be able to live just makes me more squishy and I'm not good enough to carry myself through all that much more squishiness. I'm gonna have to haunt some arena junkies forums to see what the good druids think about this and how scared I have to be.

Another change seems to be more geared to my owly druid friends but affects the rotten broccoli among us too. Nature's Grace won't proc from periodic spell criticals anymore, which means when I get my 4 piece T9.245 (hopefully this Sunday finger's crossed) I shouldn't count on the constant Nature's Grace procs that Rejuv crits are going to supply to be around forever. I'm not too concerned about this, I've never been a Nourish/Regrowth spammer.

Oh, a whole mess of our spells are having their mana cost reduced for lower ranks. Makes leveling easier for baby druids, but I highly highly DO NOT RECOMMEND leveling resto :) I did it and it took a long time (don't regret it at all).

Edited: It's not 3.0 /facepalm