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Spiritual Guidance: ICC-25 gear guide for holy and discipline priests
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. As promised, today I will be discussing 25-man Icecrown Citadel loot in a special edition of Spiritual Guidance. Additionally, I will be giving my assessments on tier 10 set bonuses for those of you who are still deciding how to spend your badges. Finally, I'll be offering up the counter arguments that readers left for the 'who to gear first' debate from Sunday's column. We have a lot of things to discuss, so let's jump right into it!
Patch 3.3 PTR: Fine threads and feisty pets for warlocks
Even more tweaks to the warlock talent builds made it onto the PTR's 3.3 build yesterday. This time we see more buffs for pets. The Imp, the destruction lock's pet of choice, will now benefit from the Ruin critical strike damage bonus. So instead of having its critical Firebolt hits doing 150% of normal damage this will now be 200%. This will work out as a 10 to 15% damage increase for the imp. Since the Imp accounts for a little under 10% of a destruction lock's damage I think this should be a straight buff of just over 1%. Felhunter's have also had a buff but this one seems slightly odd. On paper it looks exactly the same as the the one for the imp -- Pandemic has been extended to include Shadow Bite in dealing 100% extra damage on a critical strike. The confusion lies in that Shadow Bite seems to be doing that on the live servers already. When tested on the PTR with Pandemic, however, its criticals are looking like they are doing 150% extra damage. It seems this change is going to need some further work, even if it is just to clarify the language. With this confusion, I'm less certain what impact the change will have on affliction DPS but expect it to be something like half of that for destruction. However it shakes out, this is a further buff for warlock damage. It's certainly nice to see some continued attention being applied to lock mechanics as we progress with the patch testing.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tier 10 thus far
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 helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. This week, he ventures into the unknown depths of the Mines of Data to bring you information on the upcoming tier 10 paladin armor.Being as paladins, along with half of the other classes, still don't actually have models for their tier 10 gear yet on the PTR there isn't much we can actually show you other than a dwarf in his boxers. What we do have is the set bonuses which may or may not change by the time patch 3.3 actually hits. Both holy and retribution have been changed a couple times throughout the test builds thus far, so they should be getting fairly close to what we'll see. Protection hasn't had much change in it thus far, but the bonuses are in line with what we should be expecting. After the break, we'll look at each spec's set bonuses and do a little theorycrafting in some cases to see what they'll mean for us in Icecrown.
Spiritual Guidance: Priest tier 10 examined
Every week (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a UI and addons blog for WoW. Tier 10 stuff is here! Okay, that shot above is tier 9. But we don't know what the tier 10 stuff looks like yet so I had to pick something! The tier 10 bonuses for healing Priests have recently been updated. We'll compare the before and after versions. They're expected to only be obtainable in Icecrown in patch 3.3.
Lichborne: The latest Patch 3.3 PTR death knight changes in depth
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's death knight column. Remember when I said that it looked like Patch 3.3 was going to be relatively quiet for us? I may have spoken too soon. There's been a pretty major shakeup to Unholy DPS (again), and there's one or two other changes we might want to discuss, including news of some armor tier bonuses. Let's get to it. Scourge Strike Rebalancing: The Neverending Story So before we delve into this change, let's take a moment to review the star-crossed history of Scourge Strike. Scourge Strike is meant to be the basic Frost/Unholy attack of an Unholy death knight, and the hardest hitting of their attacks. In theory. Here's the thing with Scourge Strike: It does shadow damage. That means it completely bypasses all armor, meaning it does a lot more effective damage than you might guess just from glancing at the tool tip. The problem back in the early days of the class is that it was doing far too much, easily outstripping Obliterate. So, Blizzard nerfed the damage, and all was well for a while.
The two steps of ability development
After someone asks a question on the forums about the new Mage Tier 10 bonus and the numbers behind it, Ghostcrawler brings up a little interesting insight into the way Blizzard puts these abilities and attributes together. He says that there are two steps to implementing a new ability: mechanics first, and then numbers later. That may seem common sense (and to a certain extent, it definitely is), but it's interesting to note that it's always what the ability does first, and then numbers later. Blizzard is much less likely (relatively speaking of course, and there are plenty of exceptions to this rule) to put a new ability into the game than just tweak current numbers.It makes sense, and if there's a new ability you've been waiting to see in the game, maybe the reason Blizzard hasn't tackled it yet is that they're working on tweaking numbers to try and fix it without starting up a new mechanic. Ghostcrawler also says that this is the PTR we're dealing with, and so of course those Tier 10 bonuses aren't set in stone yet, just like everything else being tested. They don't call it the PTR for nothing.
