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Shifting Perspectives: Beta build 12803
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we ponder change. Beta build 12803 dropped late Friday, and with it a number of changes to the feral and restoration specs. Some are what you'd expect after some recent forum conversations with Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer), and others came out of left field. We'll take a look past the cut.
Shifting Perspectives: Restoration 101
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, a quick and dirty guide to raising one's tree from a young sapling to a mighty oak, or other suitably impressive arboreal species. Whenever other columnists here write really good columns, I sit at my computer and swear a blue streak, for I am a jealous god. Sacco, damn him, turned out a great article on the basics of elemental shamans, and for a while I've been kicking around bits and pieces of 101-esque columns for all four druid specs. This was the last shove I needed to get that done. While I expect our new balance blogger (a.k.a. Murmurs, the person I will be forcing to do all my number-crunching in the future with bribes or, when necessary, threats) will address moonkin, I'll cover bears, cats, and today, trees. A quick note on what I want to accomplish here: I'm addressing this to people with no prior knowledge of the spec who want the tools to become reasonably competent healers quickly. By necessity, that means we're going to gloss over a few finer points; this is a cheat sheet, not an encyclopedia. When I say (for example) that Improved Tranquility needs to be dragged out behind a barn and killed with an axe, I'm not going to spend paragraphs explaining why that is, or examining situations where you could actually get some use from it. If you think I've glossed over something truly important, please drop a comment and I'll direct readers to anything they really need to know.
Furor buffed for 3.0.2
Do you guys remember yesterday, when I wrote about how the Druid talent Furor was altered to prevent powershifting? Well, if not, that's OK. Furor has just been rewritten again, and this time it has all I asked for and then some. The new Furor reads as follows (with 5/5 talent points in it): Gives you 100% chance to gain 10 Rage when you shapeshift into Bear and Dire Bear Form, and you keep up to 100 of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form, and increases your total Intellect while in Moonkin form by 10%. Holy sweet monkeys, Druid fans. Not only is there now no penalty whatsoever for switching in and out of cat form, we get some added Moonkin utility for this already excellent talent. This is one of those days where I just want to hug the devs, all of them. In case anyone is unclear about how this latest iteration of Furor works, here's a quick rundown (as I understand it). The game will now track your energy regeneration even when not in cat form, like it tracks your mana regen in feral forms now. When you shift back into cat, you'll have whatever amount of energy you would have had if you had just stayed in cat in the first place. Shift out to heal at 80 energy? You'll have 100 when you pop back in, 2 seconds later. Arrive at your destination and switch from flight into cat form? 100 energy to go mangle some faces. Powershifting is still out, but this is way better for the soloing Druid, not to mention the Moonkin perks. There is some concern that this may be overpowered in PvP: what's to stop you from DPSing in cat till you're at 0 energy, then shifting to bear for 10 seconds to DPS that way, then back to cat? Well, nothing, as far as I know. However, keep in mind that this is still beta, and if ferals end up hideously overpowered in arenas, I'm sure they'll make changes as necessary.
Blizzard giving PvE to PvP transfers to friends
The rule on transfers is that you can't start out on a PvE server, and transfer away to a PvP server. Blizzard has said that players can't fight carebear up to 70, and then jump over to gank lowbies-- if you want the ability to kill those below you, you have to be killed first.That is, unless you're friends with the developers. Players are claiming that someone named Broodthorn has been switched from Zul'jin (a PvE server) to Black Dragonflight, a PvP server. How do we know they're the same? The old Broodthorn's Armory profile is empty, and the new one is right here. All indications are that he switched servers, sometime recently. How is this possible? Broodthorn is now in Fires of Heaven, which is the same guild that Furor used to lead in Everquest. And Furor is none other than Alex Afrasiabi, one of Blizzard's main quest designers (he appeared on the Lore and Quests panel with Chris Metzen at BlizzCon). So bottom line is that if you're a good friend of the developers, Blizzard can make anything you want happen in game, even things they've specifically said shouldn't happen.And this isn't the first "stealth transfer" to go down, either-- supposedly, entire guilds have been transferred from server to server by Blizzard before. Sure, Blizzard has the right to do something like this (it's their game, their rules), but it's a little hypocritical (at least) to require paying customers to abide by certain rules, while moving your own guild around at will.Update: Wow. To tell the truth, I was tending towards the camp of "it's a perk, who cares," but Nethaera is having none of it. After someone linked this post on the forums, she sez: This transfer was based on an internal request that bypassed our checks and balances dictating how such transfers occur. Since the transfer violates our character-transfer policy, the character in question is being moved back to its originating realm, and we have imposed some additional measures to help avoid such situations in the future. We made this correction as soon as we became aware of the oversight; we appreciate everyone's attention and input on the matter. Hardcore. Way to go Blizzard for making everyone play by the same rules. Kudos.
