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Guildwatch: WTB 15 more players
Lots of guilds had to slim down to get into Karazhan, but now it seems like they have the opposite problem-- as they head towards 25 man raids, more of them are needed more players all the time. If you're picky and you've been looking to join a guild, it's a seller's market right now.So click the link below and check out this week's recruiting notices, as well as your weekly dose of guild drama and downings. It's Guildwatch and just like Scarface, the world is yours right after the jump.
Shifting Perspectives: How fun is a druid?
Welcome to Shifting Perspectives! This is a new feature here on WoW Insider, which will bring you various perspectives on shifting forms as a druid, from David Bowers one week, and Dan O'Halloran the next.I'm here kick off our little druid feature for this week with a simple pair of questions to answer: "Is playing a druid fun?" and "should I play a druid?" I reply to both with a resounding yes, of course. "But why?" you ask. "What has the Druid class got to offer me that other, so-called 'superior classes' haven't got?" The answer is, naturally, everything! Well mostly everything. You see, more than any other class, druids have such a variety of abilities and can specialize in these abilities to such a degree that there are many very different play styles available to each druid player. The Druid is the ultimate class for the player who wants to tank sometimes, stealth and kill sometimes, heal sometimes, and then sit back and nuke things from a distance for a few months in order to get a change of pace. A druid can alternately be very good at healing, tanking, dealing up-close melee damage, or dealing far-away nuking damage, filling the roles of a priest, warrior, rogue or mage -- all in one class!
Around Azeroth: Holy Nova FTW!
I have to say, the talented Priest AOE Holy Nova is a skill of limited uses. Sure, it both does damage and heals, but it does relatively little of either and it does so at a high mana cost. So I always enjoy finding places it comes in handy -- like this perfect circle of skeletons surrounding Milt0nious of Draka in the Auchenai Crypts. Holy Nova FTW!Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com! Or perhaps you'd just like to see more of your pics from Around Azeroth. %Gallery-1816%
Alts and alts and alts, oh my!
I probably play World of Warcraft way too much. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, right? My addiction stems from not being happy with one character, or two, or three... I have 7 characters leveling in the Outlands right now, two of which are raiding Karazhan. Why can't I stick with just one and work on it until it's the best of the best? Because I love my alts! I created my first alt when my primary character, a Hunter, hit level 52. I'm not entirely sure why I did so, but it probably had something to do with having out-leveled my friends by about 20 levels and wanting to help them without hindering our playing experience. My first alt was a Warlock, who I took to 60 first, becoming my first instance grinding and raiding main character. The hunter stood on standby for a while, until my guild had Molten Core on farm-mode, upon which I took him to 60 and brought him in for our alt runs. He was one of the first to complete the Lok'delar/Rhok'delar/Lamina quest in our guild, which he still has (at least, until I dust him off and bring him out of retirement). After a few months with them, I met other people who played on a different server, and they needed main tanks for their progression. So I was off and running with a Warrior, who was level 60 in a matter of a few weeks. I helped that guild progress through Blackwing Lair when I took my first burnout hiatus. It took a few months of enjoying other things, more real-life than virtual, when I was feeling the pangs of withdrawal and logged back in.
To shield or not to shield? Rage is the question.
The forums are abuzz with the debate on when to use the ability "Power Word: Shield" on the tank in your group. The original poster on the forum asked why pre-shielding the tank was looked down upon, and the response was abundant! Warriors and feral Druid tanks need to generate rage to use their abilities to generate the rage required to hold a mob's agro so that it doesn't run rampant in the group, slaughtering the squishies. They generate rage by being hit by a mob and also by hitting the mob as well. In order to be a raid/heroic tank, you have to have your mitigation and avoidance up to a point that you're almost always dodging, parrying, or blocking, in order to not die from a single hit, but in turn that will decrease the amount of rage you can generate. "Power Word: Shield" only decreases the rage generated, while not protecting the tank from that much damage. On boss mobs, it gets even more tricky. In order to successfully hold (most) bosses, you have to front-load your agro and maintain that agro lead throughout the fight. This means that they need an abundance of rage up-front in order to establish that agro, and they also need time to build up that buffer to keep them ahead. Most tanks only need a few seconds to accomplish that, but the shield just prolongs that time. This also hinders the raid on fights where time is a factor. For example, the old Kazzak enraged after 3 minutes of fighting (he probably still does), and every second of dps counted.
But...we've got personality!
When I started playing WoW two years ago, my first character was a warlock. Not understanding what the warlock class was all about, I built myself a bright sunny blond little lock, and quickly tired of the class. My next character was my mage, and I took to that class quickly and easily, having played similar characters in Neverwinter Nights. But even the mage didn't truly fit my personality. Sure, she is my main character, she's my level 70 and I am proud of what I have accomplished with her. I just don't think I am a mage at heart. I actually think I am a priest. Yesterday I even took the personality quiz on the World of Warcraft MySpace, and I came up as a priest, albeit an undead one. Since then, I have been thinking why is it I love playing my priest so much. She's only 32, doesn't have all the spiffy gear my older characters have. The conclusion I came to is that the priest class fits my personality best. I wouldn't call myself a pacifist, but I really don't like fighting all that much. Given a choice to confront a mob or go around, I choose the second option. Now that I have rolled my priest, I notice that I am much more content sitting at the back of the raid filling up those green bars. I get a feeling of accomplishment knowing that I am helping keep the group going. Thinking of all of this made me curious. I'd love to know, what classes fit your personality best? If you were scanned into the game tomorrow, where would you fit in the world? Or, is there no class that truly fits you?
The challenge of twinking out a healer
When you think of PvP twinks, you usually think of DPS. People usually twink rogues, hunters, or sometimes warriors (even though at level 19, where people usually twink toons, there's not much difference between a fury and a prot warrior). The idea, of course, is to see how much damage you can push out at the lower levels (usually by finding early blues and upping stats like strength and agility with extra enchants). But Lane over on livejournal has another plan: she wants to twink out a healer.It's an interesting thought, but it seems a lot harder than a normal twink. For one thing, most healing classes don't really come into their own until you get the higher level talents involved; at 20, most of them don't have a lot to play around with. And healing gear isn't as easily found at the lower levels-- I'm sure there's a few +healing pieces around at 40, but I can only find three at level 20 (and those aren't anything to write home about). Sure, you could still twink it, just by maxing out intellect or buffing out on armor or stamina (come to think of it, a paladin with a ton of armor and stamina would be hilarious to play as a healer in 10-19 WSG), but you don't have nearly as many options as the DPS twinks.As for classes, most priests would get eaten up, especially if you're playing with other twinks. As a few people point out on the LJ thread, both shaman and druid don't really have all their worthwhile abilities until later in the game (a shaman will have ghost wolf, but if you're seriously healing, you shouldn't be in that form much anyway). A paladin would probably be the best (because a healer in mail is always fun), but it would be tough, too -- you wouldn't have that bubble yet (not quite true-- see update).Have you ever twinked a healer or heard of anyone who did it well? A good healer is already a pretty rare thing to find in BGs, so if nothing else, it might be fun to forge a new playstyle as a healer twink.Update: That's what I get for never playing a paladin-- they do have a bubble at level 18. (Thanks, cluelessnoob).
Breakfast Topic: Priest racials
One unique thing about the Priest class is racial spells. Every race has their own traits for all classes, like Dwarves' Stoneskin and the Undead's Cannibalize. However, Priests also have special spells that are only available to certain races (each race gets two of the racial spells). Fear Ward is probably the most infamous; it's a 10-minute duration targetable buff that absorbs one fear effect, and is available only to dwarves and draenei. This leads to the common contention that the best race to roll for an Alliance Priest is dwarf, because Fear Ward is far better than all the other racial spells. Some racials are obviously trash -- my own Priest, being a human, has Desperate Prayer, which is a free instant self-heal on a 10 minute cooldown, and Feedback, a sort of very expensive mana-burning aura. Desperate Prayer is pretty decent, but Feedback is such utter rubbish that I can't even bring myself to spend the money on training it.As you may imagine, this is perceived as a sub-optimal situation by many Priests, including this blogger. However, it's not immediately obvious what the best way to fix it is. Remove racials entirely, possibly making some of them baseline abilities trainable by all races? Keep the lower-powered racials and baseline/remove the high-powered ones? Eyonix recently said it's likely that at some point in the future, you'll see additional improvements to priest racials -- what improvements would you like to see?
Breakfast Topic: Who's healing you?
There's plenty of room for argument on the topic of "best healer" in the game. And with some big changes coming to paladins in the upcoming 2.1 patch, the debate will only intensify. We've got priests with their versatile array of healing spells; paladins with their excellent mana efficiency and great buffs; druids with HoT domination and in-combat rez; and shamans with powerful (but difficult to use) totem buffs and self-rez as wipe protection. We could spend all day arguing the pros and cons of each class in a raid or small-group setting without coming to a conclusion!But let's overlook the debate for now and just ask this basic question: who's actually out there healing you? A priest? A paladin? A druid? A shaman? A rogue with a good supply of bandages?
Blizz "fairly happy with Priest healing"
Being as how a Priest is my main, it's no surprise that the "big issue" of 2.1 for me is the Paladin/Priest situation. In short Priests were healing worse than Pallies, and then Blizz nerved Pallies. I've come to accept the rhetoric that Paladins were nerfed because they were healing too well, and not to make Priests look better, but it's still a little annoying.Yes, there were a couple of Priest buffs. I probably will use Binding Heal a bit more now. The Circle of Healing buff, on the other hand, was just silly -- 25 points to the maximum rank. Anyway, now that the community has had some time to complain, what does Blizzard have to say? Drysc:We're fairly happy with priest healing where it is, so instead of just playing leap frog by pushing each class above each other until the encounters and content are trivialized ...So there it is. They liked Priests where they were, so they tried to nerf Pallies down to their level. Honestly, as far as 5-mans go, I'm not sure they're wrong to be content with Priest healing by and large. I healed Shattered Halls last night without ever going under half mana, and I can fairly comfortably solo-heal most of the heroics I've tried. As far as the change to CoH goes, again from Drysc:We've made some changes to Circle of Healing obviously, and we're just in the process of wait and see, taking baby steps as we go. Changes to Lightwell are along the same lines, we want to make sure our footing is there before taking the next step. It's generally better to make incremental changes instead of emptying the clip and seeing where things fell, which don't get me wrong, has happened before in some capacity. It's not an approach we generally intend or like to take though.Alright, I understand the idea behind making incremental changes, but 25 -- 5% -- is an extremely small increment for a spell that most Priests consider hopelessly broken. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Lightwell and CoH are not fixable without extreme changes. You can't just retune their costs, values, or durations. If you want many Priests to consider them as viable options, you're going to have to do something major to them. But that's just my opinion -- what do you guys think?
How to die (without style)
Over on his blog, Gitr discusses the many ways in which one can die when playing a warrior after playing a priest for 64 levels. And oh -- I feel his pain. There's a reason I always play healing classes that stretches beyond helping others. There's no better way to save yourself than with a quick power word: shield or a timely psychic scream. While I've never seriously played a warrior, Gitr lists a few ways to die that I'm completely familiar with: Wait until you get to 1000HP and try to heal yourself. Spam the Bubble key over and over again to deflect damage. Aggro too much and try to Psychic Scream. Whenever I'm playing my rogue, I just keep hitting the flash heal button and it never works out quite the way I expected. (Why not, I may never know.) However, I'm very glad to read that I'm not the only one who has this sort of problem when switching classes.
WoW Moviewatch: Shadow Priest Public Service Announcement
Today on WoW Moviewatch we bring you an important public service announcement from your friendly neighborhood shadow priest. Well, at least he's friendly up to the point people start yelling "HAEL ME!!!" I really can't accept blame for anything that might happen after that point.Previously on Moviewatch...
Build Shop: Priest 35/5/21
Talents in trouble again? Must be Tuesday! Welcome back to Build Shop, where we look at reader-submitted talent builds. This week's build comes courtesy of Hamacus on Sen'jin, and it's an unconventional sort of Priest DPS build, which is why I picked it -- after last week, I wanted something a bit unusual. Hamacus neglected to inform me as to his goals with the build (shame!) so I made some educated guesses. There's no kill count or arena teams on his Armory page, which means he has less than 1337 honor kills, and he skipped the common PvP talent Martyrdom, so I figured PvE is his focus. On the other hand, he does have full Blackout, so I could be wrong. More on that later. He's a Priest, so it's obviously not a solo build. That leaves group PvE.35/5/21. Why does that look odd? Oh yes, it's because nobody ever specs between 5 and 31 points in Shadow: people tend to either put 5 in Spirit Tap for leveling/soloing, or at least 31 for Shadowform (SF). SF is such a tree-defining talent that it's often held up as an example for the other trees (as in "please make our other 31-point talents this good"). For the uninitiated, for one point, SF lets you raise your Shadow damage by 15% and decrease your physical damage taken by 15%. So why on earth would anyone want to skip it? In a word, versatility. When in SF, you can't cast any Holy spells, which of course includes all our heals (even Gift of the Naaru, the Draenei racial, in case you were wondering). And by not investing all those points in Shadow, this build is able to grab some general-purpose talents in the other trees.
Is tailoring necessary for clothies?
The forums of the famous Horde raiding guild Elitist Jerks are home to possibly the most intelligent, respectful and creative WoW micro-community out there. (Amusingly, their Alliance counterparts, Death and Taxes, have one of the most vicious and mind-numbing forums out there. Coincidence?) They're deep into theorycrafting and gear questions, so it should come as no surprise that they've created one of the most intriguing threads about caster itemization I've ever seen. Basically, according to Mearis, the BOP crafted tailoring sets -- Primal Mooncloth, Frozen Shadoweave, and Spellfire -- are actually superior for raid DPS and healing to Tier 4 and 5. For example, here is the Tier 5 priest damage gear, compared to the Frozen Shadoweave Vest. The Frozen Shadoweave offers significantly more pure shadow damage, and the spirit and crit on the Tier 5 isn't that great for shadow priests. A warlock I talked to also rated Frozen Shadoweave above lock T4, and checking out the gear in general, the crafted sets seem to feature nearly double the damage increase (for a certain class of spells) of the tier gear. Mearis says this has two negative effects. First off, it makes tailoring nearly mandatory to stay competitive in early end-game DPS, and by having early access to seriously powerful gear, it allows mages, locks and priests to do much more damage than comparative physical DPS classes -- and leads to more nerf cries from rogues and warriors. I talked to a warlock in the top raiding guild on my server who has the full Frozen Shadoweave set. He said that he considered the tailored items "amazing" and that they probably did contribute to cloth-wearers dominating the damage charts early on. However, he added that he noticed rogues and warriors catching up to mages and locks in damage as they began getting more pieces of their Tier 4 and arena gears, while the clothies weren't replacing their BOP crafted sets yet. And since tailoring was pretty much a money pit before TBC, he didn't mind that it was now suddenly powerful for raiding. "I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon and say that the crafted is overpowered because it is expensive to make and may be replaced as early as 4-piece Tier 4," he said. "And I'm happy to see tailoring be a worthwhile prof while it lasts." Plus, the caster pieces don't have a ton of stamina, which is important on certain boss fights. A shadow priest in my guild with Frozen Shadoweave and Battlecast added, "They're not overpowered -- the T4-T5 sets are just weak." Personally, I like the idea of crafted sets that are equal to raid sets, and think the tailoring clothes and the blacksmithing items are a step forward for the game. Now if only leatherworkers and engineers could get nice things ...
Ask WoW Insider: Favorite class forums and blogs?
It's time once again for the weekly edition of Ask WoW Insider, wherein we choose one of your questions to publish for your fellow readers to answer. This week's question comes to us from Vince, who wants to know specifically your favorite priest sites, forums and blogs -- and more generally, your favorite stops for class-specific news: I've been a devoted WowInsider reader for almost a year, I think... you're one of the first stops I make on my daily tour of the internet. But I wonder if you know of any great priest forums or blogs I should be reading? Back when my main was a mage, I really enjoyed the Subcreation mage forum, but I haven't found anything similar for priests. There's far too much noise in the Blizzard priest forum. Any suggestions? Maybe this would be a good "Ask Wow Insider" topic, people could share the class-related blogs they like. Will you share your favorite priest and other class-specific sites with Vince and the rest of your WoW-loving peers? Please also share your questions with us at ask AT wowinsider DOT com, and each week we'll choose one to publish and kick off discussion.
In Death and Taxes, pallies heal and priests DPS
This Forums thread poster points out (probably discovered via the Armory) that every single Paladin in Death and Taxes (our Guild of the Year last year) is specced for healing-- right down the line, they're all 41/20/0. And as if that wasn't interesting enough, later in the thread, paladin Nidhogg of D&T posts, and actually lays out just what every class' role is in their raids. There's some surprises:Our warriors tank Our paladins heal Our druids heal Our priests DPS Our rogues DPS Our hunters DPS Our warlocks DPS Our mages DPS Our shamans heal As Pally Sucks says, priests DPS? While all the paladins heal? Nidhogg says the "utility + DPS" of shadow priests is something they can't pass up, so their priests are in shadowform (with one holy for spirit). In addition, he says all the paladins are specced for healing not because they're forced to, just because they like it. And they put 20 points in Protection, Nid says, because he likes having them for PvP.So what does it mean for class balance when you've got the hybrid healing instead of the main healing class in one of the most advanced guilds in the game? Sure, Paladins can do DPS, but when it comes down to it, a raid who knows what they're doing makes them healbots, and asks priests to all go in shadowform.
Forum post of the day: "The Priest Class: Game Design, Philosophy"
Special thanks to Kamakahema of Shadow Council-US for tipping me off to this thread. Today's thread of the day tackles the question of whether a healing priest is as fun to play as it could be (WoW is a game, after all, and one of games' major goals is fun). Voryk/Kryvor of Matheridon-US approaches the philosophy of the class as a whole and, in one of the best written forum threads I've seen in a while (especially in the unruly Priest forums), determines that at least in a healing role, the class is just too monotonous -- you can only play whack-a-mole for a certain amount of time before it gets dull, generally speaking. Most of our talents are passive, for mana efficiency, extra strength for a particular set of spells, etc.; as players, our job is relatively simple and limited.
Dissension among the priest ranks
Actually, only one priest, and he's sort of a tool. Pawne of Box Lunch on Dentarg says he'll never heal a shadow priest, and in fact refuses to group with them at all, which must make raids interesting. If the group he's in has a shadow priest, he makes the group kick them before he joins. As expected, all the other priests (shadow, holy and discipline) tear him apart for defying priest unity, having bad gear, not being 70, and pretty much anything else they can get their hands on. The Armory really makes making fun of people on the forums a lot easier. The argument then descends into hilarity as the priests call him a bigot and he calls them nerds, as if arguing on a WoW forum didn't make everyone involved a nerd. Since Pawne has also posted that he doesn't like turning into a girl when he dies, I suspect he's either a clever troll or not exactly at the front of the line when brains were handed out. I understand why some guilds don't like having all shadow priests -- you do probably need the majority of your healers to be healing specced if you want to be on the cutting edge of new content. Nevertheless, as a rogue, I love being grouped with a shadow priest, since vampiric embrace heals us when everyone else seems to have forgotten us. If I ever stop being lazy and level my blood elf priest, she'll be shadow until 70. What do you think about shadow priests?
Step number two appears to be rioting
Here's an interesting bit of devil's advocacy for you. It seems that the best way to get what you want for your class is to hold a riot. Observe:First, nerfs are announced to the priest class that hit Vampiric Embrace and Prayer of Mending hard.Then, priests riot across the servers, as Blizzard promises to ban those involved.But a few days later, priests profit, and un-nerfs appear in the patch.The Inciter (Time for fun!) inside me says the evidence is clear: riots are how you get your way. Of course I'm sure that's not the message Blizzard wanted to send (has anyone heard of any major bans that went down because of the priest ingame and forum riots?), but, as Relmstein hints, the evidence kind of speaks for itself.I should point out that priests didn't completely get what they want-- Vampiric Embrace, a staple of facemelting, is still getting a fairly harsh nerf, and PoM is still feeling that cooldown. But it's not nearly as bad, and while I'm sure Blizzard will claim the changes came down as a result of playtesting, it makes you wonder. I don't condone rioting or any kind of griefing, but as I said, this is devil's advocacy. Maybe the only conclusion Blizzard should take from this is simply to not release the patch notes (as they would say) until they're done.
Un-nerfing for priests and paladins
Paladins rejoice, because Blizzard has decided to reverse the two changes that were planned to be implemented in 2.0.10. Eyonix informs us that they felt "the adjustments were too imposing on the class' ability to tank in dungeons." So Avenging Wrath won't be sharing a cooldown with Divine Shield (but will invoke Forbearance) and Forbearance won't give the player a -15% damage debuff. This should mean that paladins will be unchanged in patch 2.0.10.While it's not clear if this is the mystery buff Nethaera was telling us about, Eyonix let us in on some interesting changes. In addition to looking at improving Lightwell and analyzing priest survivability in PvP and PvE, Blizzard is planning on making the following concrete changes: The cooldown on Prayer of Mending has been reduced to 10 seconds (instead of the planned 20 second cooldown). The damage mitigation of Power Word: Shield is being improved by increasing the bonus it gains from +healing gear by 10% (to 20%). Circle of Healing will now cost 30% less mana. And while these are certainly improvements, I can't say that they excite me terribly much. The lessened cooldown for PoM is certainly better, but still worse than it is on live. And while PW:S will scale better than it does now, it still won't scale very well. And I'm not sure I'll want to spec for Circle of Healing regardless of how much mana it costs. So, yes, these are buffs -- but not particularly strong buffs and not buffs that seem to address priests' primary concerns. However, if they're still looking at priest survivability, we may yet have good news coming.
