gift-of-the-wild
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The Light and How to Swing It: Cataclysm blessing overhauls
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon an entire flight of black dragons. Well, we've had a small deluge of Cataclysm information about paladins in the past week. Some of it was fairly straightforward answers about design goals while other information was more hinted at with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge sort of feel. One of the items that has been fairly glossed over is all of the changes they're wanting to do to blessings. At the beginning of Wrath, we had some blessings and auras removed by moving them to talents, built into the base coefficients or changed into the hand abilities. It made life easier on trying to figure out who is casting what and which people in the raid were which spec so you know which spell to cast and then managing all of the exceptions. This is why there are multiple addons that people have designed to handle them for you and remind you to recast them. It looks like the coming expansion will be bringing more of these simplifications and reorganizations, but all of the details are still in flux. While some of the changes have been decided upon, others are more in the idea phase and will likely change greatly throughout the course of the possibly impending beta.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Undocumented druid changes
Our esteemed colleague Boubouille has datamined some undocumented changes to druids on the patch 3.3 PTR, so while I'm waiting for it to download (53 more minutes.../sigh), let's take a look:BALANCENATURE'S GRACE: Now procs from non-periodic spell criticals (old: all spell criticals).So direct-damage spells (e.g. Wrath, Starfire, Moonfire's initial hit) or direct-healing spells (e.g. Regrowth's initial heal, Nourish) will be the only ones that can trigger the 20% haste effect from 3/3 Nature's Grace. This is definitely a nerf for Balance concerning Starfall and Hurricane crits, but it's also a nerf concerning specific gear sets. Moonfire's DoT component can crit if you're using Balance 2-piece Tier 9, and a Restoration druid rocking 4-piece Tier 9 gains the ability for Rejuvenation to crit.For Balance's AoE situations and Starfall cooldowns, it's an out-and-out nerf, albeit a limited one given Starfall's cooldown and the unlikelihood of Hurricane playing a major role in any given boss fight. Otherwise, it's also a nerf directed at Tier 9 bonuses, unless Blizzard's planning on future tier bonuses (or class changes) that will make periodic damage and/or healing crits a routine thing. Stay tuned.
Patch 3.02 for Restoration Druids, part 1
The single biggest change for most restoration Druids with patch 3.02 will be the disappearance of at least four commonly-used PvE and PvP specs: 8/11/42 (the traditional resto PvP spec) 11/11/39 (Resto PvP with Insect Swarm) 13/11/37 (Resto PvP with Insect Swarm and Nature's Reach) 11/0/50 (PvE Tree of Life with Insect Swarm). The first three are kaputski because Feral Charge is now a 21-point talent in the feral tree, and the last three are bye-bye because Insect Swarm is now a 21-point talent in the balance tree. If you still want talents from the balance tree especially, you'll have a ton of stuff to play with (frankly I ran out of space here to discuss the new restokin specs but we'll cover it as soon as we can), but for the moment we're only going to concern ourselves with stuff squarely in the Restoration tree. Shifting Perspectives later today will have a full run-down on moonkin in patch 3.02 and Wrath. Otherwise, there's still a ton of new stuff for tree Druids in this patch, including a resurrected Tier 3 set bonus, a vastly-improved Tree of Life form, an out-of-combat rez, and an insane +haste buff to two of your most-used spells. If you also want a look at what early 5-man healing in the beta is like as a resto Druid, head here.Read on for a comprehensive look at the new healing and mana regeneration mechanics, Restoration abilities, talents, and glyphs!
Group buffs should last through death
Wrath of the Lich King is fixing a lot of minor annoyances that have been present in the game since launch. Things like Entangling Roots being changed to work indoors, or clams stacking. They're also introducing a system to selectively modify spells: glyphs. Most spells seem to have a glyph that makes them better in some way, including the group buffs Prayer of Fortitude, Gift of the Wild, and Arcane Brilliance (there is no glyph for Prayer of Spirit right now, and Prayer of Shadow Protection has never been taken seriously). The group buffs are all simply more convenient versions of single-target buffs the classes possess. The single-target buffs hit one target and last for half an hour, while the group buffs hit the whole raid (up from one group in BC), last an hour, and require a reagent. The glyphs for the group buffs that have them all reduce their mana cost by 50%, which is a reasonable benefit for a minor glyph. However (and now I'm finally getting to my point), I think it would be better if the glyph let the buffs last through death, instead of or in addition to its mana reduction. It's annoying to have to rebuff everybody after a wipe, and while the buffs hitting the whole raid will help that a lot, it's still a bit irritating. I don't think it would be imbalanced to only have to rebuff once every hour, and it would make me a lot less irritated on those progression raids or bad pugs. Think of it like flask buffs. And isn't the point of group buffs convenience?
Rolling restarts this morning
US realms will be seeing rolling restarts beginning at 5:00 AM PST today to apply a small fix to introduce a necessary reagent to vendors across the world. Drysc isn't specific about what he might be referring to, but I can only assume he's talking about Wild Quillvine, a reagent required for a druid to cast Gift of the Wild rank 3 (the group buff version of Mark of the Wild). Complaints about the lack of the reagent go all the way back to beta, so it's good to see them finally getting some notice. To those of you hoping for Drysc might be talking about the missing Khorium veins, his wording seems pretty specific to a vendor reagent. The restart process shouldn't last more than 15 minutes -- perfect time for a breakfast break!
